What is your best advice for choosing fabric/patterns/colors for a quilt?

I'm taking a quilting class and need to choose five fabrics.What is your best advice for choosing fabric/patterns/colors for a quilt?
First I select my ';to-die-for'; fabric (often called a ';focus fabric). As in Harry Potter it's not so much that I select the fabric, but the fabric selects me! Then I choose fabrics with different patterns that have coordinating colors. Five is an easy number - if you are limited to three you have to be careful not to have to use the same fabric for two different elements that end up touching each other. I recommend selecting three patterns with coordinating colors: one large, one small, and one anywhere in the small to medium-sized range. Select your remaining two fabrics from ';plain'; fabric - kind of a small, all over pattern (such as blue with silver flecks). I almost never use solids because they don't interest me and you will find every single stitch shows in lighter solid fabrics. Have fun in your class!What is your best advice for choosing fabric/patterns/colors for a quilt?
My very best advice would be to go to your nearest quilt shop and ask one of the staff to help you out - they are almost always all quilters themselves and LOVE to help new quilters pick fabrics.


If that's not possible, here's my next-best advice. The most interesting quilts usually have fabrics in a range of scales (large to small), colors (hues like red, green,blue, etc.), values (light to dark) and textures (solid-color or almost to textures that look like burlap or lace).


One approach is to first choose a 'focus fabric', which should be a print with at least several different colors in it. If the quilt is earmarked for a specific room, pick your focus fabric accordingly, otherwise just pick something you'll enjoy working and living with. Along one of the selvedges are groups of dots of different colors - these are all the different colors that were actually used in printing that fabric (you'll be surprised how many there are sometimes). You can use those dots as guides to help you choose coordinating fabrics. For example, say your focus fabric is an iris print in purple, yellow, and green on a white background, and it has dots of light, medium and dark purple, light and medium yellow, and 3 shades of green in a medium to dark range.


You could use a dark purple print, a light yellow print, a medium green print, and a white-on-white print as your fifth fabric. Look at your fabrics from at least 3-5 feet away when choosing - they look very different than they do up close. And don't worry if colors don't match exactly - it makes for a livelier quilt if they don't. In fact, a common sign of a 'first' quilt is that it's too 'matchy-uppy' (now THERE'S a technical quilting term for you!).


Most of all, relax and have fun!
Light, medium and dark are the usual categories.





Choose a few of each and lay them together to see what you like.





The dark colors will pop and the lighter colors will recede. Medium helps to balance the two opposites.