3 Ideas to Find the Perfect Color Palette

Who of us hasn't gone to the quilt shop and needed help putting together fabrics that will make a quilt go from ho-hum to WOW? Choosing fabrics and colors can be such a struggle, one we've all been through at some point in our quilting journey. But it doesn't have to be.

Though I'm certainly not an expert at choosing colors, there are a few tools I find extremely helpful in finding a color palette for my quilts. Let's take a look, starting with the easiest.

Use the Color Scheme in a Favorite Fabric

This idea is so simple! We all have favorite fabrics in our stash, full of beautiful colors, those that really speak to us - otherwise we wouldn't have bought them. Well, it's time to pull those out for color inspiration! That's what I did when choosing the color palette for Zen Garden.

Though that floral print in the upper left corner is a really old print, I just love the warm, rich colors in it, and pulled fabrics using those colors as my inspiration. I tend to look at the colors in the print, but fabric manufacturers make it even easier by printing color palette dots in the selvage. 

Once a group of fabrics are put together, the initial inspirational fabric can be included in the final quilt, or not - it's your choice. I recently found the fabric seen above at a local LQS and love the palette, but I'm really not interested in using the fabric in a quilt. Right now, I'll file this palette idea away for another time.

Note: when fabric shopping, if you see a color palette you like, but maybe not the fabric print, take a picture of the selvage palette. Then you can start building your own personal library of color palettes to draw upon for future inspiration.

Use a Pre-designed Color Palette

Just as palettes are on fabric, an already made color palette found online is another great option. There are a ton of websites, some of them better than others, devoted to pre-designed color palettes.  A couple of my favorites are:

Coolors.co

This site is fun to use - just hit the space bar to generate a new and different palette - tons of palettes to be inspired by.

 

Shutterstock.com/colors

This particular page of their site offers a wide range of colors to start with. Choose one, then choose monochrome, analogous, contrast, or triad for additional colors that play well with the chosen color.

Or, choose any of the 101 pre-designed color palettes that Shutterstock offers - there's plenty here to get excited about. This one, called Grunge Graffiti, is another I'll add to my palette library.

If your skills are a bit more advanced in using the color wheel, then create a palette using Adobe's Color Wheel. Settings for a palette theme include analogous, monochromatic, triad, complimentary, split complimentary, double split complimentary, square, compound, shades, and custom. That's a lot to play with!

And one site that's a particular favorite is iColorPalette.com. Clicking on 'Color Palettes' in the header bar reveals a list of pre-designed palettes by color or by theme. I love the theme palettes, as there are pages and pages of palettes, all based off of pictures - what better color inspiration is there than a picture!

Pull Colors from a Photo

As seen above, pictures are always a great way to find color palettes. And again, there are a ton of sites that will pull out the colors from a photo, providing an instant color palette. As a member of Canva.com, under 'colors', there's four places to get ideas: a palette generator, palette ideas, color wheel, and the meaning behind colors. All do a nice job, but the palette generator only returns four colors, not five like most of the others. I was a bit disappointed that the generator did not return the red from this picture.

  

But over at iColorPalette.com, the uploaded image returned a beautiful color palette that included the red, which I saved for future use.

Coolors.co/image-picker can also make a palette from a photo, with an option of increasing or decreasing the number of colors in the palette. 

Adobe.com/create/image-gradient will also pull colors from a photo, though you get to choose which colors to pull by moving the circles around. For me, that's a bit more work!

Isn't that a lot of great resources to use in choosing color palettes for quilts? Fabric shopping will be so much easier now with a color palette in hand, and the confidence to choose fabrics in colors that go well together. Start making it a habit of creating and collecting color palettes for beautiful quilts. And if you know of more color palette sites out there or have any favorites, let us know in the comments.

Happy Quilting!