Quilting fabrics can be found anywhere. You can use old clothes and other fabric items to make the patches of the quilt. You can even use old stuffed animals as quilting fabrics for quilts that might remind you of your childhood. These are great places to find quilting fabric, but sometimes you might want to make a quilt that doesn’t use older material as the quilting fabric. If you’d like to make a quilt out of brand new quilting fabrics, then you still have many options to choose from. Lots of retail stores sell fabric that you can use for your next quilt. Many fabric stores even sell quilting fabric squares that you can use.

Many of the quilting fabric squares that you find at fabric stores will come in sets that are called charm packs. These charm packs work together to make a whole quilt. Sometimes the quilting fabric squares are related by color, and sometimes they have a common theme that helps pull all of the squares in the quilt together.

Some of the themes that can be found in the charm pack quilting fabrics are fairy tales, flowers, cartoon characters, romance, and holidays. Often the fairy tale quilting fabric charm packs will use each panel to tell one piece of the story. You might be able to find many of the traditional European fairy tales that were made popular by the Brothers Grimm, and you can also find many Asian fairy tales that American quilt makers may not be familiar with. Many of these Asian fairy tales are depicted in the quilting fabric squares using the sparse aesthetic qualities that are popular in Japan, China, and many other Asian countries.

Dick and Jane are popular cartoon characters that have several of their own quilting fabric charm packs. These squares show a young girl and boy participating in idealized childhood activities, such as riding bikes, playing on a see-saw, and holding stuffed animals. Dick and Jane are popular characters from the basal readers written by Zema Sharp from the 1930s to the 1970s. You might also be able to find less traditional cartoon characters that you can use as quilting fabric too. When you’re shopping online and at retail stores for quilting fabrics, you might want to keep in mind the cartoon characters that your children like, or even some of the characters that you enjoyed in your childhood.

Regardless of whether you decide to pull your quilting fabrics from old items around the house, or you decide to purchase new quilting fabric squares that come in charm packs, making your own quilt is a rewarding experience. Often, charm packs don’t include all of the quilting fabric that you need for the entire quilt. It depends on the size of the quilt that you want to make. So using charm packs for your source of quilting fabric doesn’t mean that you don’t have plenty of creative license. You can use any kind of other fabrics that you’d like to use in the construction of the quilt. The charm pack quilting fabrics are there to create a theme, to pull the quilt together, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use your own taste and individual personality when you’re making the quilt.
By Bud

About the author:

BUD is a fabric expert and fabric sourcer / supplier / vendor whose company, Atlantis Fabrics Fabrics-textiles.com, offers fabrics like patchwork madras, organic cotton, madras, cotton prints, silk fabrics, linen, jute, bamboo, knits and all kinds of fabrics, sourced directly from their own warehouse in India, and available right here online at http://store.fabrics-textiles.com.