Jelly rolls, layer cakes, guy themed
 

Why on earth don't designers/manufactures design with a guy in mind? I'm not talking camo fabric here, but senseable fabric for a preteen on up. No baby prints or cartoon characters. The majority of charity quilts that I make are floral themed for girls and young ladies. I feel the guys are being left out more and more, as I find it very difficult to find jelly rolls or layer cakes that would appeal to a young boy/man. Do you know of a line of fabric that would appeal to them? If so, please share with me.

For me I stick with colors more than specific manufacturers. I also know lots of men that like florals and bright colors but it can be more difficult when doing Charity quilts. You can’t go wrong with Grunge or Batiks and lots of subdued colors and prints in the Reproduction lines as well.

Keep looking, I've seen sports theme, tools, fishing, firemen, policeman, hunting, also a lot of browns, greens, beige, etc. Civil War fabrics may also work. There are also animal fabrics with cats, dogs, bears, alligators, you name it, it's out there. One of my favorite places to order from on line is Quilted Twins in Dade City, FL. Look around on their website, it might give you some ideas and they have very fast shipping.

Tim Holtz designs manly fabrics. I'll bet you could find pre-cuts of his fabrics.

I often use civil war reproduction type colors and prints for men as well as blues, black and white, greens, and the grunge type lines. I agree there are many pre-cuts that seem to be juvenile or feminine but there are plenty of other options for the men folk. You are gathering lots of options here. Good question to ask.

I find that batiks are perfect for men. They tend to read as tone on tones. Whether it's a flower, leaf, geometric doesn't really stand out. I think one of the mistakes made is sticking to dark colors, blues, browns, blacks. Men like color too.

Grunge is a great choice for guys. I don't care for novelty fabrics; I prefer to let the design of the quilt do the talking. If I'd made a quilt for my preteen boys based on their interests, I would have been making a new quilt for them every 6 months or so. Grunge is perfect because it comes in so many colors, it's not flat, and it doesn't have vines, flowers, paisley, or anything else that seems girly.

I am making one using a layer cake called lakeside story by Moda. My husband is happy with it!

I made a couple of donation quilts for older (teen) boys using fabrics in the colors of the local sport teams (navy, orange, and white for the Chicago Bears; red and black for the Chicago Blackhawks). Because the fabrics didn't specifically have sports icons on them, they were cheaper than buying the licensed fabrics. I also made a quilt using a fox panel and one using a deer print fabric. Any brown, blue fabrics (including some batiks) can be used for a more masculine quilt too.

As long as you stay away from pastels, especially pink.

I've made my great nephews (age 2 to 14 years) carpenter's star quilts with red, gray, and black wool from felted sweaters and men's suits. My 17 year old nephew is getting a quilt this Christmas made with golf ball fabric and paw print fabric (our local school mascot is the bulldog). I second the vote for using the colors of local sports teams. If you use a feminine print in the sports team color, it may not "read" as a floral if the print is small. Plaids are always good, too.

I don't agree with this statement at all. My 28 year old son's favorite quilt is all pastels INCLUDING pink. He actually asked me if he could have it because he loved it so much.

I think it's best to find out specifically what the recipient prefers, and not make assumptions based solely on someone's gender.

I've got a lot of experience at Being A Guy and have found my preference is toward the standard-issue quilters' cottons that are not discernable prints. Solids are great. Dark themes are great but maybe mostly as counterpoint to the dozen-odd quilts already visible around the house. (well, four, but it *feels* like dozens haha)
We want to see the craftwork, we want to feel the love that you pour into your art. We want you.
Prints of machines, animals, weapons, sports players, etc are especially out. If we want to see a bulldozer, we'll go watch a Tuff Shed commercial, or rent a Bobcat to dig up the old septic system. Floral prints may hold very little interest; just about anything "licensed" (team, toy, movie etc) is also out.
All that said, Peckish has the most direct advice: make it for the recipient, gleaning what you can of their preferences. Ideally you can ask and treat it as a conversation - the longer the better (measured in calendar days, not minutes per talk). My favorite quilt, my wife asked and I had a clear vision of size & shape (to match my favorite lounging position on my favorite couch spot) and very poor communication about design ("I like those licorice all-sorts I sometimes get... I dunno, I bet you can come up with something... wouldn't you rather do like a unicorn quilt for the grandkids" etc etc etc over the course of about a month of her design work).

