How to Pick Colors and Fabrics for a Quilt- The Quiltville Mystery Version

Trying to decide how to pick colors and fabrics for a quilt can be a hair-pulling nightmare!  I am by no means an expert on such things, but I am usually quite happy with how my quilts turn out, so I’m going to use the About-To-Start Quiltville Mystery Quilt-along to walk you through how to pick colors and fabrics for a quilt.  By “how to” what I really mean is, “here’s the way I do it, which can be taken with a grain of salt, because everyone has a different style.”

What’s a Quiltville Mystery Quilt-along?

First of all, a little background info.  Bonnie Hunter is a quilter and pattern writer, who specializes in scrappy quilts.  She runs a mystery quilt every holiday season.  As of today, the only thing we know is the colors for this year’s quilt, the yardage needed of each color, and the finished quilt dimensions. 

This is last year’s mystery quilt, which was made of all of my most favorite colors!  Also, it’s hard to take a photo of a quilt on a windy day!

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You can read all about my thoughts on mystery quilting in this post, but the short version is that I highly recommend you give it a try, it’s a lot of fun!    When will we start learning the clues for this year’s mystery quilt?  The first clue will come out next Friday, and then one each Friday until the quilt is complete.  Here is where to find all of the clues and directions:  Quiltville Mystery Quilt 2020. 

How to Pick Colors for a Quilt Pattern

This year’s mystery quilt, called Grassy Creek, will be made of all the fall leaf colors.  Red, dark orange, golden yellow and parakeet green.  Plus, a gray that’s almost blue, and a neutral (cream, white, beige, you name it, if it’s neutral, it’s good to go.)

I participated in the quilt-along last year, and I stalked the photos from afar the year before, so I knew before the colors were announced that lots of quilters would throw the palette out the window and change things up.  Some make slight changes; some are quite drastic.

Now, I love gray, but I’m not such a fan of gray as a part of this particular color palette.  At first, I thought maybe I would just sub out the gray and use black instead.

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Then I started thinking, maybe I would make other changes too.  This is where learning how to pick colors and fabrics for a quilt becomes a handy skill.  Bonnie does a great job of setting quilters up for success with this skill, by providing paint chip names and numbers, so that you can get your own (for free!) and know exactly what shade she is talking about.  Sometimes photos can have the colors skewed, especially when viewing on a screen.  This takes all the guesswork out of picking colors for a quilt, but also makes it easier to change things around.

You can take a photo of the paint chips, and then use a gray scale filter to remove all of the color.  Now, it doesn’t really matter what the original colors were, what matters is how those colors interact with each other.  The red is the darkest, although it’s not that much darker than the gray on the bottom.  The yellow and the parakeet green are quite similar, although the yellow shows as brighter. 

I started my palette by pulling out some greens.  If you’ve seen my quilting at all this year, you know I favor the minty greens over the grassy greens.  I knew these minty greens wouldn’t work well with the fall leaf palette, but didn’t have any red in my stash anyway, and I knew I could pull some other fabrics that would work with the minty green.

Then, I pulled out some oranges, but stuck with the melon and coral oranges, rather than the pumpkin or orange oranges, so that it wouldn’t clash with the minty green.

Since the red paint chip was the darkest of the shades, I added some purple to my collection, because I didn’t have any red on hand, but thought that maybe either purple or navy would make a good “dark” to go along with the green and the orange.

Now keep in mind, at this point in the game, I was just pulling fabric out of storage, and looking at how it worked together.  I know how the color wheel works, but in a how-to-teach-color-to-preschool-students sort of way, not an have-an-art-degree-and-am-qualified-to-make-color-decisions sort of way.  My strategy is generally to just throw fabrics together and see if I like them or not. 

I did not have my paint chips at hand at this point, I was just putting together fabrics that I liked.

So far I was loving this color combination, still needed a fourth color, and I thought a medium to light-ish blue might work well with the rest.

I liked how all of the colors played together, but still wanted to make sure they fit within the gray scale dark to light scheme of the paint chips, so I threw the paint chips on top and again used the gray scale filter to check.

At this point I was {mostly} happy with the look.  I especially liked how the two lightest paint chips weren’t really visible against those fabrics, I thought that meant I had done a good job picking colors with just the right amount of contrast to the other colors.

But, I wasn’t quite happy with the purples and blues.  The purples seemed too dark and the blues too light.

I pulled out some darker blues, and again used the gray scale filter to compare.

And this was the point where I learned something interesting!  My phone has several gray scale filters, and they are NOT all the same!  Take a look at these next two photos, one shows the lighter blues being the best match, and the other shows the darker blues being the best match.  No help at all!

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Then I transferred the photo to my laptop, to attempt playing around with the lighting and color there.  Rather than using a filter, I was able to simply remove all color, which gave me a truer to original gray scale photo, and I think either group of blue would work just fine.

I ended up deciding I liked the darker (not really dark, just darker than the light blues) blues best, when placed with the rest of the fabric.  Also, I think if blue gets sewn to green at any point in the quilt pattern, this will have more contrast.  I also decided that gray worked just fine with my adjusted palette, so I put the black fabrics away for another day.  Settling on a blue scheme, and picking gray over black erased my doubts about the purples I picked.

This quilt will be heavy on the grays, and the neutrals (not shown, but I have a bunch of white on white tonal fabrics to use), so while I need to do some more gray shopping, I may not need any more of my other colors.  We’ll see if I need to do some mid-project shopping or not.

I’ve also got enough of this gray with purple fabric to use as binding, plus a little in the quilt too.

How to Pick Fabrics for a Quilt

The second part of how to pick colors and fabrics for a quilt is the fabric selection, which (unless you are using solids) includes the design or motif, as well as the scale of the print.

Just as with the colors, this is often (although not entirely) about individual preference.

I like fabrics that are tone on tone.  That means that the print is from the same color family as the fabric, although often in a darker or lighter hue. 

I also like white print on colored fabric.

It is very rare that I use fabrics that are multi-colored, although they certainly have their place.

The other thing to keep in mind when choosing fabrics is the scale of the design.  The traditional thought is that a quilt should be a mix of large-, medium- and small-scale prints.  I think this is good advice for most quilts, although I do tend to favor medium- and small-scale prints.

Now while I think of the green as a large scale and the blue a medium scale, other quilters may say they are instead medium and small.  To each their own, go with what you like!

However, for a mystery quilt, it’s best to leave out the larger scale prints, especially if they are multi-colored.  The reason for this is that you don’t know what size you are going to be cutting your pieces.  While a multi-color, large-scale print might favor one color overall, once you start cutting it into itty, bitty pieces (and Bonnie Hunter does like itty, bitty!) you may end up with the wrong color when all the other color is cut away.

Since I changed up my color palette, I wrote directly on the paint chips so that I could keep everything straight once I start cutting into these pretty, pretty fabrics.