Picking colors and fabrics for a quilt is one of my favorite parts of the whole process. I have a lot of different ways I go about it, but today I thought I’d share the simplest method of all. It’s low tech, and it’s also the most accurate in terms of visualizing colors together and in specific layouts. Essentially, you use little swatches of the fabric you have in mind, so what you see is literally what you get. It couldn’t be easier.
I’m starting a new Ribbon Letters quilt and got a little overwhelmed for choice when it came to the palette, so I thought this would be the perfect project to illustrate.
I wanted to use fat quarter bundle of Garden Oasis Chambray Tonals from Connecting Threads. Because the blocks in Ribbon Letters rely on using pairs of tone on tone colours I needed a bundle with lots of different shades of each colour, so it was perfect.
First I took some little snips out of each fabric, each less than half an inch square. Depending on the fabric you may even be able to take this from the selvedge as I did in the video below.
Then I grabbed my coloring sheets and started playing around. The snips become like a little paintbox of your exact fabric palette. Ribbon Letters calls for two colors in each letter block so throughout I was working with pairs. I initially had a bit of a “Life Aquatic” color scheme in mind.
But the great thing here is that you can slide your swatches around endlessly before you commit. So I kept going, eventually landing on two final contenders: a classic rainbow (arranged on the diagonal) and a more subdued look with some of the deeper colours from the bundle.
If I like a layout I’ll tape or glue the fabric swatches to the paper.
Tip: it can help to take a photo before this step … in the picture above I can see a concentration of reds and pinks on the middle right that I didn’t notice before, so it’s another opportunity to make tweaks. I’m leaning towards the rainbow but feel like the decision will ultimately be made by what background fabrics I already I have in my stash.
Source Guide
Fabrics: Chambray Tonals Fat Quarter Bundle (“Garden Oasis” from Connecting Threads)
Pattern: Ribbon Letters (traditional patchwork pattern)
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