Do These Fabrics “Go” Together?

I don’t know how old you are, but when I was a teenager, we used to “go together”. This meant stuff like you passed notes to each other in class, maybe held hands on the sly at recess. In high school it meant you traded class rings, went on dates only with each other, and everybody knew you were not available. When my daughter became a teenager, I was summarily informed that you don’t “go together” anymore, you “go out”. “Go where?” I would ask, only to be sighed at. “What do you call it when you want to go somewhere? You can’t say you’re going out, because you’re already doing that…” More sighs.

Sometimes, at the quilt shop, we are asked if fabrics “go together”. Hmmm, I wonder what the real question is? Fabric manufacturers create fabric collections, which usually contain a number of coordinating prints. These lines also often come in several color families. They are a set, so to speak. Obviously, a set of fabrics from one line goes together. But what about combining fabrics from different lines or even different manufacturers? Is this legal? Will the quilting police come and take you away if you do this? Or, most importantly, will the finished quilt look good?

The answer is yes! (Except for the part about the quilting police…) We try hard at the shop to put together fabric groupings that “go together”, even if they didn’t “come together”. After all, what is a quilt anyway? A bunch of fabrics blended together in an artful way to create one harmonious piece. The first step in creating a quilt is to see in your mind’s eye what a blending of many fabrics will look like in the finished work. If that is difficult for you, or too time consuming, take heart! We love to do this part. And we promise that any collection you see on our site “goes together”. Once you quilt them together, you could even consider them married!