LindaM

Hi Peg,

When I'm looking for OBW fabric I look for something with two or three main colours, and a nice background. I tend not to like animals (don't like to see their faces cut up), but have seen lots that are very effective.

Medium to large scale designs work well, as you'll get different parts throughout the blocks and the blocks won't look all the same.

One of the fabrics I have in my pile of projects is the Kona Bay teal that's in the photo. I have some of the teal and pink to do borders and cubes.

If you search the board here, quite of few of the OBW quilts have a swatch of the original fabric in the quilt - really helpful to see how the OBW transforms the design!

On the other hand, there are also lots of fabulous OBW's that started with fabric that the quilter thought was just too ugly to anything else with LOL! As in, if you cut it small enough, it gets prettier.

For my eyes, the most spectacular ones have a small number of main colours - it helps my brain find some sort of order in the array of swirling patterns and colour.

Hope this helps!