It can be tricky to use large prints for patchwork. It’s so easy to buy those luscious fabrics, but sometimes not so easy to use them effectively.

Scrap quilts are what I make most, and I’m pretty determined to use the stash I’ve accumulated over 33 years of quilting. So I’ve devised a couple of ways to use fabric that doesn’t lend itself readily to patchwork quilts. The fabric above is a good example. There is nothing wrong with the fabric, but when you cut it up, here’s what happens.

Now it’s a bunch of patches (these were 1-1/2″ x 2-1/2″) that hardly seem related. They’ve lost their cohesiveness.

If you pull four random patches and put them with four of another fabric, you get a block that doesn’t quite work.

Those four patches forming the windmill don’t seem related to each other. But there’s an easy trick to fix this problem.

Sort the patches so they’re in groups that look alike. Now you can see that the patches in each group relate to each other. They seem like siblings again.

I took four similar patches and made this block, and it makes more sense than the block above.

Here’s another one. The pink flowers help to tell the story and hold the patches and the block together.

With a fabric such as this, you’ll still end up with lots of odd patches that don’t seem to fit anywhere, like the ones just above. The areas of very light and very dark make them really tough to use successfully. And that’s when I turn to another one of my favorite strategies.

I flip that fabric over and I use the wrong side.

It looks like a time-worn treasure, a slightly faded print from yesteryear.

It’s still a very active print with a lot of interest, but it lets the windmill fabrics shine. If you made a boatload of these blocks using the wrong side of the large-scale fabric for the background, I guarantee they would look amazing.

Most of my scrap quilts have some fabrics used wrong side up. I love the adventure of it. I love the discovery of how the wrong side plays unexpectedly well. People are shocked when I tell them this, and I get it. It took me a long time to get over feeling like the wrong side was, well, wrong.

But when you realize that what the fabric does and how it acts is more important than which side is used, it’s easy to embrace the wrong side. I challenge you to cut up some big prints and give these two easy tricks a try.


I sew on HQ Stitch, one of the best domestic sewing machines around. Get a free one when you buy a Handi Quilter longarm now through August 20.