Tips for creating a controlled scrappy quilt

Scrappy quilts are a fantastic way to use up fabric leftovers, but sometimes too much chaos can overwhelm your design. That’s where controlled scrappy quilts come in! By limiting color palettes, using coordinating fabrics, or adding structured layouts, you can enjoy the playful charm of scraps while creating a quilt that feels cohesive and polished. In this post, we’ll explore strategies for balancing variety and order, helping you make scrappy quilts that are vibrant, fun, and beautifully harmonious.

An example of controlled scrappy is the Electrolite quilt (pictured below). The fabric pairings below show my initial fabric pull for the quilt. (I didn’t keep all pairings as shown but most pairings stayed together). Each pair of fabrics represents a star in the quilt. A feature fabric is paired with a co-ordinating simpler print. But how do you co-ordinate? What I do is consider the colours in the feature fabric and pick a fabric that is in a colour contained in that feature fabric.

For example take the geometric grid like fabric in the top left. It contains dark grey, light grey, light blue and a bit yellow. In this case I’ve paired it with a yellow. I don’t want my second fabric to be competing with the first. so it is a print fabric that reads like a solid fabric. Similarly, I could have paired it with the dark grey to create a sharp contrast in the star (the lighter colours would not have given enough contrast).

Let’s look at another example. Take the pair in the bottom row, third from the left. The feature fabric contains some light pink, dark orange, black, medium grey and some aqua. It would look good and give sharp contrast when paired with an aqua, black or dark orange. In this case, I have paired it up with a dark orange that reads like a solid so as not to compete with the geometric print of the feature fabric. Below you will find the completed Electrolite quilt and can observe the pairings.

I hope this all makes sense and you found it helpful!