Five fabrics are lying on the table and they look right together. You pulled them one at a time, held each one against the others, put two back and found something better, and now the pile in front of you is genuinely pleasing. And then the pattern asks which one is fabric A, and the whole thing stalls. Liking a group of fabrics together and knowing what each one is going to do are two separate pieces of work, and only the first one is finished.
In a layered block the fabrics are not doing equivalent jobs. Some carry the design and some hold the space around it, and the difference matters long before the rotary cutter comes out. The fabric that forms the star at the centre is the one that has to be strongest, because that shape is what the eye goes looking for first and everything else in the block is arranged in relation to it. Give that role to something quiet and the block will read as a pleasant arrangement of pieces with no centre to it. The fabric at the outer edge sits at the opposite end of the same scale. It is the one that absorbs the most variety without anything suffering, which is why it is the sensible place to put the print you love but cannot quite control, or to use two or three near relatives instead of one fabric throughout.
Then comes the part that catches people out, and it is the reason this is worth doing on paper before it is done in fabric. In most layered blocks one of the fabrics turns up twice. It appears in the star at the centre and then again out in the ring around it, and because its pieces are small in both places, nothing about the drawing suggests it is the fabric you need most of. It is, though. Add up the pieces and it can want half again as much as anything else in the block.
The useful rule underneath all of this is that the yardage a fabric needs depends on how many times it reappears in the block, not on the size of the pieces it gets cut into. Small pieces in three different places consume more fabric than large pieces in one. Counting the appearances before you cut is what stops you running out of the fabric holding the whole design together at block seven of twelve, which is the worst moment to discover it, because the fabric that has to match is the one that is hardest to replace.
Here is how to settle the roles before anything is cut:
- Give every fabric a letter before you cut a single piece. Write the letters on sticky notes and put one on each folded fabric, or pin a labelled corner to each one. The letters are not a formality, they are the decision itself, and making them physical means you stop re-deciding halfway through a cutting session. A fabric with a letter on it has a job. A fabric in a nice pile is still a possibility.
- Count how many times each letter appears in the block, then multiply by the number of blocks. Go through the block drawing letter by letter and count every place that letter turns up, pieces and all. Then multiply, because a fabric appearing twice in a block appears twenty four times in a twelve block quilt, and that is the number that decides what you buy. Do this before you commit to any quantity, and buy the repeated fabric with room to spare rather than to the line.
- Choose by tonal value rather than by colour. What separates one shape from its neighbour is light against dark, or bright against muted, not one colour against another. A fabric can be exactly the colour you wanted and still fail the job it was given, because it sits at the same value as the fabric beside it and the boundary between them disappears. Our notes on value, colour and texture go further into how to see it.
- Save the strongest fabric for the role the eye finds first. Decide which shape in the block is meant to be seen before anything else, and put your boldest, deepest or most saturated fabric there. Everything else is then chosen in relation to that one rather than in competition with it, which is a far shorter conversation than trying to balance five fabrics all at once.
- Sort the fabrics into light, medium and dark piles before you begin. Three piles on the table, sorted by value and not by colour family, and the gaps announce themselves. Most of us find we have eleven mediums and nothing genuinely light, and it is considerably better to know that while the pattern is still on paper. Squinting at the piles, or photographing them and looking at the picture in black and white, both work when two fabrics refuse to declare which pile they belong in.
- Check what large prints do at the size you are cutting them. A print with a dominant motif behaves differently once it is cut into small pieces, and it can end up competing with the role it was given instead of performing it. Cut one piece at the finished size, lay it in position next to its neighbours, and look. Sometimes a large print belongs at the outer edge where it has room to be itself, and sometimes it wants to be replaced by something with a smaller repeat.
- At the points where several tips meet, press that allowance away from the neighbouring seam. Those junctions collect more layers than anywhere else in the block, and the way to keep them flat is to send each allowance in the opposite direction to the seam next to it, so the bulk is shared out rather than stacked in one place. It takes a moment at the ironing board and it is what lets the tips sit down properly instead of standing up in a small hard lump under the quilting.
Seeing the roles assigned out loud, with the fabrics being placed one at a time and moved when they do not hold their position, makes the method clearer than a diagram of the finished block:
Choosing fabrics you love is the part everybody enjoys, and it is not the same as deciding what each of them is going to do. One is a matter of taste and the other is a set of decisions about work, about which fabric carries the design and which one holds the quiet and which one you are going to need a great deal more of than you thought. Make those decisions with a pencil, while the fabric is still folded and everything is still possible, and the quilt starts to look like the one you had in mind rather than a version of it you had to settle for halfway through.
