A few months ago, I bought Tula Pink’s newest book.

This weekend, I had my first chance to create some of the 6″ by 6″ blocks. I used my scraps from my Emerald Challenge Quilt.

In the book, Tula includes a small section on color theory. This is one of my favorite aspects of quilting. It is also something I never paid much attention to until this year.

Above, she describes using “tunnel vision” to select your colors. The gray, white and black samples (above) form a monochromatic color palate.

Mono – means single

Chroma – means color

Combining the two words means…a single color.

In the world of color, choosing to work within the confines of a single color is not limiting. Working with gray, a monochromatic color palate means any variation of gray – lighter or darker – works! This means we get to work with white all the way to black. And, all the stripes, dots, flowers and textures, too.

I decided to use my emerald green paired with a gray monochromatic color scheme. Here’s a close up of the blocks in order from the darkest value to the lightest value.

This was my first experience with “Monochromatic” quilting & with sampler blocks. I have to say…I love both! I could continue working within this theme to fill out the colors, but I might just use them as is. I haven’t decided yet.

Here is Tula’s monochromatic quilt from the book. She named this one “Skyline” and as you can see, all the little sampler blocks do stack up to look like a city skyline. 

Thanks for reading!