- So you want to make a quilt. You've got all these patterns,
you've got all these fabrics and it should be easy just
to put them together, right? But when it comes time to cut your fabric, you just can't do it. You know something's wrong, but you don't know how to fix it. So here are seven mistakes
that quilters make when choosing fabric for their quilt and the ways to fix them. So stick with me and they'll
show you how to do it. (funk music) - Hi there, I'm Karen Brown
of Just Get It Done Quilts. I give you tips, tricks and strategies to help you make the quilt
that you want to make. And I am getting so close
to 150,000 subscribers. I would really appreciate
your support by clicking on that subscribe button. Quilters cut up pieces of fabric, and then we sew it all
back together again. To make all that work worth it you need to choose fabrics that work well together. But how do you actually do it? The front end of making a quilt
is fairly brain intensive. We get so many ideas,
we see so many patterns, we see so many fabrics and they're swirling around in your head. Now I'm not going to
linger on this stage today. That's for another video. But at some point you make a decision to move forward with a pattern. And this is a shift from the dreaming phase
into the planning phase. And this is where you choose
the fabrics for your quilt. And whether you like this
phase, or you hate this phase, you'll find it a lot less challenging, if you avoid making these mistakes. (funk music) When you buy a pattern, it
comes with so much information. Not only does it tell you
how many fabrics to buy, but it also tells you what quantity and what shape the fabric should be in. But most importantly, the
pattern comes with a picture of the quilt on top, which gives you a map of where the darkest value should go and where the lightest value should go. And where are the areas
of largest contrast. And all you need to do is to
take a black and white photo to see where those values lie. Now, I covered a lot of this step in my colour theory series part four, and there's a free handout
sheet that you can download from my website to deal with it. And I covered this specifically for the Meadowland Quilt
in my vlog episode #3. And if you're interested in
seeing either those videos, I'm going to put a link
in the notes below. (funk music) Now, I know you're probably
rolling your eyes and saying, Karen's talking about colour theory again, but this is why it's important. You are going to be putting a lot of hours and dollars into your quilt,
and you want the whole thing to look cohesive, and you
have to make so many decisions for fabric and value and saturation. It is so much easier if you narrow it down to your colour harmony
right at the beginning, and you can eliminate all those hues from the thought process. Now, where does this
colour harmony come from? You might want to follow
the colour harmony of the original pattern. You might be making this
for a particular person and you want to choose
their favourite colours. But for most quilters, it
comes from a fabric or fabrics. And we use this as the jumping off point. So it's time to get out your colour wheel. And it's best to do this in
daylight and near a window because we want to identify the
major colours in our fabric. For my Meadowland quilt, I am
using a fat quarter bundle. My yellow is not quite a pure yellow, but it's not quite a golden yellow, but I'm going to choose to
go with the golden yellow. My orange is a red orange. My green is actually a blue green and my blue, which is a
little bit difficult to tell when it's this dark, but
I've got a good light and I'm going to go with true blue. So this is my colour harmony. And if you are just
working with one colour, what you do is you look
on the back of the card and you choose what
colour harmony you want. The choice is yours. If you don't have one of these, I'll put a link to it in the notes below. (funk music) A beginner mistake is that
we have a favourite colour and then we go out and
we buy that colour over and over again, and exactly
the same intensity in hue. But when you make a quilt, you need to have a range of saturations. So you can choose a range from up here. You can use it range from down here, or you can choose a range
from the whole card. But the point is you
have to choose a range. Personally, I keep my fabric
stored by colour one container for each hue and each box has a copy of the colour range
associated with that hue. These ranges are from my colour series, part 3 on your Colour Zone. You can download them from my website. I'm going to pull box that corresponds to each one of the four
colours in my colour harmony. For my Meadowland Quilt,
I need 20 fat quarters. My fat quarter bundle has
12, so I need eight more, but I'm going to pull more than that at least five in each colour, so in the next stage I have choices. I choose lighter ones,
I choose darker ones, I choose ones with different patterns. (funk music) Remember that first
step when we took a look at the values in your pattern, well, this is where we're
