Standing in front of a wall of fabric, it is easy to fall in love with six prints that each look wonderful and look terrible together. Choosing fabrics is a skill, and like any skill it has a few simple rules.
Use these five whenever you combine fabrics, for a quilt, a patchwork cushion, or just a print and a lining for a bag.
1. Start with one fabric you love
Pick a single print to be the star, often called the focus fabric. Every other fabric is chosen to support it. A multicoloured floral or a busy children's print makes a good starting point, because it gives you a ready-made colour scheme.
Look at the edge
Many printed quilting cottons have a row of small coloured dots along the selvedge, showing each ink used in the print. They are a ready-made palette: pick fabrics to match two or three of those dots.
2. Mix light, medium and dark
This matters more than colour. A quilt made only of medium tones looks flat, however pretty the colours; one with lights, mediums and darks has depth, and the pattern stands out.
Lay your fabrics side by side and take a photo with your phone in black and white mode.
If two fabrics look the same grey, they will blur together in the quilt. Swap one for something lighter or darker.
3. Vary the size of the prints
Large prints
Big florals and scenes. Use them in larger pieces or they get chopped up and lost.
Medium prints
The workhorses: geometrics, mid-sized florals and stripes.
Small prints and tone-on-tones
Tiny dots, ditsy florals and fabrics printed in shades of one colour. From a distance they read almost as solid.
Solids
Plain colours give the eye a place to rest and make the prints beside them stand out.
A mix of at least three scales looks balanced. Several large prints together fight for attention.
4. Add calm fabrics
Quilters call them blenders: fabrics that look almost plain but have a little texture. They tie a busy mix together. Good blenders on our shelves include Kona solids, the soft woven look of Chalk and Charcoal, and tonal batiks like Prisma Dyes, which read almost as a solid.
5. Repeat colours across the project
A colour that appears only once looks like a mistake. If you use a red, use it in at least two or three places, so the eye travels across the whole piece.
The shortcut: buy a bundle
Fabric designers do this work for you. Every collection is designed so its prints go together, in a range of scales and values. A fat quarter bundle gives you the whole set in one go.
Already coordinated
Fat quarter bundles
From KES 5,000
Sets of 9 to 30 fat quarters from one collection, including Live Love Glamp, Florista, Kindness Always and Wishwell Brushy. Add one Kona solid and you have a complete quilt palette.
See a bundleShop by colour
We have sorted our quilting fabrics by colour to make matching easy: red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, pink, brown, cream and white, grey, black and multicolour.
Build your mix with us
Bring your focus fabric to our shop at Muthaiga Mini Market and we will pull fabrics from the shelves to go with it. Or send us a photo on WhatsApp.
Shop quilting fabricOr message us on 0798 316 860
Prices correct at the time of writing.
