Choosing Fabrics For Your Quilt

Do you want to make a quilt, but then stand in front of your fabrics and feel blank? I totally get that, I feel that way sometimes too! I think that’s the refrain I hear the most from other quilters. “How do I choose fabrics for my quilt?”

There are so many ways to go about deciding which fabrics to use. Today I thought I’d share one method, which is finding an item or photo as your color inspiration and pulling a big stack of fabrics based on that.

In the two photos above you’ll see an example of this. I found this vintage pillow cover and fell in love with the colors. So I tried using it as an inspiration for a fabric pull. I didn’t have a quilt pattern in mind, and who knows if I’ll ever make a quilt with this stack of fabrics. It’s just really good practice to do this type of thing!

There’s really only one thing to decide. Am I going to do a very literal and exact pull? This means that I’ll try to find the exact right shades that match fairly close to the threads in the pillow. The cool thing about this is that I might end up with an unusual group of fabrics because so often when you study the colors one by one close up, you realize they’re different than you thought, based on the overall impression the item gave you! For example, the blue border in this pillow is a shade of blue that I don’t especially like. It’s quite a cool blue, and I was tempted to rather add in a warmer blue, which somehow the pillow as a whole gives a warm vintage color scheme. But no, I had decided to try and find as close as possible to the exact shades in the pillow, so I added a true fairly bright blue to the stack!

The other option to a literal and exact color scheme is to look at the overall feel the pillow gives and pull fabrics that compliment it, or that go together to give a similar feel. This actually takes a bit more practice and confidence. I always say to rather add more fabrics and you can always take them away if they’re not seeming right!

Here’s another example, based on a vintage quilt in a book. This fabric stack was a bit more of a generalized one, as the individual pieces in this quilt are much too tiny to really match my fabrics to. I did try to analyze basic percentages of different shades and pull a similar amount though. For example, There’s quite a few shades of dark brownish red, a few less of dark blues, about an equal amount of darks and lights, etc. This quilt stack I’m really loving so pretty sure it’s gonna turn into a quilt, although it will be a different pattern than this log cabin.

And then sometimes you can get inspired by an unplanned stack! This was a completely random bunch of fabric that I had just pulled out of the dryer and folded. And I thought to myself, “I really like this bunch of fabrics together just like this!” I would never in a hundred years have intentionally put this stack together, but somehow it works!

So there’s a little peak into how I’m always pulling together stacks of fabric. If I make a stack that I like, I’ll take a photo and also leave it sitting around for awhile. Does this make for a messier sewing area? Why yes!

Eventually I fall out of love with some of them and the fabrics get put back on the shelf, but others find their way into a quilt! I encourage you to try this too! It’s great practice and there’s no pressure to make a quilt out of it. If you end up making a stack you really like, then it could be the starting point for a quilt in the future.