Fabric Shopping Bliss
The next best thing to fabric shopping for yourself is going along with someone else: You get all the joy of browsing, imagining the possibilities, and matching up prints with both a pattern and a color scheme. But the actual purchase doesn’t affect your wallet at all! My mom and I recently headed to her local quilt shop, Patched Works (in Elm Grove, WI), on a mission. She had redecorated my room after I moved out years ago, but recently decided to replace the plain white duvet with a more sophisticated (and more interesting) quilt. I was along as ”consultant.”
Here’s my room:
Note: I’m also adding in a small piece of unsolicited advice here to any future room decorators…DON’T choose the paint color first in a room. Find a rug, fabric, bedding, picture, etc. that you like first and then choose a paint color to match. It’s amazing how much trouble we’ve had matching various room décor pieces to this lavender color!
We’d gone in with a couple patterns in mind (two from past issues of Quilt!) We wanted a big block design-something with a more contemporary look than the traditional favorites-and something we could use some fairly calm fabrics with, since the rug in the room has a pretty busy pattern. Then I saw this pattern from Blue Underground, Posh Tot. Enlarged to a bed-size quilt, it would be perfect!
The next challenge was fabric. The wall color in the room is incredibly difficult to pinpoint. It’s in the purple family, but depending on light, time of day, and what you put with it, you could call it everything from gray to blue. We had a tiny paint swatch on a scrap of paper that we held up to fabrics, only to see how off we were! We found a couple options and then enlisted the help of Julie, Patched Works’ owner, who helped to push our boundaries. She introduced us to a great Kaffe Fassett woven stripe and a medium and dark purple shot cotton as coordinates for the main print. We came home with small cuts of the following fabrics to see how they looked with the actual walls.
Now here’s where quilting gets even more fun! Looking at the swatches in the bedroom, we decided that the lavender/gold batik wasn’t going to work for the main fabric. But…flip-flopping the fabrics around, we found (what we think is) the perfect combination: the dark purple shot cotton for the main fabric and the lavender/gold batik and woven stripe for the blocks (along with a narrow frame of the dark purple, not shown in the photo below). The deep, rich purple doesn’t have to ”match” the walls, and it will offer great contrast to the gold and lavender elsewhere in the room. I can’t wait to see this finished!
Lisa Swenson Ruble
About the Author: Lisa Swenson Ruble
I made my first quilt when I graduated from college and realized that I needed a hobby to fill all those hours that used to be dedicated to homework! Eleven years later, I'm completely addicted to quilting and thrilled that my day job as the managing editor for Quilt, Simple Quilts & Sewing and Quilt Almanac allows me to "play" with quilts and the friendly world of quilters!
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