5 easy ways to choose fabrics for your quilt
Whenever I ask "what's your biggest challenge when making a quilt?", choosing fabrics is always in the top two answers. A lot of people struggle with choosing fabrics, but a lot of times, it's just because they don't trust themselves to pick out the right fabrics.
And I totally get it! You spend a lot of money to buy all this fabric, then spend even more time to make the quilt, and the last thing you want is to look at your finished quilt top only to realize you picked the wrong shade of a colour, or one of your background fabrics is standing out as if it was the main focus.
Which is why there are so many curated bundles out there, and quilt kits, and designers posting mockups of their patterns in many colours. Which are all a great way to choose fabrics for your quilt. But, if you want to shop your stash, or have something specific in mind, you CAN learn to pick your own fabrics for your quilt. So to help you, I've collected my 5 favourite easy ways to choose fabrics for your quilt.
First up, though
Before you dive into picking fabrics, make sure you know what your quilt needs. Different quilt patterns have different design elements. Some blocks have a main element and some supporting elements, and then a background. In other patterns, all the elements have the same "weight" and none stand out over the others. Your fabric choices depend on what kind of quilt pattern you have, so make sure to think about whether you need a focal fabric, or a few equal ones, before using the methods below.
And don't forget to use the colouring page if your pattern came with one. Most modern patterns do have them, but they may not always be directly in the pattern. Some designers have a link to where you can download them, others use digital colouring page services like PreQuilt or QuiltInk. And if your pattern doesn't have one, you might be able to draw a sketch for yourself to colour in, or photocopy one of the diagrams to colour in.
1. The hero print
This is a great way to choose print fabrics for a quilt that has a main focal point, such as the center of a repeating block.
A hero print is the main fabric you'll use for the focal point. This is usually something like a large scale floral or geometric print that includes a few different colours, or a print you want to fussy-cut.
Since it includes many different colours, you can use these colours to help choose the supporting fabrics. Supporting fabrics are like the supporting cast in a movie, they help bring everything together and make the colour scheme or fabric bundle feel cohesive. These supporting fabrics should be smaller prints, and not include multiple colours (or only minimally so). The point of them is to support the hero print, not stand out on their own.
The easiest way to pick the colours for these supporting fabrics is to look on the selvedge of the hero print. You'll find circles on there of all the individual colours (some designers also use different shapes, like stars) that are used in the printing of the hero fabric. Take this selvedge and check your supporting fabrics against those dots. If they match, they will match the hero fabric.
2. Use a colour palette
Using a colour palette (such as my monthly colour inspirations) is a great way to pick a colour scheme. I love looking through Pinterest for colour palettes, and I find myself drawn to the photos they are based on usually before I even look at the colours. Which means sometimes a photo I love doesn't work quite so well as a quilt colour scheme, but more often than not, they do.
3. Use complementary colours
The colour wheel can look a bit intimidating, but it's a great tool for picking colour schemes for a quilt. My favourite is the Complementary colour scheme.
This means using 2 colours that are opposite each other on the wheel (for example orange & blue). There is also Split Complementary, which means that instead of using the colour directly opposite, you choose the two that are on either side of it (for example orange plus turquoise and blueish purple).
Complementary and split complementary are fun colour schemes to use because of the contrast they create. I almost always end up with a blend between the two, though, because I tend to choose one of the colours for the background, and then a variety of the other one for the main elements, so the colours always spill out into the neighbouring ones.
Another fun way to use complementary colours is to add in a pop of a contrasting colour somewhere.
4. Make it ombre (or any gradient)
A colour gradient just means going from one colour to the next in small steps. So you could go from pale yellow to bright pink via darker yellow, yellowy orange, peach, and peachy pink.
Ombre is a variation of the gradient in that you're using the same colour, but going from light to dark.
5. Use the full rainbow
If you've looked around my website and blog a little, you'll notice I love rainbow quilts. I joke that it's the easy way out of choosing fabrics because you just pick them all, but it's not quite as simple as that.
A rainbow colour scheme works great for a lot of quilts, from modern geometric designs to more traditional ones (a great way to modernize a traditional design) and especially scrappy quilts.
6. Bonus: How to pick a background fabric
You may have noticed that I didn't talk about background fabrics a whole lot. That's because most often, the kinds of quilts I make are the type to be "a colour scheme on a background", so when I pick the colour scheme, I don't include the background in that, and rather pick a separate background that shows off the fabric bundle I picked.
How you choose your background depends a lot on the quilt pattern you are using. Is it an overall pattern that doesn't have a single background? Or is it something that has a main design element and a background to show off that element? Maybe there are even a couple of background-like fabrics that show off another element of the design.
Generally speaking, if you do need a background, there are a couple of things to consider: How much background is there and how do you want to use it?
If there is a lot of "negative space", you may want to highlight that with a custom quilting design. In this case, it's probably best if the background fabric is a solid, or subtle print that won't take away from the quilting design.
On the other hand, if you're using an overall quilting design, or something very simple, you may want to use a fun print for the background. I prefer using neutrals still, but neutrals with a fun element like the bees on the quilt below can really add to the overall look of a quilt. There are two things to keep in mind, though. If you're using the hero print colour scheme, make sure that the background print doesn't compete with the hero print. And if your background is made up of lots of small pieces, don't choose a large print because it will get chopped up and end up looking not like you hoped.
If there isn't much background, a nice neutral might be all that's needed to make the main design stand out. Or you may want to choose a lighter or darker version of one of your main fabrics as the background, as long as there is enough contrast between the background and main design.