My husband agrees with you completely. As does my brother. Neither want kitchy, theme, or logo fabrics. Both like rich solids or geometric/non-florals. No "team colors". Neither like scrappy, either. My brother-in-law's favorite is one that has warm, earth-toned, tapestry-like prints with a warm white background fabric. He and my sister-in-law actually hung it in their house as a focal piece of art.

I don't know anyone, of any gender, who'd want novelty prints, cutesy stuff, or old-fashioned florals reminiscent of the century before last. I don't like them either. ​You really don't need to gender your quilts. You can make anything you like!

Ask the recipient what their favourite colours are, and you can also chat about shapes and patterns, maybe textures if you branch out into other fabrics. Right now I'm finishing one quilt, improvised in gentle curves and citrus bright colours (especially green), and starting another, semi-improv pieced equilateral triangles to make up hexagon shapes in oranges, blues and some greys. My partner loves red, so that features prominently in the quilts I've made for him. I've just made a lap quilt out of needlecord and velvet in blues, greens and purples, because the friend that went to was getting really chilly, and those are her favourite colours. The quilt in my avatar went to a male friend who loves those colours, also trees and Tolkien.
​

Gorgeous quilt, very fresh and modern.

I've used pink in quilts for men, too. They were thrilled, and in one case had actively requested it (that one was pinker). If it's mixed in with all the other colours, it just looks multicoloured.

They are costly, but Japanese wovens are great for non-feminine quilts.

Another non-gender quilt is Postcards from Sweden. Really colourful!

Past that, quilts made with solids work well too...I like working with a simple design using just white, black and ONE colour, a technique I learned in a class called "Speed Date With Improv" by Krista Hennebury. The quilts with this palette look really striking and do not have a gendered feel:
https://www.instagram.com/explore/ta...atewithimprov/

Linda I understand your frustration I always look at bundles for sale on line and so many of them have a lot of florals. Not good for guys. I sew for Project Linus and try to do at least 2 teen boy quilts every month. Right now focusijg on red white blue fabric. Seems I have a lot of that in my stash. Second choice is tone on tone fabrics. Third is primary colors. Right now I'm making cowboy boot blocks I have some prilnt fabrics that seem to work ok.

I makejig zig zag puzzle quilts and a little floral is ok.https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/easy...attern-2821825. Another good pattern that you can hide a floral is simply woven. http://sewcraftyjess.blogspot.com/20...ven-quilt.html

Fun football pattern. I did this one. Alternated with 4 patch in primary colors and two goal post with another larger football. Turned out really cute. https://www.kellifanninquilts.com/20...ilt-block.html

Hope this helps.

I think the OP is talking about quilts for donation to charities and so doesn't have the option to get to know what the person prefers. That's good advice though if you are gifting to a family member or friend. The OP seems to donate a lot of quilts to charities, from what I've read and has a very generous heart! Probably looking for more generic ideas for men and boys.
I have seen charities asking for more quilts for boys.

I think fabric manufacturers make it seem harder to make quilts for men and boys than it really is, because they have an interest in changing fashions for fabrics, and that means heavily promoting fabric sets, novelty fabrics and such.

As quite a few people have said here, most folk don't actually like novelty fabrics. They're not that high a proportion of fabrics anyway, but if they're what you're paying attention to, they'll seem like more. Men do not need trucks on their quilts to prove that they're men, and are likely to feel like they've been treated as children. Children don't need them either, and teenagers in particular are likely to feel condescended to, or just misread. I've never used one of those fabrics in my life, and I've made lots of quilts for babies, children, and adults of all genders. I've backed a couple of baby quilts with animal prints, owls were very in one year, and that's it. I prefer to make the shapes with the piecing, so one baby quilt had fish, another had a big turtle, and the dinosaur quilt was really popular. It surprised me how many adults said they'd have had that dinosaur quilt like a shot, although one woman was shocked that it was going to a wee girl.

