The secret about blender quilt fabric
Using Blenders
When you visit our quilts shop and fabric store in St. George, Utah (we love living in St. George BTW), you'll notice that among the many aisles of fabric cabinets that we have divided our store into fabric sections.
When we first opened our doors, many gracious customers would express their ideas on what we could do to improve the layout of our quilt store. Arranging fabric in color gradients, blenders, prints, themes, etc. made the top of the list of recommendations frequently.
Our store location is conveniently right off of the I-15 freeway and welcomes many visitors passing through town. Our customers would provide a perspective that they've seen visiting fabric stores across the country and even internationally! One of these recommendations was to divide the store by organizing our bolts of quilting fabric in sections.
Through trial and error, and some luck, we're very happy with our store's layout. Watch our video below to see how we've arranged our store and the thousands of bolts of fabric.
One of the most popular features of arranging our quilt store by fabric families and themes. When you walk into our store, you'll immediately notice that we have beautiful colorwalls of fabric arranged in a blending spectrum -- we call these fabrics blenders. This arrangement is a spectacular way to visualize the subtle differences in color tone and tint. Most quilts will use multiples of the same color family, such as dark green, muted green, mottled green, etc.
When you can visualize fabrics as blenders, you can gain the foresight of how the colors will look together or how one color will really stand out amongst the others. When you are making a quilt that requires 5 blue fabrics, you have a choice of five different shades light-through-dark blue to choose from. This also works if you want similar blues but prefer different textures with each fabric selection.
This adds a lot of character and interest to your quilts. Having a large range of colors to choose from helps when working on a project from your stash (who actually uses their fabric stash? 😉) and you don't have enough of a specific fabric, have a miscut or need a binding to match. Colors are fashionable and tones change often throughout the years and make it hard to match existing or older projects.
When you visit our quilt store in St. George, you'll find that our staff is very knowledgeable in putting fabrics together, finding colors that meet your criteria and knowing what fabric we have on hand which, is quite a feat when we carry 8,000 bolts in-store! As you browse through the blenders on our shelves, we hope you'll gain inspiration and motivation to find the right quilt to use blenders.