Originally Posted by
dpendleton
Quossum & Dedemac, I *love* the black backgrounds. It makes your blocks look very modern.
Off to look at quilts like yours - maybe a future project for me!
Jinny Beyer is a (recently retired) quilt maker fond of black and dark backgrounds, so searching for her quilts will show you lots of examples. (She had a business selling fabric, patterns and kits, so you will see many other people's execution of her ideas.) I love her book
Color Confidence For Quilters for explaining her approach to color. It was originally published in 1992, and you may be able to find it at your local library. Amazon sells both new and used copies of it.
I was blown away the first time I saw her Lotus Quilt. To me, the colors just glowed against the black background. I was amazed how the quilt broke the color "rules" I was taught for dressing while growing up: don't put red next to pink, don't put orange next to red, etc. I bought the kit, and had so much fun working with such "daring" color combinations. One photo I saw of someone's quilt made from the kit was a bit overexposed, which made the lightest blue fabrics have even more glow; so I substituted in a few lighter fabrics for that sections to game the same effect in real life. Here's what the kit picture was on the selling page (I didn't do the applique, as I don't enjoy large amounts of it):
The background looks solid in the picture, but the kit had a print with subtle gray dots on it:
What looks like solid black diamonds in running through the star are actually a purple on black print:
