Originally Posted by laurafet

Decide on the colors you want first. That will narrow the field considerably. My DIL came to me with two pieces of ribbon- one plaid, and one polka dot. That gave me little more than colors, but she wanted lots of dots. I got a stripe, a polka dot, and a plaid, then looked at some prints in same color palette for her to choose from. It ended up great if I do say so myself. The only real theme from that was she wanted striped walls, so I made a quilt with monkey riding elephant carrying balloons of the different fabrics- kind of circus looking.