How To Pick Fabrics For Your Next Quilt

[Music] quilty [Music] quilty is brought to you by Baby Lock sewing and long arm machines baby lock for the love of sewing autofill autofill Italian thread perfectly suited for all your quilting projects Fairfield together we can make beautiful things free spirit a new generation of creative and playful fabrics perfect for fashions home decor quilting crafting and more hovels sewing cut it close with hovels Moda make something quilty with Moda fabrics thermo web manufacturer of heat and bond adhesives and new luxe interfacing x' proudly made in the USA [Music] hi you're watching quilty my name is Mary Fonz and we're really glad that you're watching the show and and asking lots of questions and sending in your recommendations for episodes today is a quilty fantastic episode which means that it was suggested by one of you uh viewer Laurie Parker this one's for you it's also for a lot of other people who have suggested this show and for any quilter who is beginning or wants a refresher on choosing fabric you know we talked about this kind of all the time on the show because we make patchwork on the show so we talk about the fabrics that we chose and you know but we kind of we touch on it here and there it's ubiquitous thing to discuss the fabric that you're using but a lot of people when they're starting out and even people who've been making quilts a long time when it comes to choosing the fabric it's this like the agony and the ecstasy of choosing fabric it's the funnest part and it's also difficult for some people to see color see pattern so that's what we're gonna look at today it's not a science but it's also not magic so let's take a look this is a copy of quilting magazine this is the copy from November December so actually we're filming the show in December 2013 so this is the issue that's out right now and this issue is full of quilt patterns as usual quilty is always full of quilt patterns and this quilt I selected because I love it and it's called black arrow and this is a quilt that we do one of you might see and say I love that quote I want to make it but I don't want all that black like I'm not really a person who wants a lot of solid black like maybe your home is done in pinks and and whites and things and this just isn't really your look well you can make it yours and in fact in quilting magazine one of the things I wanted to put in from the start was just this little section called make it your own and I just get my colored pencils out and I doodle a little bit and put options for you to see this quilt in a different way when you go to the quilt shop you can make this quilt however you want to make it in the colors you want to make it so you have to select some fabric right okay so let's go back here this block is just this arrow block and it's got its got all that black the arrow is in black and then the colors around it okay so what I would do I have a pattern I want to to do I go to the quilt shop and usually or I go to my stash but either way I kind of pick a fabric that I want to be the star or a color that I want to be the star of the quilt so if I was doing this quilt I decided to myself and I was at the fabric store wow look at this fabric it's so cool I think it's very beautiful I think this is an Anna Maria horner print or maybe yeah Anna Maria Horner from her dowry line I love her her fabrics and so if I wanted to showcase this I would pick this first like that would that would be what would happen I would go to the shop or I would go to the my stash and say oh I'm inspired by this so then you build the quilt to kind of around that fabric that's kind of the first thing you do after picking your pattern kind of get your inspirational print or your inspirational color and then it's like okay well what goes around it so if that fit that blue fabric is the black arrow and all these arrows are going to be that fabric what do I put behind it and that's when we get into scale and contrast okay that's a big part of selecting fabric it's really the main part if I wanted to highly contrast that fabric I might pull in something really dark I'm actually gonna flip I'm gonna show it like this if I put black behind this fabric and this was my arrow you would really see that arrow pop in this pattern you've got lots of different colors behind the arrow okay so maybe we'll use a lots and lots of different colors and maybe I don't want to use that black in my quilt so I want to try something else I made up a couple of these blocks with some options I decided to go a little bit funky and I put some red behind it and you know what I'm not sure that it works and that's part of selecting fabric is you have to audition things sometimes you have to make up a sample block that's why buying fat hoarders is really that's a really good way to try out new fabric to see if you like the palette when you're selecting fabrics you might not want to buy a yard or two yards of something until you know that it's gonna work so buy a fat quarter go home make a sample block and then come back to the shop and get what you need so I tried this out I put the red behind it but I think the contrast isn't really high enough I'm losing that arrow a little bit personally you might love it and that's fine but for me if I'm selecting fabric for this block I want something a little higher contrast so I made up the block again and this time I put a real light taupe real light taupe behind it I use different fabrics there but they all read about the same this real light taupe and personally I think the arrow is easier to see with that so when I was selecting fabrics I tried something kind of funky and then I tried something a little bit more tame to let this fabric really shine and I ended up liking that better again I made up a sample block here I made up a sample block here and these don't go to waste I put extra blocks on the backs of my quilts a lot of the time you can make a little coaster you can do all kinds of things with these sample blocks and if you love making patchwork like I do this is not painful to me to do patchwork and make a sample block to see if you like it this is not something that we don't want to do another hint about selecting fabrics is is the scale is the scale thing so it's not a hint it's it's one of the cornerstones of the whole process this is a large scale print we've talked about this on the show before it comes up again and again if you cut out a two and a half inch strip from this fabric and then you sub cut that two-and-a-half inch strip into two and a half inch squares you cut strip out of there and a strip out of there and a strip out of there you're gonna have squares that are all blue and you're gonna have a square that's all this color like this you know it's gonna be all this flower stuff this is a large-scale print the repeat of the design is bigger than two and a half inches so when you when you cut it apart you're gonna get different things this is a small scale print that is a very simple polka dot if you cut two and a half inch strips out of this and you cut it down to two and a half inch squares you get the same thing every time okay so as you're selecting fabric you got to remember that because if you're cutting small pieces out of this fabric some are gonna be yellow some are gonna be you know gonna have this red in it and some are gonna just be blue so you know if you're if you're picking a focus fabric a lot of times you need to consider that how big are the pieces that you're dealing with because if they're real tiny don't don't waste time on a large-scale print so think about so pick a pattern these are the steps you pick a pattern you get inspiration from a color or a fabric that you want to use and then around that fabric you start looking at complementary colors complementary patterns that you like and you sort of build the block do a sample block test it out put it up on your design wall and then you also need to consider scale scale and contrast okay so those are some that's kind of the basic overview of selecting fabric like I said it's not a science you kind of have to feel it out and you have to test it out and that is how you begin your selecting fabric journey and we encourage you to buy a lot of fabric by a lot of fabric so you always have options so keep watching quilty for more information on all of this and how to make patchwork and we will be selecting fabric for as long as we do this show so watch this again if you need more help and stay tuned to quilt eat because we'll talk about it many more times in the future okay thanks for watching buh-bye quilty is brought to you by Baby Lock sewing and long-arm machines baby lock for the love of sewing autofill autofill italian thread perfectly suited for all your quilting projects fairfield together we can make beautiful things free-spirit a new generation of creative and playful fabrics perfect for fashions home decor quilting crafting and more hovels sewing cut it close with hovels Moda make something quilty with Moda fabrics thermo web manufacturer of heat and bond adhesives and new luxe interfacing x' proudly made in the USA

Channel: Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting

Views: 90,395

Rating: 4.8673835 out of 5

Keywords: Quilty, Quilty 2014, 400 Series, QNNtv.com, Mary Fons, heyquilty.com, how to quilt, how to make a quilt, how to quilt video, how-to video, free how-to video, free how to quilt video, free quilt tutorial, free quilting video, quilt designs, quilt fabrics, designing quilts, beginning quilts, quilting projects, quilt projects

Id: xywur8X5jbY

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed May 28 2014