Selecting Fabrics

Have you ever found yourself at a workshop, class or simply a sewing day with friends when you realized that the fabric you brought, is not right for the project you are working on?
Obviously we cant travel with our entire stash....so these situations require a little bit of planning.

A few of us are to meeting up soon to spend a day putting together some blocks for CQA's Big Quilt Bee. Here is how I decided what I would take.
1st up, fabrics that were created to celebrate Canada's 150th Birthday ( a required element in each block)

These fabrics have blacks, beige/yellows, greys, browns, & reds.  So, next I looked to see if I had a print that had all or most of those colours and dug out this floral.

then, I began pulling fabric scraps containing similar colours with a variety of texture and different sized prints. (many of these fabrics are oddly shaped, leftover bits from previous projects)

it is hard to see from this pile, but I have pulled from fairly light to fairly dark in each grouping.. Below, you can get the idea of how they look when they are sent off to play with each other

Since the blocks are created using a free pieced, sort of liberated technique, I figure if all the fabrics play nice together in the pile......the finished block should be cohesive and have eye appeal.....at least...that is my hope   :-)

A short video of how to make these "slab" blocks can be viewed here