What's Under the Needle?

Selecting Fabric Colors for my Quilt

Posted by on 22 March 2021 | 0 Comments

Tags: quilting, class

Last week I started designing a new quilt. I manipulated a photo to make a better composition, then printed it out and pinned it to my design wall to think about and consider changes. 

My printed photo

I will need to think about how big I might make this but first I'm going to decide on the background fabrics. The simple way to do this is by using your colored photo to match the colors however sometimes it is quite hard to see the real colors or there are only very small areas to compare so I prefer to use the aid of GIMP - it can really help.

I've made a short video showing what I do. I'm using the original photo as this is always better and the resolution hasn't changed. Please excuse the bit of crackling heard in the video, I was using my old microphone!

Once I have my page, I can print it off....

printed color blocks

and then head to my stash to start selecting fabrics. The pieces I pick can also help me determine the size of the quilt I want to make - sometimes you find the perfect piece but it's not quite big enough!

Selected fabrics

So now I have a number of fabrics to select from - they look quite light but that will create wonderful contrast against the foreground. Next, I can start considering how I want to put these together to form the background. Will I piece them or will I applique them?

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