Not sure how to choose fabric for your next quilt project? Never fear, here are some quick and easy tips for you to aid in your decision making.

Tone or Value. In order to make your patchwork stand out, you’ll want a mix of different tones – darks and lights – for contrast. If your background and block designs are too close in tone, it won’t have much impact and in the case of print fabrics, it might even look too busy. You could even try taking a black and white photo of your fabric choices with your phone to check there’s enough contrast.

Complementary or analogous colours. There’s two surefire ways to choose colour. The first is choosing complementary colours, which are colours on the opposite sides of the colour wheel like red and green. The other is analogous colours, which are colours alongside each other on the colour wheel, like orange and yellow. Just make sure to pay attention to tone in addition! There are a lot of colour resources and tools out there to learn more, and it’s best to learn the rules before you choose to break them.

Print scale. When you look at a fabric collection by your favourite designer, you will notice there are a mix of different print types and scales. You’ll often find a variant of a plaid and a dot, a large print and a small print, for example. If you’re choosing your own fabrics, you want to choose a mix of styles too as this will help differentiate your patches. If all of your fabrics are ditsy florals, for example, it will be harder to make out where one fabric ends and another one begins.

Style. For cohesion, you may want to stick to one style of fabric. That could be all civil war style prints, or all batiks. You could also mix in subtle blenders and solids where appropriate, but you may not want to mix reproduction feedsack prints with geometric modern prints as an example. The easiest solution here is to choose a precut as all of the work has been done for you in terms of style, scale and colour!

Go scrappy! There is nothing to say you can’t make your next quilt where each patch is made with a different piece of fabric. If you want to go scrappy and mix it up, go all in. Combine many fabrics together for the ultimate effect and see what happens. Separating them by colour helps, as does auditioning fabrics that will be adjacent to make sure there is the desired effect in terms of contrast.

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Which of these tips have you tried? We can’t wait to see your projects, so be sure to share! Please post, and tag us on Instagram or Facebook so we can celebrate your design! #TrendTexFabrics @trendtexfabrics

Looking for more tutorial and project ideas? Check some other ideas out here.