Welcome back! Now that you’ve had a little lesson in color and contrast, lets put the concepts into practice. You can choose to follow the colors shown on the pattern photo, or you can go in a completely different direction. I’ll show an example of that. It’s fun to be bold with color.

Making Decisions 

Here’s two examples of being bold with color:

Some quilters would not feel comfortable putting some of these colors together. But that’s the fun of scrap quilts. I will alternate between warm and cool colors and also lights and darks for contrast to keep things interesting. 

Here’s an example of changing up the fabrics and colors from the pattern’s original quilt sample. I did this with one of my patterns:

On the left is my original quilt made in Civil War Reproduction fabrics. On the right is my version in bright fabrics. Same quilt, different look. You can do this if you want to make a quilt for a family member or friend and they are not a fan of the fabrics you like.

Tips Gathering or Shopping for Fabric

Tip #1: Now that you have an idea of what you want, it’s time for what I call “auditioning” fabric. The first thing I do is go through the fabrics I have at home and lay them out on my cutting table.

By doing this, I can see how the fabrics play with each other. If a fabric sticks out to me, that usually means it won’t work in the quilt. I pull that one out and put in another. I do that until I am happy with  my combination.

Tip #2: You can do this next step too. Find a fabric you really love, then look at the selvage.

See those dots of color? Those are the colors that went into making this piece of fabric. You can take that piece of fabric around the shop and use those dots to find a green, orange, red and blue that will go well with this fabric. This is often used by quilters when they’ve chosen a “focus” fabric. That’s the fabric they build from to create the color scheme for their whole quilt. Look what I picked:

I think I did a pretty good job with these first three fabrics I pulled.

Tip #3: Make test blocks. Use up scraps from your scrap stash, choosing fabrics to represent the colors you are thinking of using, and make a few blocks.

This way you can see what your block looks like in different color combinations without cutting into new, expensive fabric. 

If you do not have a lot of scrap fabric to do this, consider drawing out or making a photo copy of the block you will be making and use colored pencils to “audition” colors.

Tip #4: This fits into the “auditioning” of fabrics at home. Once you venture out to the fabric store, you can stack up bolts in a well lit area of the shop to see how they look together.

If you don’t want to haul around bolts, see if the shop has fabrics pre-cut into fat quarters. Those are easier to gather and stack to audition. Once you decide you like the combination, you can find the bolts and get the amount you need of each fabric.

I hope these tips helped you whether you are a beginner or an experienced quilter. Have fun choosing the fabric. It’s almost as fun as making the quilt!

Happy Quilting and Happy New Year!

See you in the new year,
Deanne