I am still such a newbie and leave a lot to be desired when it comes to color matching. Here's the problem, I want to make a quilt using shades of purple/lavender. Don't want to make the quilt the same color so I need help with choosing main fabric colors and accent colors. ANY help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

It's probably easiest if you pick a focus fabric first that has the colors you want - for instance a busy print with lots of color. Then you can pick fabrics in some of the other colors in the focus fabric. Each fabric doesn't have to match each other or have all the same colors, but it looks good if they kind of blend together as a whole.

For example, if you found a busy floral with purple/lavender, pink, yellow, green, you could then look for other prints that have some of the colors in them. Like maybe a print with yellow and pink, or green and purple. Vary the size of the prints, larger flowers, smaller flowers, leaves, scrolls, etc. You can get ideas by looking at the collections by some of the manufacturers. You can mix and match. I hardly ever make anything exclusively using one collection.

Hope this helps! :)

Sure does help. Thank you. I am very dull when it comes to colors and patterns. Quilting is really getting me out of my shell.

You're welcome! Here's an example of what I was trying to describe. You will notice many different size prints/colors, some only a couple of the colors, yet they work well together.


http://www.fatquartershop.com/store/...=&Search_Text=

Oh happy day! If I can't put something together with this site, I am in trouble. Thanks.

Hi!

Sometimes I use "school" colors as a guide. I know there are several schools with "purple & yellow" a local school is "purple & black" and one of my old schools was "purple & teal"


Somebody somewhere did the research and decided those colors looked good together - and usually, most school color combinations do look good.

Blue and goldm my school colors, scarlett and gold, USMC! Right you are!

Here's a fun little color wheel with lots of options to help you visualize some combinations. It's fun just to play with too.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Wow! That is awesome. Thank you.

You could also add some fabric that has green in it and some toward pink to broaden the range. There are "value finder" tools that help you read the value of a fabric.

One way is to lay the fabrics on a copy machine and make a black and white photocopy. You can see at a glance if your selection has a nice range of value (light, medium, dark) or if they all blend. Looking at it in black and white takes the "oh but isn't this color beautiful?" trick of the eye out of the equation.