Using Clothes to Pick Fabric

One of the problems quilters have a lot is picking fabrics. And that's an age old question I'm always asked, how do you pick fabrics for a quilt? Well I'm gonna show you how to use your clothing or something that you wear to pick your fabrics from. It doesn't have to be from a border fabric, it doesn't have to be from a fabric in a store. But it can be something that you wear. So that's why I have this colorful scarf on. I'm gonna take it off. And if you think about it, somebody worked very hard to put all these colors together on a scarf. And it's a very colorful scarf. So if I wanted to put colors together, since all these colors look so nice in a scarf, wouldn't they look nice in a quilt? So I'm gonna look at all the different colors all the different shades. Now, when you think of color, there are shades and there are tones. Shades just mean from dark to light. Tones mean, it's like different like there's red purple and a blue purple and those are called tones. So if I pick out these fabrics. Let's say this gold here I like. So I can put all different kinds of golds in this fabric and oranges. So you can see all of these fabrics go with this yellow and orange that are in the flower. So I could use these. I could look at some of the other colors, there's blue in this, so I can pick some different shades and tones of blue. So here's some different blues that would go with the blue. See all those match that blue? There's purple in the quilt and lilac. So I have a couple shades of purple that go with it. I can also put in a green. I'm not a big green person, so I didn't have a whole lot of green fabrics to pick from to put with this but you can put other shades of green in here. So you could put a lighter shade of green or a darker shade of green in here to go with it. And there's reds and orange reds. So these are some different reds that I put together. So when you pull this scarf out to look at all these different colors you put together here. Wouldn't that make a beautiful quilt? Look at all those different colors that you can use in that quilt. And they all go together because they're in this scarf here. Let me show you another example, I've got another scarf. Now most of my clothes, I wear a lot of blacks and solid clothes, so I don't have a lot of clothes that are different colors. But some people like real colorful blouses. But here's another scarf. Now of course you can always put white or black with any fabric to give it a little depth. So here's a beautiful scarf, it has all different color flowers on it. It has black and white dots. So it's really, a very, what I like to do is I like to pick something that has a lot of colors in it. So then I can pick a lot of different fabrics to go with it. So there's a couple shades of green in here. So I found these two shades of green, I could use those. There's some blues and blue purples so I could pick those. There's some purples in here. So I have different tones and shades of purple. There's even a fuchsia. There's a fuchsia in here. Isn't that a pretty color? So I had some fabric to go with that. Here's another shade of green, a darker green. So I can put that with these greens here. There's a yellow, a bright yellow in here. So I could put that in there. And I also can black and white in there. So you can see all of these colors because they're already in the scarf, are gonna go very well together if I put them all in a scrappy quilt or a specific kind of quilt, doesn't make any difference what kind of quilt you put it in. But you can see that all of these colors are all gonna blend when you put them together in a quilt just based on some clothing that I own.