On the quilt I am doing now, I had the design done in my mind first, then sketched out on a piece of copy paper. I decided on my color palette. After that I went shopping for fabric. I have since changed my mind about the background color. My quilt is all appliqued blocks so changing the background fabric is no big deal. I have created the appliques on cream on cream fabric, but will just applique that onto a different colored block. I am putting a LOT of machine embroidery on the applique and discovered that my blocks needed to be 16x16 and then cut down to whatever I want the final size to be as the process of embroidering distorts the background fabric somewhat.