Using a Window to Choose Quilt Fabrics

So you've selected the fabrics for your next quilt, or at least you think you have. The things that we don't really look at that we should look at is not only do we have a variety of color, a variety of values, but do we also have a variety of stylization of print and size and scale of print. And then the most important thing, how do those fabrics interact with each other? And one of the best ways to see how the fabrics are gonna interact with each other is to put them in a window. So here's my window, I've cut a square out of a piece of fabric, pretty simple.

It's gonna show me how these fabrics are going to interact with each other. So if I take my plainer fabric, so I've got two plain blues, two plainer yellows, and I put them so that they come together into a grid, and I put my window on top. I get to see what happens when those four fabrics come together. Not very interesting. All of these three are very much too similar and the colors aren't different enough.

So if I leave my two blues, but I take out those two plainer yellows and I put in more interesting yellows, we instantly have something more interesting. Two plain with two busier. Now I'm gonna leave those plains and again and I'm gonna bring in blue again, but the blue is going to be very complex here. Here we have a very complex blue that has lots of other color in it, if I use this side or that side. And another plain blue with lots of color in it that's a slightly different value of blue.

And now I can see the interaction of blue on blue, but two that are very complex and two that are very simple. Now what happens if we take out our simple fabrics and change our color instead of our complexity? Well, we're gonna change the complexity a little bit. I'm going to put that in and let's see the stripey one in. So here we have these together.

And what I'm doing is I'm isolating the fabric in here and I see them interacting with each other without all their excess around them, and I can see them how they're gonna work with each other. And I look at this and I say, it's pretty groovy. In fact, I like it better than the plain fabric. The reason it's working is because these fabrics are simpler. They're basically tone on tone, there's no contrast in color.

Also, there's only one design on each one whereas these have lots of complex designs on them. So they're very busy. What happens if I put lots of busy next to lots of busy? Is that gonna work? Am I gonna be able to pull that one off?

Probably not, but this is gonna be the proof in the pudding. If I put these together here and I put that window up and say, it's just craziness. It's just chaos, nothing is working very well. I need to change that up. So I'm gonna change it up, I'm gonna keep the color the same though and make it simpler.

So I'm not using the solids like I did before, but I'm using very simple tone on tones. And when I do that, I get a wonderful interaction of those colors. So instead of just thinking about the colors and the values, think about how those prints, those motifs, and the size and scale of those motifs are going to affect the fabrics as they integrate and come together and behave in the block that you're piecing. Try auditioning them in a window. It will really help you to see how they're going to interact.