Do these fabric color combinations work? Are the patterns too loud? Are they competing with each other? I hope it’s not going to look like a mess when its done. 

Maybe I should go back to the store and pick out different fabrics. 

This is my inner monologue every time I start a new quilt. 

Have you ever started a quilt project and had the same thoughts run through your head at the fabric store?

Have you also spent more than a stupid amount of hours trying to teach yourself basic color theory from random websites online?

Me too. 

You getting any where with it?

Yeah, me neither. 

So over the years I’ve picked up a few hacks to help myself settle on colors for a quilting project without needing to know much formal color theory. 

At least until I get the opportunity to either take a class, or experiment enough to develop it naturally.

Today I wanted to share a few of my hacks for choosing quilt fabric color combinations in the hopes that I’m not the only person suffering from buyer’s remorse at the fabric store. 

Go All Solid

With solids, you can pretty much never go wrong. 

When you make a quilt of all solids, picking colors is as easy as matching your clothes in the morning. 

Most people know enough about colors and the rainbow in general to be able to pick out a couple of colors that look great together. 

Whether it’s all warm colors between the reds and yellows, or you naturally stick to more cool colors with blues and greens. 

Picking solids is always an easy way to make sure your quilt is going to look fabulous at the end. 

Use a neutral as a background and you’ll be golden. 

Once you have your solids picked out, play around with whites, off whites, and grays as backgrounds to get the perfect combo. 

Chose one fun fabric and pull low volume ones in colors found in the fun one

This one is a great way to get family members involved in picking fabrics. 

If you have kids, grandkids, or husbands tagging along to the fabric shop try this trick out. 

You give the general color, and let them pick out the patterned fabric. 

From there pick however many other fabrics you need that are colors already in the original patterned fabric. 

To get this one right, you want to avoid loud patterns in your other fabrics. 

Choose low volume or solids in your coordinating fabrics and you can’t go wrong. 

A great example of this is this More Than Stars quilt using Winnie the Pooh fabric. The Winnie the Pooh fabric is my fun fabric with multiple colors, and the honeycomb fabrics are the low volume patterns in colors that are pulled straight from the character fabric. 

Related:
Free Quilt Pattern – More Than Stars

Google (or pinterest) paint schemes and find fabrics to match

This is one of my favorite hacks to choosing quilt colors. 

Paint is basically the same as fabric when it comes to colors, and interior designers all over the internet have designed great color schemes to inspire home DIYers when designing their homes.

So why not use those same color schemes to decide on quilt fabrics?

If I’m interested in a specific mood to my quilt just google whatever that mood is with “paint scheme” in the search bar and head to the images tab.

This also works fantastically on pinterest as well.

It will give you great color schemes to work with to give you a jumping off point in your quilt. 

Stay monochromatic with only one color of different shades

If you stick to one color, with a neutral, regardless of the patterns, there’s almost no way to go wrong.

Even if you pick 30 different navy fabrics with different patterns, all navy and white (for example) for your blocks, you’ll have no problems when it comes to quilt assembly time. 

Pick neutral colors for the quilt and a fun binding

Neutral colors are neutral for a reason. Because they go with pretty much everything. 

Maybe you are doing a plaid gingham quilt pattern thats all white, black, and grey. 

The colors themselves are simple and basic. 

But what if you throw a bright red binding on it?

A pop of color that really makes a basic quilt come to life at the end.

The binding will be that thing that really makes people go, “Oh I love that”.

People often don’t put too much thought into the fabric of the binding.

And why would they, its such a small percentage of the overall quilt and is almost never the most complicated aspect of the quilt. 

But when you are doing a more simpler quilt, its often fun to make the binding the star of the show.

And when you are making the binding the fun part, you don’t have to really care about competing patterns, because it is just so small of an edge, you won’t see any huge patterns any way.

Pick the backing first, and choose coordinating solids for the front

I’m a sucker for large floral patterns in fabrics that have no business being cut up into small pieces where you will never see the full flower. 

I’m a minimalist at heart, and clearly am not great at color theory so this is a different version of one of the earlier tips.

Pick out a great backing that uses those huge patterns that will never give the same effect cut up. 

When you choose your fabric color combinations for the front, pick out fabric colors that are used in the backing fabric. 

All of those solids can come directly from whatever pattern you picked for the back. 

And you already know they are going to look great because you wouldn’t love the backing if the colors didn’t look good together! 

My favorite part about this tactic is that no one ever expects the back of the quilt to be the show stopper. 

When the see the front they’ll go “oh, how pretty” and then when they see the back they’ll immediately go “oh my god I love that”. 

It’ll give your quilt a punch no one was expecting and bring the whole scheme to a new level. 

Use a curated collection

And finally, my favorite of all options for making sure my fabric color combinations never fail, is to let someone else pick them for you!

Premade and curated fabric color combinations literally take ALL of the guessing out of what colors and patterns look good together.

You just have to use it, which is the easy part. 

My Modern Windows quilt above from earlier this year is a great example of this. 

Related:
Modern Windows Finished Quilt

The quilt uses the super cute curated fabric collection called Bloomington and I can’t tell you how long it would have taken me to pair all of those fabrics together on my own. Instead, I just picked out the collection and the size fabrics I wanted and started my project.

Using precut fabric collections is by far my favorite way to choose quilting fabric but I can rarely find them in my normal box stores in a wide enough variety and with high quality fabrics.

Fat Quarter Shop is my go to place when I’m looking for the perfect high quality fabric collection for my newest project, they have an incredible variety of manufacturers and will even create their own curated collections using fabrics across different manufacturers.

So if you are looking to save yourself hours of staring at bolts of fabrics on a shelf, worrying about whether or not you are even going to like your choices by the end of the project, a curated fabric collection is the number one way to go.

Click here to visit Fat Quarter Shop and start your next quilt with excitement and confidence knowing that choosing fabrics is now the easiest part of the process.