A Good Color Wheel is an Essential Tool.

I’ve worked with a lot of color wheels and have long been in love with my Itten Color Star.  However, after years of use, it is getting a little tattered.  The fabulous thing about the Color Star is that it comes with templates that allow you to isolate a group of colors by scheme.  I’d buy a new one, but they are no longer being manufactured, and finding them online will cost you anywhere from $100-$500.  Crazy, right??

A recurring frustration for me and my students happens when I refer to this tool and how to use the templates in my lectures: Color Theory for Quilters, Pictorial Quilt Primer, and Driving in the Dark; as well as my online class, Successful Pictorial Quilts.  Students see how I use the wheel and the templates, love it, want it, only to find out that is wan’t readily available.

Someone should!  Someone did!!

For years I’ve been saying, “Someone should reinvent this Color Star.”  So, imagine my excitement when my friend, Katie Fowler, did just that.  She designed a new color wheel with templates, even more templates, and has named it Color’s Greatest Hits. There are other significant improvements: 

• The color blocks are bigger and so are the windows in the templates This gives more color space and less negative space and makes it easier to envision the color scheme.
• There are more templates.   Katie has added a double-double complement, and an analogous run, for a total of 10 templates, where the Color Star had only 8.  In the past, when I didn’t have what I neededI had fashioned my own supplements out of typing paper.  It wasn’t optimum, so I like  having more options on hand.

Room for Improvement:

There are a couple of features of the old Color Star that I prefer:

• The peg in the center that allows the viewer to secure the template and spin it to view various color combinations within a color scheme.  It’s possible to do the same with the new color wheel; you just have to steady and turn the template by hand.
• The templates on the Color Star were black on one side and white on the other.  I find that the white negative space is sometimes easier on the eye.  The new templates are black on both sides.

These are pretty minor issues, and I believe the new version is better overall. It’s my understanding that the  I definitely prefer it to anything else I’ve seen currently on the market.

If you are interested in getting your own Colors Greatest Hits, you can order online directly from Katie’s website. 

Reminder: Have you gotten involved with the Border Wall Quilt Project?  Do it now!