KONA Color Of The Year 2025 and Aurifil Thread
It’s that time of year again! No, New Years, not yet: Kona Color time! You may remember my participation in last year’s Color of the Year reveal: Julep. Well I’m back at it again, this time with 2025’s Nocturne.
As I’m sure you know by now, Nocturne is a deep, heavy purple that’s dark enough to make contrasting colors pop, but still light enough to show its own personality loud and clear!
That's why I went with my pattern Overlap for this project: I wanted to give that feeling of a freshly opened box of crayons, as well as the view of geometric designs just floating in a beautiful sky.
As it happens, this coincided with Aurifil’s most recent artisan challenge: to give you all a pro tip to do with threads. So let’s look at my favorite part of this entire quilt: the quilting.
See how it’s shimmery and fluctuating with color, mirroring both the colorful feature fabrics and adding to the nebulous feeling of the Nocturne background? Well, the initial plan had actually been to alternate different colors of threads, one at a time, to try and bring the whole thing together.
But we can all agree that switching threads is not the most fun part of quilting, and with all the colors I wanted to use, it would take me forever. So I used just one thread: Aurifil Variegated 40wt. in Marrakesh.
All variegated threads flow between either different shades of one color (light to dark and back) or between a mix of different colors. Marrakesh takes on a whole rainbow of color!
This is my tip: using variegated thread for quilting will create an effect full of movement, depth, and color, without having to ever switch threads. I really think this is what took this quilt in particular from “pretty” to “fancy”.
Now take a quick peek at the back of the quilt: I went with a lighter purple, and when I binded with an intermediate tone, I made sure to add these cute little tags (I only have so many chances left to use up my ‘made in 2024’ labels)!
Also, I discovered the Aurifil Deep Violet 2582 matches almost perfectly with Nocturne.
Do you have a favorite color of the year? One that you’ve been hoping will pop up? I’d personally love a sort of periwinkle or maybe a nice navy… What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Happy quilting and wishing you the best,
Mariana
