Picking fabric - the scale of it all

I wish I could take credit for putting together the Nocturne fabrics, but I cannot. This was a Moda collection. There were a few pieces in the collection that are not in my quilt - the shop where I had bought them did not have the entire line. There was one piece they had but I did not like it at all

Breaking down each color in the collection into groups demonstrates what I think is one of the most important aspects of putting fabric together and that is SCALE. By scale I mean the size of the design - small, medium, large. Along with the size of the prints the other big factor is of course COLOR. In this group of Nocturne navy background fabrics, you can see how the size or scale of the prints goes from large to small left to right. There is also the creams, grays, and medium blues which pick up the other colors used in the collection.

Here is the gray group. You can see that the large gray circle piece is not the same gray as the other pieces in the collection so it is not so matchey matchey.

The creams

And the only two medium blue the shop had.

Another thing to look at with this collection is the use of geometic shapes. Whether it be a stripe, zig zags, circles, etc. a geometic adds an element to keep the group from looking flat and boring.

Here is a small group of blues I put together. I think there are too many small prints or tone on tone fabrics in this group and what's with the yellow and turquoise fabric?

I am just making a baby quilt so I am going with what I have collected. This is how the top turned out

I think the zig zag fabric is too light and again too many small prints. Is it the end of the world? No. I will quilt it and somebody will love it.

It makes me rethink these other groups I have put together for baby quilts. Looking at these again I am basically dealing with one main color for each group and not four colors like the Nocturne collection. When a collection is being designed it is much easier to evenly distribute the colors across the entire collection than to go out to the marketplace and try to find fabric that would work this way! I have a group of whites, grays, and black that I plan on paring with these stripe sets - I will talk about those next.

Here are the black, gray and whites I have cut from my stash. It contains all kinds of prints including text and geometrics

Here are the small prints pulled out of the group

The mediums

And the large

An interesting thing is just because a fabric is a medium in this group doesn't mean it can't be a small in another group. Here is the snowflake fabric with a small and a large print which makes the snowflake a medium print

Keeping the snowflake fabric and paring with two different fabrics changes the snowflake fabric into being the small print

I hope this has helped in someway. You need to just mix it up a bit! Have fun!