Colors, fabrics, and prints, oh my!

Fabric, or perhaps more abstractly, color, is what brings many of us into the quilting sphere. I started quilting, sort of, in the summer of 2003. My mom quilts pretty casually. She does a ton of needlepoint, but has done a decent amount of quilting. So that summer I decided that it was about damn time she make me a quilt. Off we went to Little Timber Quilts for me to help her select fabric to make me a rag quilt. I'd been to Joann's and Hancock's, those sort of fabric stores, but never been overly excited about making anything more complex than a cape for Halloween. Walking through the door of LTQ was immediately appealing to me. I've painted since I was 12, so I LOVE color and texture...and here I was surrounded by all different colors and textures and ready made little paintings. My mother knew almost immediately that she had created a monster. I picked out the fabric for her to make me that quilt, but I ended up making it for myself. Before that though, I picked out fabric for a quilt to redo my bedroom (a log cabin, still not quilted)...then I picked out fabric for another project (a Lucky Stars, by Atkinson's Designs)...then another (a Yellow Brick Road that she and I took a class together to do) See pictures of three yellow brick roads I made very early in my quilt career...and then that fateful day when I bought my first fat quarter with no purpose. I just loved it.
The Yellow Brick Roads are all draped in the top of the picture. Three of the first quilts I finished.

So that's my story. I to this day have a fabric problem. Last year it really came home that I am a fabric collector, not just a quilter who happens to have a lot of fabric. I made the quilt pictured below because I loved the line with all the browns and oranges (yes, it made many people want to throw-up, but I love it!)

...I made the blocks and chose to sash it in this great orange fabric with black and metallic gold spider webs. I took enough home to sash the quilt. Finito, voila, lovely, I have fabric I love in a quilt I love, right? NO! I agonized about the spider web fabric. I couldn't sleep because there was only about a yard left on the bolt at the store, and I knew I should sell it so I can attempt to make a living. Finally, in tears (fabric doesn't often bring me to tears, but occasionally), I called my mom for advice. Sobbing, I sniffled about how I might want to make something else someday with the spider webs, and what if I never found it again, and blah blah blah. My poor mother sighs in exasperation and tells me that it's okay if I want a little extra of the spider fabric. So I gleefully took home the last little bit of the fabric and I can tell you right now that it will never get cut up unless it's my very last piece of fabric. I just had to have some of it to pull out and pet occasionally. Now, don't worry if you're just starting, this doesn't happen to most people (or at least I don't think it does). I'm an extreme fabric addict with no intention or desire for reform. I control my addiction by owning a fabric store, so I get contact with tons of pretty fabric every day so I don't have to take it all home. The moral of this tale, however, is that if you really love a fabric, for Pete's sake, buy some extra if you can afford it. A little fabric sometimes equals a lot of happiness.

Which brings me to my next point, and then I'll get on with my actual lesson. Fabrics do come in different qualities, as you will notice by the different prices found in independent quilt shops and chains like WalMart or JoAnn's. I am not a quilt shop nazi. Obviously I want and hope that everyone who quilts will shop at independents to keep us alive and fed and keep beautiful fabric on the market, but I myself have been a quilter without much of an income, and I know that sometimes you just can't afford the better stuff. So I will say only this: buy the best you can afford. Your projects will last longer, be more beautiful, feel nicer, etc...but don't beat yourself up if you have to use cheap fabric--it's the journey not the destination and your first few quilts probably aren't going to be heirloom quality anyway. The same advice applies for sewing machines, tools, etc...Buy the best you can afford, it will be worth it in the long run.
A quick note: there are three main types of quilting fabric and they are all 100% cotton: cotton prints, batiks, and flannel. Cottons and batiks work fine together, but flannel is best kept by itself (though you can use it as the back of a quilt to make it soft. I suggest Wikipedia if you want to know the differences amongst these three. As to a question that you will find addressed with differing levels of passion in various quilting publications, to prewash or not to prewash? There is no right answer, do what you want. I hate prewashing and have never prewashed a single piece of fabric in my life and I wash all my quilts and dry them on hot and have never had a problem, so, there you go. I will say that I have found cheaper fabric tends to bleed more, so if you don't prewash, use those color catcher sheets you put in the wash. Also, it's all or nothing: you can't just prewash your reds and leave the rest as cotton does shrink and when you then wash the top, the red is preshrunk and the rest isn't: you'll be sad.

Okay, now to the actual picking of fabrics. There are three main factors to consider when choosing fabric: color (first and foremost), value (second, only slightly), and print (a more minor, but still important part).

