Unmodulated Color in Today's Modern Quilts

A quilt top, probably from the 1930s made from the

 Laura Wheeler/Alice Brooks pattern

Japanese Morning Glory

(#800 in BlockBase)

For the past few weeks I've been talking about the use of flat areas of color in modern design and how 20th-century quiltmakers chose fabrics to fit into that idea. The pieced quilt above with its simple floral and solid-colored cotton follows two important principles of modernism---abstraction and flat color.

Construction Cranes

Claudia Mazur

Claudia showed this quilt at our guild exhibit recently. She has abstracted a set of construction cranes and their color into a very graphic wall quilt. Today we can have color-fast solids in any shade and people are making the most of them.

Chantelle had this Flashburn quilt for sale on Etsy.

Convergence

Annette Guerrero

The use of  vivid color adds to the graphic qualities.

See more of Annette's use of solids at her website

http://annetterg.com/gallery/contemporary-quilts/

Dark Star

Maura G. Ambrose

But even muted color looks modern if there is little to no pattern in the fabrics as in this prizewinner at QuiltCon.

Dinner Bell

By Jenifer Dick

So whether the shapes are extremely abstract or not, the use of saturated and solid fabrics looks modern.

Cover quilts for Quilt Retro

by Jenifer Dick

You see the bird in 19th-century applique but nobody is going to mistake the cover quilt for a 19th-century antique. See Jenifer's blog here:

http://www.42quilts.com/

See one of Kathleen Probst's quilts using solids and near solids here:

http://kathleenprobst.com/?p=2852

The Modern Quilt Guild has been blogging about solid colors. Here's a post:

http://themodernquiltguild.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/100-days-week-of-solids-featured-quilt-6/