going to incorporate that. Not all colours are equal in value, yellows have the highest
value, blues have the lowest. So you might be in a situation where you're choosing a dark yellow, but in value it's still higher than your lightest blue. So this review can happen a variety of ways based on what your pattern needs. The simplest way is just lining them up from lightest to darkest value. When you take a black and
white photo of your fabrics, you're going to see whether
there's an even gradual change between the lightest to the darkest. And have you got the whole range that you intend to sew with covered. You might recall in my
Beginner Bargello quilt, I had to introduce another blue
is still in a gap in value. If you do have it covered, then you make your selection based on what your pattern requires. If you are making a log cabin, you want a strong distinction
possibly between the dark side of the block and the
light side of the block. So you will be choosing from
the darks and the lights, but you may not be taking from the middle. For my project, the Meadowland Quilt, each block has three fabrics. So what I'm doing is
I'm dividing my fabrics to light medium and dark values. (funk music) So at this point we have
qualified our fabric. It is harmonic, we have chosen a range of fabrics in the hues
of that colour harmony. We have a range of values and we want to put them together in such a way that we can see the contrast and how they react with each other. But quilters often fail to look at their fabrics in the sizes that the fabric will actually be cut to. You can use templates, you can simply fold the
fabric into the size that you need by laying your
fabrics against each other. You can ensure that you have
the contrast that you require. You're looking for that
interplay between the fabrics so that the patterns can
hold up against each other. You might also see some
strong, directional elements that you need to consider
when you cut as well. And that's why I have pulled more fabrics than I finally need. So I can make some choices here if they're not working together. And with this step, we are finally able to make our final choices. And now we're ready to cut, right? We can cut now right? [Now, the voices start in your head.] [Maybe you should have used more blue.] [Maybe I should have used the
yellow instead of gold yellow.] [Did I get enough Dark?
Did I get enough Bright?] [Do I have enough fabrics?] [Maybe I should pull everything
out and look at it again.] [Maybe I should consider another pattern.] [I really hate these colours.] [I really want to start again.] Which leads me to the last
mistake that quilters make. (funk music) Taking that first cut
into your fabric can feel like jumping off a cliff
freediving and let's face it. Not all quilting decisions are equal, and some people have a harder time making decisions than others. There's no judgement here, that's just the way some people are, but the longer you take to make that cut, the more what ifs come in. If I just stick it out one
more day or another week, another month, a better
fabric will be available, or another idea will come to me and I'll make it even better. That's a dark spiral
that you can get into. And it just leads to projects in bags, in your cupboard and bigger
and bigger fabric stashes. If you want to move forward, you have to trust in the design. It's why you're making
the quilt to begin with. If you've looked at your pattern
and you've done the work, you've done the colour harmony,
you've got the saturation, You've made the values, you've seen the way the fabrics
play against each other, you're ready. Now I'm not trying to imply that you make all these
decisions in one hour, one week or even a month. You make the decisions at the rate that you feel comfortable, but
once you made the last one, give yourself a time limit. And when the time limits up, you need to grab your
big quilter scissors, take a deep breath and cut. I'll be honest the colours that I chose for my Meadowland Quilt are so out of my colour zone
that I had to repeat over and over again to
myself while I was making it, trust in the design, trust in the design, trust in the design, and you know what? It worked out of 20 blocks, I
am so happy with 19 of them. I knew this one fabric was
going to be problematic, but I made the decision
to keep it in there because it was part of
the fat quarter bundle. They work up close, (funk music) they work from across the room and they especially look good altogether. I couldn't be more pleased. (funk music) And what if you don't like the results, then you learn from it. I remember watching an
interview with Tula Pink when I first started quilting. And she said that with
every fabric collection, she learns how her designs work together and how fabrics interplay. And it's a journey, the more
we do the better we get at it. So I hope this video helps you
make better fabric decisions. And remember you can download
any of those handouts from my website, Just Get It Done Quits. And I will link those videos
I referenced right over here. So if you liked this video,
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