Traditionally, quilters struggle with their fabric choices when making a quilt -- sometimes all the way through to adding the binding! Build your self-confidence in choosing fabric for your quilts using this fun and informative pattern. The lessons will help you to look at fabrics a different way. You will create a series of paste-up blocks using fabrics from your stash to make a useful resource book and then make the quilt to enforce your learned skill with choosing fabrics that will result in eye-popping quilts.

You Will Need The Following Materials For The Exploring Fabric Choices Workshop In A Bag Exercises
The fabrics listed below are very specific to successfully completing the workshop
Colors and Types Of Fabrics Needed For Your Paste-Ups:
• White
• Red
• Black
• Values: Fabric (The hardest things to pick are true lights and true darks.)
- very light
- medium light
- medium
- medium dark
- dark
• A graded selection of five (5) monochromatic fabrics (Choose one color, i.e.: red, or blue, or green, etc.)
• One (1) Ugly fabric

Each piece of fabric from the list should be at least a fat eighth -or- fat quarter in size. Vary your fabric selection so you have solids, prints (large and small), stripes, plaids, batiks, focus fabrics, brights, florals, geometrics, ethnics, monochromatic blenders, etc. Use what you normally use in your quilts. The fabrics don’t need to be coordinated – remember, you’re going to play.

Backing and Batting:
• 6 yards of backing fabric
• 1 3/4 yards of Hobbs Heirloom 80% cotton/20% poly batting

Instructions for making batting blocks to use when constructing blocks can be found inside pattern envelope with instructions for the quilt.

The most important part of choosing fabrics for this quilt is to consider the value of the fabrics that you choose. Value is the lightness or darkness of the fabric. It is the value of your fabric choices that will make a remarkable difference in your quilts.

This quilt is an exercise in playing with value to create a quilt with dramatic results.When choosing fabric for a quilt, I always begin with a focus fabric that I use the colors to pull the additional fabric. My focus fabric in the sample is my border fabric, which has a little touch of gold in it.

You will need 10* fat quarters of fabric to make this quilt, divided in value order (do not use a ¼ yard cut of fabric):
• 2 light fabrics (one should be white or very pale off-white, plain or print)
• 2 medium light fabrics
• 2 medium fabrics
• 2 medium-dark fabrics
• 2 dark fabrics (a solid dark works best for your very darkest fabric – I used black, but you can use navy, maroon, forest green, deep purple, etc.)

**You will need 1/2 yard of your darkest fabric to use as sashing between the blocks and to frame the blocks.
• 1/2 yard of fabric for the interest sashing strip
• 1 1/4 yard of Border fabric (I used my focus fabric here)

Other Items Needed
• Sewing machine a 1/4" foot with a guidebar
(If you don’t have one, see your local machine dealer for the correct one for your machine)
• Neutral thread for piecing
• Clover-brand fork pins for pinning butted seams and ball head pins for accurate piecing
• Seam ripper
• Rotary cutter and mat