Step One: Picking the Right Pink

This stripe print is 1639 Strawberry Splendor by Kris Lammers and Maywood Studio.
I have plans for this fabric. I have plans for a Starter Quilt Simple (SQS) project that uses striped fabric. Any stripe, not just this one, but this one's Pink... and it's Saturday... so Happy Pink Saturday.

We're going to take this project really slowly.
Step One is picking your fabric.

Select your Stripe. You saw that one coming right? Now, on the selvage edge of the fabric will be a row of colored dots with numbers in them. Looks like the printer used 16 different colors when printing my strawberry stripe.

These dots will help you match your fabrics, they isolate the colors so you can better see what, exactly, the colors are in the first place. We'll need a "light" I'll be using a Kona cotton (not pictured) that matches the color number 4.

Now I'm just pulling fabrics out of my stash for this next part, but you could just as easily stand in the fabric shop and sort through all their fabrics instead. I want to emphasise the color of the strawberries. You may have purple sea monsters or orange race cars you want to match, the principle is the same no matter the color. Find the fabrics that say "Strawberry" (or "sea monster" or "race car") to you.

Here's my pink/berry stash spectrum:

Not all of those are going to work with my stripe fabric, and for this project you only need a couple. Here are four from my stash that will work with my stripe:
Numbers 5, 7, and 11 of the color dots are the same tones as these four fabrics. The "honey comb" print is a definite, and then I need two more... not three more, but I'm still deciding. So we'll talk yardage next time. Tonal prints, I think, work better with this project but they don't have to be all the same color. If your purple sea monster swims in aqua algae with a yellow fish, feel free to select purples, aquas, and yellows. I'll illustrate other steps of this SQS project using other "colorways" as this tutorial progresses so you can visualize your options -- but today it's all about PINKS.

Other pink postings can be found through Beverly at How Sweet the Sound.

Congratulations to Dana, from the Stone Rabbit. She won my giveaway.