Most of us who graduated from kindergarten at least know the basics of color (or did at one point ;). The primaries--red, blue, and yellow--combine to make secondaries--purple, green, and orange--all of which can combine to make tertiaries and on and on to make all the various shades in between, like reddish pink purple or light bluey green. Knowing combinations of color is not really necessary in quilting like it is in painting, but a little color knowledge can help you make informed decisions.
The color wheel is such an excellent tool for color decisions if you know what kind of effect you're going for. One of the easiest ways to choose fabric is to go with a monochromatic color scheme where you use various shades, tints, and hues of said color. So, say all greens (and creams, but black and white don't really count as "colors" unless they're all you're using) like my quilt on the left below, or all blues, like the one in the middle. Monochromatic quilts are very peaceful, but can also run the risk of boring, so it's good to have a little zazz in there--the shiny cream in the green, the silver polka-dot in the blue. The close cousin of monochromatic is analogous. Analogous just means that they are next to each other on the color wheel. So, blues-greens-yellows, or even just blues--blue greens--greens or say from green to orange on the wheel above. Analogous colors also tend to feel pretty calm and peaceful, but do run the same risk of being boring if you don't pick either a dominant color or an interesting focus piece. A focus fabric is typically a larger print with several colors and cannot obviously be categorized as light or dark, one color or another. The quilt on the right below rides on the focus fabric, a blue and green tropical leaf print, a lot as well as the black for zazz.
I realize that the picture isn't very big, but since we're examining color, that's okay. You can instantly see that the first two are more calm than the third. Bear in mind that if you don't like green or blue, you will not like any of these quilts, so try to imagine them in a different colorway, like red or purple, or whatever your favorites are. You may already be seeing a pattern in my quilts. I do a lot of analogous and monchromatic quilts. Also a lot of blue and green.

That being said, I'm not just a one trick pony. For a flashier quilt, one of the quickest ways to get some pop (also a nice way to add some spice to a monochromatic number) is to use complimentary colors. Go back up to the color wheel and look. Complimentary colors basically are two colors that when mixed together will make brown or black and are always opposite on the color wheel. Scientifically color gets very complicated, so we'll just stick to visual color which is what you see when you mix paint or crayons or something of that nature. You'd think that when you put complimentary colors next to each other you'd get a visual muddying since they make brown, but that's not what happens. In fact because they're on opposite sides of the color wheel, they pop when next to each other. Blue and orange, purple and yellow, reddish purple and green, they all really pop. In the quilt below I used a very pale blue as the background and orange for the flowers and it just really pops.
Most people hear blue and orange and think "Blech" but it really works, even for people who don't like these colors--they think the quilt is pretty. I've had a number of people unable to say why they like this quilt, but I'd be willing to bet it's the visual appeal of the colors because the pattern has it with a white background and pink flowers and it just doesn't work for people.
Those are your basic color schemes that are nameable, but another awesome way to choose colors is to pick a focus fabric you like, or a theme (say Christmas, fall, winter) and go with that as a starting point. Below is a grouping of "fall" fabrics we put together just thinking of fallish colors.
Here again though, your color wheel can help you. On the wheel above, you'll notice that it has arrows around the outside that say "warm" and "cool"...In general you can intuitively feel this about colors--red is a warm color, but you it can have cooler or warmer shades depending on whether it's got more blue or more yellow making it more purple (and therefore cooler) or more orange (and therefore warmer). Fall and summer colors tend to be warm, while winter is cool, and spring is a mix of the two (think crisp cool blue skies or clouds, juxtaposed with vibrant, warm red tulips and yellow daffodils). Again, temperature is a great way to tie your quilt together--if you want to do a green and purple quilt, choose all cool, or all warm versions of greens and purples and it will meld a little better.
The second way I mentioned involves a focus fabric. That's how I chose colors for this quilt, even though the focus ended up being a tiny part of it (find it if you can!):
I probably wouldn't have combined these particular fabrics without that guide. Below is another example of choosing a focus fabric that I really love and choosing colors to go with it:
I love the fish print, so I chose a bunch of fabrics that I liked, then pared it down a little:
Which brings us to our other considerations: value (lightness or darkness) and scale of print (the size of the elements on a fabric). The fish fabric above is a large-scale print that I would use as a focus fabric, but that's not to say you can't cut it into tiny pieces. Focus fabrics are not necessarily going to be huge chunks or borders, they serve as a bridge to tie the rest of the quilt together. Scale is an important part of choosing fabric because variety is the spice of quilting, as well as life. If you pick all huge prints, the quilt will be muddled and confusing for me, at least. Some designers and pattern writers like using all huge prints, so you know, take my advice with a grain of salt. I like to throw in small scale and medium scale prints because then there are places for your eyes to "rest" if there's pieces of big prints every which where, your eyes just constantly flutter over the quilt and can never pause long enough to decide what the heck is going on. SO, that's my two cents. Below is an example of similar colors in negligible (in quilting we refer to these as "reading as solid") print, small print, medium print, and large print. All of these would fill (more or less) the same color and value role, just different texture as a result of the print size.
On the note of "reading as solid", I never actually use solid anything in my quilts. Unless you're going for an Amish or antique look, I just don't think they're as visually appealing or attractive as something that reads as a solid. That's all I'll say about print.
Next in my culling is value. Value is best described as where the color would fall on a scale of black to white if you took a black and white photo of it. There are tools for seeing value if you have trouble (they are little pieces of red, transparent plastic, or green, transparent plastic). In general though I think it's good to practice seeing value with the naked eye. If you're having trouble, go to a color section and find the lightest one and try to order them, stand back, squint and see if anything looks out of place, and continue. Quilt shop employees may wonder what you're doing, but for the most part, we're a passive lot. Below is a French Braid that made use of value changes to create the "glow" effect.
You can see there's one piece that sticks out more in some braids than others because there was a wide range of values within it, but also because it's cooler than the others. The lesson is: if it bothers you before you sew it together, it will bother you after even more, so fix it before you sew. Hahahha, if only I took my own advice. Oh well, I still love it. Below I also pulled a light, a medium, and a dark of blue, green, and purple so you could see how they feel the same even though they're different colors (the light blue is just a sliver at the bottom--sorry, I didn't realize how crappy the picture was until after I'd put all the fabric away).
Here again, some people sew with all mediums and don't like contrast, but I think one of the most important parts of a quilt is the contrast in values...Go back up to the blue and orange quilt--doesn't that dark blue really snap up the light stuff? The flowers and leaves are mediums, but having those lights and darks makes a huge difference, so in general I think it's good to have contrast, and balance--mediums, lights, and darks.
There are some tricksters out there, where you want to think it's a light because it has a light background, or that it's a dark because there's black on it, but in general, most prints that are all over the value board ultimately average out and read as mediums. The three prints below are excellent examples of these tricky fabrics. Don't be afraid to use them, they cut up and sew up just as nicely, they can just throw you off in a big ol' piece on the bolt.
So there you have it, now you can go forth and choose fabrics for your quilt, with at least these loose guidelines and opines from me. Again, I don't really feel that there are rules in quilting and if some combination of fabrics floats your canoe, just go with it--it's your quilt, sewing on fabric you love is the whole point!

