The Tessa QAL Week 1 - Choosing your Fabric

Now down to business - picking your fabrics. This post will give you a few tips and several examples of different fabric combinations.

Before you start, I recommend that you print off the free coloring sheet I have in my shop. Even if you already know which fabrics you are planning to use, it is useful to write in the fabric names on the coloring sheet to help keep everything straight.

Fabric Requirements

Edit: Thank you Jeannine for pointing out that you can make the baby size with only fat quarters. Fabric C and H will not work with 1/4 yard cuts, but they will work with fat quarters!

I would love for this pattern to be 100% fat quarter friendly, but fat quarters just aren't big enough. You CAN use fat quarters for any of the fabrics that are listed as 1/4 yard, so if you want to supplement a fat quarter bundle with a few 1/2 yards, that will work.

Fabric Placement

One of the great things about this pattern is that it lets you show off larger scale prints.

Tip: There is one trick to remember here that will make sure you larger scale prints work in your quilt - if you have a print where a seam will be particularly noticeable (stripes for example), use it somewhere in fabrics A-E for the baby size and A-G for the lap or twin size (the colored fabrics below).

Why? Look at the diagrams in the pattern - the fabrics that go this direction have fewer seams. Notice in the quilt below (ignore the fact that the quilt is upside down, oops!) several of the prints that are running from the bottom left of the quilt to the top right of the quilt have patterns where seams would be more obvious.

Put a Bird on It Tessa Quilt - Kitchen Table Quilting

An All-Solids Quilt

Solids also work REALLY well in this pattern.

The Tessa Quilt in Solids - Kitchen Table Quilting

Because there are no patterns to disrupt, the seams are basically invisible and this looks like a super difficult quilt pattern (but it's not!). All of these colors are Michael Miller Cotton Couture and the colors are: Glass, Bottle, Fresh, Lilypad, Mermaid, Saturn, Ocean, Slate, Juniper, Clover, Leaf, Turf, and Dusk. The white is Soft White and the gray is Pewter.

It can be a little tricky to find a shop that has the full range of Cotton Couture in stock - Hawthorne Supply Co. seems to be a good one. If you know of another shop that stocks a large selection of these fabrics, please let me know in the comments!

Quilt Examples

Here are a few examples of the quilt mocked up in different fabric combinations. As of the time I am writing this post, I haven't started picking my fabrics yet - I will be sharing my selection process in my Instagram stories this week and will save it in my story highlights.

Here are a few things to take note of in these examples:

Fabric O is distinct from all of the other fabrics and the background fabric (there is less of a distinction in the solid quilt below - I think this one still works but it is a little trickier).
There is a balance of color and value - try not to have two colors that are very similar in color right next to each other. You will also want to have darker and lighter valued fabrics evenly distributed throughout the quilt.