Menswear in the west is terribly dull and lacking in colour. While a man may not want to buck the trend and wear brighter colours, although many do, it's not the same when it comes to quilts. A quilt is something kept in your home, mostly, it's not subject to the same social pressures as clothes. There is no reason to deprive men of colour! Of course they like colour! Even men I know who wear extraordinary amounts of grey want colour in their quilts! (Blues and greens for that friend, and he hung the quilt on the wall.)

It's odd that people feel under pressure to limit colours for men, like those discussions about football teams or what have you. About thirteen years ago, I bought a beautiful teal green bathrobe for my then-partner, which was the only nice colour in a depressing selection of grey, black, and colours striped with dull grey. He was thrilled. His grandfather made a crack about how it was the wrong colour, and we both had to spend quite a while figuring out that he was referring to the traditional football teams for that part of Scotland. My ex did not have the slightest interest in football, and I doubt anyone of his generation or younger would have cared about having a green bathrobe. When I say "his generation", he's forty now.

I'd avoid making something that looks like it's aimed at babies or old ladies, and also avoid anything that could be described as "screamingly girly" or "princessy". *But I would avoid that for absolutely everyone.*

Do you know who has really strong views about avoiding pink? It's women. Women who grew up being told they had to wear pink because they were girls, who found that everything marketed to them was pink and also twice the price. My mother was obsessed with pink and wore little else, which seriously put me off it. I'd have been deeply embarrassed and upset if someone had given me a pink and purple quilt at any point in my childhood, especially my teen years. I've got friends whose kids have a pink craze, so I'd do a pink quilt if requested, but you know, it's not always the girls having the pink craze. You can have a long and happy career as a quilter avoiding default pink.

The only time I've had pink requested in a quilt, it was because that friend (who is not a woman!) wanted the bi pride colours, which are pink, purple and blue. I went for hot pink, added in black and some orange to the purple and blue, and found that I really liked it. The quilt does not read as girly, it reads as vibrant.

If there's a bit of pink in there but the quilt is generally multicoloured, most people won't notice. Same goes for pastels. Look at all the mixes of colours in Kaffe Fassett prints, for instance. As for florals, a lot of them are really old-fashioned, like trying to reproduce quilts from the century before last. Assume that the vast majority of people want something modern, not something that their grandmother might have considered old-fashioned. Whereas if you have some fabrics which are leafy, and some which are sort of a large scale chrysanthemum in surprising colours, nah, it's not really a big deal.

Just put together nice combinations of colours and have fun. If you're struggling with colour, try a group of colours which are close together, and then an accent colour that's different. I have a lap quilt which is all earthy tones, rust and olive green and ochre and black and brown, and then little bits of a jade which reads as turquoise there. Or that blue and green quilt I made for a friend, that's largely blues and greens, some purples, and little pops of orange.

If it's going to teenagers, and especially teenagers who've had a hard time, please make some rainbow quilts. LGBTI teenagers are disproportionately likely to experience abuse, homelessness, the care system and such. Getting a rainbow quilt means the world to many of them. Rainbow quilts are also pretty universally popular, so many people find them cheering.

Peckish, what is that pattern called? I LOVE it, especially done in pastels!

Good news - it's FREE! 😁 Here's a link to a tutorial. More good news - it's very simple and easy, no bias! I used jelly rolls for mine.

Thank you. It does look very easy!

It's probably just that men aren't expected to like or want a lot of color or pattern, so most of the market just go to solids/blenders/plaids for men's quilts.

In my experience guys had all kinds of tastes in fabric, but a pretty consistent preference for bold quilt patterns, like the zig-zig Peckish posted. The big impediment was more often colorblindness than some bias towards certain motifs or colors. If half the shop looks like shades of grey, then no wonder you just want simple prints and solids.