Originally Posted by tweezy50
I have been watching this board for a while now and have come to the conslusion that alot of what makes a quilt pretty, beautiful, or gorgeous are your color combinations. Seems like most of you can take the simplest pattern and make it stand out by your color combinations. Mine on the other hand are .........yawnable, if there is such a word. I've got the light, medium, and dark down, but how do you decide which colors will "pop"? Please let me in on the secret. Apparently color coordinating wasn't one of the genes I picked up.
When I was first learning to quilt, my teacher kept telling us to remember that we weren't getting dressed. Your fabrics shouldn't be all matchy-matchy. I think the most important feature is CONTRAST. Dark brown with orange & lime green. One of the other thing that needs to change is value - lights & darks. Again, this is really like contrast. Black & white is so hot right now & you can't get any further away from one than the other. Now take that B&W & throw in a wild & crazy pop of color!
A lot of fabrics have circles of color on the selvedge - the color of inks or dyes usd in the printing. These can help you with color selection. When picking out prints, keep in mind that you don't want all focus fabrics or your quilt will be shouting, "Look at ME!", "No, look at ME." and the eye will go crazy jumping around all over the place. The design also gets lost when all the same type(size) and value of print is used.
Look at quilts you really like & break them down into their different fabrics - color & type. See what works & what doesn't work. Learn from the quilt world celebs! With their works, they don't show the ones that didn't work, but we know they all had them!
Good luck and have fun!