- 1). Decide on a color scheme for your quilt top. Many people consider a scrap quilt as being without a planned color scheme, and this can certainly be true in some quilts. Other quilts have a basic plan on which the fabric choices rely. Choose all jewel tones, various pastels, earth tones or rainbow bright colors to make a scrap quilt with a more planned effect. Use the focus fabric technique and find one fabric with multiple colors and choose every quilt fabric on the basis of its "playing well" with the focus fabric. Or make a truly random quilt and use every fabric that you can find.
- 2). Purchase fabrics with a large variety of print sizes. A scrap quilt that consists of fabrics with little flowered prints and no other shapes is a very uniform and boring looking quilt top, no matter how many colors it employs. Choose fabrics with large-scale prints, tone-on-tones, batiks and medium prints, as well as the classic small florals or figural designs.
- 3). Consider the value of each fabric's color when adding it to the design. Many quilt designs rely not so much on color as value, which refers to light, medium and dark fabrics. You can mix together dark blues, browns and greens, but keep the light blues away from this group to make the most effective quilt block pattern.
- 4). Find a large variety of sources for scrap quilt fabrics. Search thrift stores for used clothing that you can cut into scraps. Look for handmade skirts that people have donated for large expanses of cotton fabric. Search newsgroups and quilt websites for people willing to exchange fabric squares. The Millennium Quilt craze of 1999 was fueled for the most part by people trading fabrics online to collect the 2000 different squares that they needed. Many scrap quilters still trade fabric packs to get a larger variety for their quilts.
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