Quilting, Step 1 - Choosing Your Fabrics

I may have mentioned that I'm interested in quilting. I recently signed up for a quilting class and I'm in the process of making my first quilt. Last night was the first time I had the opportunity to lay out all 16 quilt blocks to select my arrangement of blocks for the quilt top. I have to say, I was simply amazed. I'll write more about it (with photos!) in a later post. For this post, I want to start at the very beginning.

The first step in quilting (once you have a pattern, I guess, which I did) is to select your fabrics. This is just as much fun as selecting your yarn for a new knitting project.

For this project I had to select an "inspiration fabric", 5 fabrics each of two different colors (I chose blue and green, which are my two favorite colors), as well as fabric for the border and the backing of the quilt. Here are the fabrics I chose.


Beginning at the right, we have the fabric for the backing, followed by the blue and green for the borders (I decided to use two distinct colors for the border - to mirror the colors in the quilt). In fact, the blue and green fabrics for the border look almost identical to the dark blue and dark green in the second set of fabrics, but they aren't the same. It just looks that way in the picture.
The fabric above those three is the "inspiration" fabric for the quilt.

The second set of fabrics is the 5 green fabrics and the 5 blue fabrics I selected for this quilt.

I have to say, I'm very happy with the fabrics I chose for this quilt.