One last tidbit of advice for those still wary of picking fabric (many an experienced quilter hates that part)--if you're really scared, the brave new world of quilting we're in has come in to save you. Many beginner patterns work really well for jelly rolls and bali pops (40--2.5" strips from a line of fabrics or batiks), layer cakes (10" squares of a whole coordinated line), or charm squares (5" squares), so pick one of those up and sew away, but try to analyze what you like about the combinations of colors and prints: that will help you to make your own choices in the future.

Finally, a note on buying fabric. In my own quilting life, but especially as a quilt shop owner, I have experienced the tragedy of not being able to get more of a specific print. To those of you who don't know, there is only one fabric manufacturer of cotton prints (batiks tend to be more loosey goosey about reprinting) that reprints their fabric. The rest print a set number of bolts, and when it's gone, it's gone, they don't print it again (except in exceptional cases like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, where they were making so much money they'll probably never stop printing that). This can be very frustrating if you bought something three years ago and get around to sewing with it and wish you had a half yard more. There are sadly no hard and fast rules for how much of anything you should buy, but in my quilting experience (I've made over 30 quilts, and probably about 40 tops that need quilting--not bad, especially since 90% of those are from the past two years) a print you really love that isn't especially large, I never buy less than two yards. If it's large, I buy four. If I want it as a border, I buy four. If it's a blender, at least 1. Why these numbers? Because usally if I love something, I want to build around it, and most patterns that call for a focus fabric never call for much less than two yards. If you only make miniatures, you can probably adjust this. This also leaves me room to recover from cutting errors, and maybe even have a little left over for my fabric petting zoo. I get a lot of grief for just trying to oversell people, but honestly, on this, I have so many women come through, frantically searching for something they bought years ago and didn't get enough of, that I'm only pushing for you to get that extra fabric in your own self-interest. I also tend to like my quilts to match, so that scrappy "I didn't have enough of this red" look is just not appealing to me, but if you like that look, you probably care less if your reds don't match. Again, just my opinion, but hard earned (I used to only buy fat quarters, and I still have most of them), so like all my advice, take it or leave it.

Well, here's my stockpile that I've selected for my Cappuccino quilt and Tuesday we can start talkng tools of the trade, cutting, and more!

Until then, happy quilting (and fabric shopping!)!