Colour story
Where this came from.
A photograph supplied by Allison, named "pumpkin spice": a scrappy half-square-triangle quilt in browns and oranges, photographed on a deck. Colours only — the quilt in it is somebody else's design and nothing of it is used.
SAMPLED. Six colour clusters taken from the image inside its binding, then assigned to the fabrics by scoring every arrangement against this quilt's seam shares and keeping the one where the pumpkin reads as bars rather than slivers.
Where each colour came from
-
Fabric A
#6E4E47sampled — the walnut brown of the check border and the brown prints, the two largest clusters at 31% and 14% of the image, averaged. The ground, 50.2% of the quilt. -
Fabric B
#382926sampled — the near-black chocolate prints, 7.7% of the image. The dark anchor. -
Fabric C
#D98747sampled — the orange inner border, 14.5% of the image. Put on fabric C, the wide bars, so that it shows. -
Fabric D
#D7B688sampled — the palest cloth in the image, an oat, 2.2% of it. There is nothing lighter in the photograph. -
Fabric E
#A94627sampled — the brick reds, 6.1% of the image. -
Fabric F
#B98746sampled — the gold prints, 10% of the pieced centre. On fabric F, the accent slivers.
What it does to the seams
Checked against all 14 fabric pairs weighted by how much seam length each actually shares in this quilt. 0.8% of the seam length falls below 1.25 contrast: the gold slivers where they meet the pumpkin bars, at 1.13. Nothing in the palette is lighter than the oat at 69, so there is no true light for the eye to rest on — the photograph has none either, and that is what makes it read as October.
- Seams that will not read
- 0.8%
- Soft seams
- 18.51%
- Lightness range
- 51
- Reads as
- Shapes
- Nothing in this palette is lighter than 69. A design of many small pieces needs somewhere for the eye to rest.
- C-F carries 0.79% of the quilt's seams at contrast 1.13 — those seams will not read.
Contrast is measured on screen colours, not on fabric. It tells you where the piecing will disappear, not which bolt to buy.
