For the past couple years, I’ve been in love with solids. If you want your pattern to appeal to me, make the cover quilt in solids. So when I saw the Conversation Sampler, I knew I was going to have a blast choosing fabric for it.
Photo from AnneMarie Chany.
A few years ago, I subscribed to a Kona solids club with Stash Fabrics. Each month I got a beautiful bundle of fabric, and at the end of the year I had every color in the collection. When I first found this quilt along, I knew I’d want to use my Kona solids and had to convert from the colors in the pattern to Kona if I wanted a similar look. Which I totally did!
So I pulled out my Kona stacks and started doing some rough comparisons. Let me give you a disclaimer right now: I know using the colors from something printed on paper isn’t the best way to match fabrics. But it’s what I had, so here’s how I did it.
Start with Easy Things First
Some of the color names in Kaleidoscope Wovens were the same as Kona solids. So anywhere there was a match in name, I pulled the fabric to see if I liked it. If I did, it went into the project pile. If I didn’t, I looked in the stash for something that suited me better. There were only a couple easy matches like this, but here’s what it looked like:
Coral, lime, and the background fabrics had the same name across the fabric lines. These were no brainers to match.
Now the Hard Part
Most of the colors don’t have the same name across the fabric lines. No worries. I pulled out my Kona solids color card and started guessing. Some of the color names in the Kaleidoscope SKUs matched Kona names. Once I thought I was getting close on a match, I would head over to the pattern cover image to see how “close” I was getting. This is the final list of Kona fabrics I chose for this project:
After some creative guessing, I ended up with a list of Kona fabrics pretty close to the original pattern.
Oh, What a Beautiful Rainbow!
Once I had all the fabric pulled out and stacked in order, I was pretty happy with how this quilt was going to turn out.
My final fabric pull for the Conversation Sampler quilt.
And now that I’m settled in the new house, it’s time to get into the studio to finish rows one and two before the third row is introduced this Friday.
Quilt on!