I make alot of two fabric quilts. LOL.

This is what I do. Also, when I wash them, I hang them from my shower curtain rod to dry (hey, it rains a lot where I live) and that gives me a chance to gaze at them as well.

I pull from focus fabrics to make sure that the colors coordinate. I've had varying success rates. The celestial circles quilt on my blog has too many fabrics in the same intensity so the purple circle doesn't pop as much as I would have liked (I'm also very glad that I decided on yellow for the other circle rather than the red as I would have lost both circles.

I'm hoping that using yellow in the border might change some of the visual impact.

The yellow in the penguin 9-patch (also on my blog - below) is a little yellower than I'd like - it does coordinate well, but I think a slightly more of an orange tone would be better - however, now that the center is pieced, the bumble bee effect is lessened.

On the other hand - the Dragon Quilt (August 2010 in the blog) came together really well in terms of color and contrast - I didn't have a fabric collection to work with like I did with Celestial Circles and spent a lot of time in the quilt store auditioning colors and patterns. I'm in the process of piecing the border and hope to start adding borders soon (working my way through Quilter's Academy and I haven't reached the borders class yet).

Cheers, K

TG I'm not the only one who has trouble selecting coordinating fabrics for my quilts. TY for all the great tips to help.

This is my biggest problem also....I also have problems coordinating lite, med and darks....

Justwannaquilt mentioned using paint swatches. I just read a tip in a Lynette Jenning's home decorating book that I'm going to try when selecting my next quilting fabric. She says to take a sample of the fabric you want to match to the paint store and find paint chips that come as close as possible to the three or four dominant colors in your sample fabric. On each paint chips there will be other coordinating colors. So with 3 to 5 colors per chip, that will give you 9 to 16 color possibilities. She was talking about matching sofa fabric, but I don't see why it wouldn't work with quilting fabric.

Thank you for your post, I thought I had saved this when it was on before, but I hadn't, but now I have!!! ;-)

One way I do it is to hold my main fabric in front of bolts of fabric and move the main fabric up and down the row of bolts until something pops out at me. Seems to work really well for me.

I think I have the tone and color part down, what I have problems with is the size of the prints, when to use big and little..that sort of thing.

i am not good at this eother, so i take my sister, she is great at picking out colors that i would never think of putting together, if she cant go i will try to do it myself , but have no problem asking a clerk or another customer or 2 of there opinion