Itten's Harmonious Proportions

 When given the challenge of  'beginnings' for our Tangled Textiles quilt I started with brainstorming, recording ideas and sketches. I immediately thought of my beginnings in quilting, beginnings of art quilting and also beginnings in color. Below are a few shots from my sketchbook as I worked through some ideas.

Looking back now I may have preferred the finished quilts of my first sketches but I settled on the last one, partly out of time constraints but I did know I wanted to make a quilt based on black and white blocks and this was a good opportunity to do it.

Then which color or colors to add? That was quickly decided with the three primaries as this is a 'beginnings' quilt. As you see from the sketch I hadn't decided to put Itten's theory to work yet, but as I glanced at my book shelf , that old book from Color Theory class junped out at me and I immediately knew I would be using Itten's theory of Harmonious Proportions.

I took those relationship ratios and put then into a relationship among the three primaries and came up with 6 to 8 to 3. I decided I wanted my widest strip to be 2" so the blue was cut 2", red 1.75" and yellow 7/8". As I started to cut fabric for the binding it hit me that I needed to use the same relationships there.

Here are a few shots of the piece.

Thanks for visiting! To see the other Tangled Textiles quilts head over to our blog ...... that's where I'm headed now as it is reveal day!