Welcome to Week 1 of the LoriAnn Quilt sew along! This week is all about selecting fabric for your quilt. This quilt is perfect for using precuts or putting a dent in your scrap hoard. Here are some helpful tips for pulling fabric for your quilt.
Choosing Fabrics for LoriAnn Quilt
Selecting fabric for the LoriAnn quilt is fairly straightforward and simple. To get the most out of the design, you’ll want to make sure you have good contrast between the three components of the quilt. There is the background, accent squares, and scrappy squares. You can play around with value placement, but you’ll want to keep three distinct tones to emphasize the design. For example, you could have a light background, dark accent squares, and mid-tone scrappy squares. You could also do a dark background, mid-tone accent squares, and light-tone scrappy squares. You can move the values around however you like; you’ll just want to make sure you have three distinct values.
To see the value of your fabrics, try looking at them through a black-and-white filter on your phone. This makes it much easier to see the contrast between fabrics.
This pattern works great for prints or solids! If you’re planning to use prints, there are a few things you’ll want to consider. If having fabrics be upside down would bother you, you'll want to stay away from directional prints. Also, because the pieces are smaller, you may not want to use larger-scale prints. Personally, I think it’s fun to see a large-scale print chopped down into smaller pieces; it creates an almost abstract feel. If that’s not your jam, stick with blenders and smaller-scale prints.
Create a LoriAnn Quilt Mockup
We love the quilt mock-up tool for visualizing quilts! This tool allows you to easily drop in images of fabric into the mock-up. It then populates them into the pattern. You can drag and drop to shuffle things around. There are a ton of patterns available, and more are being added all the time. Check out the mock-up tool here to play around with fabrics and mock up your LoriAnn quilt. *We’re not responsible for the hours spent playing with this tool!
Our friend Remy built this tool. If you enjoy using it, please consider donating to their Ko-fi to help them keep it available for free!
Ultimately, just have fun! This quilt is meant to be a little chaotic and random. Don’t overthink and just go for what feels good to you.
If you’re still feeling stuck, here are a few examples to help give you some ideas.
LoriAnn Quilt Color Inspo
Light Background, Dark Accent, Mid-Tone Squares
Dark Background, Light Accent, Mid-Tone Squares
Mid-Tone Background, Dark Accent, Light to Mid-Tone Squares
If you want to take the easy route, check out our LoriAnn quilt kits here! We have so much fun putting these together and tried to create something to fit a range of vibes.
We’ll see you next week when we get started on cutting!
