How to Shop for Solids Online
Solids have become one of my favorite fabric options for my quilts, but matching colors online can feel next to impossible. Let’s look at some tips for making online fabric shopping a bit easier.
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Whether you love solid fabrics as accents to your gorgeous, scrappy prints, or you’re a very modern quilter who uses almost exclusively solids, it can be dang hard to shop for solids online (and maybe even harder to find a good selection in person). To help with this conundrum, here are a few of my best tips for confidently ordering solids online:
Pick a Brand
Decide which brand of solids is going to be your “main squeeze,” and invest in their color card. Personally, I’m obsessed with Paintbrush Studio’s Painter’s Palette Solids. They have a rich spectrum of 210 colors (with the 42 new colors added Summer 2022), and they are thick like Kona but soft like Bella. (Yes, we carry the full line here at String & Story, and you can order a color card here)
Once your color card arrives, cut it up to make it more useful. Yes, it’s a bit of work, and yes, it feels counterintuitive to cut up a brand new purchase, but it is SO MUCH EASIER to match colors when you can lay swatches on top of yardage to confirm the color or over prints to color match.
We have a magnet board of all the PBS solids in the String & Story on Main shop, and it is a wildly popular tool with everyone who comes in. You can follow my instructions to make a magnet board of your own in this blog here.
Embrace Bundles
Fat quarter bundles have long been a favorite for collecting a useable piece of each print in a collection, but they are also wildly useful for collecting a curated selection of curated solids. Even if you make a magnet board like I suggested above, picking out a dozen or more solids that go together can be a bit of a headache. Instead, of starting from scratch, fat quarter bundles can come to the rescue:
If your quilt pattern is written for fat quarters, buying solids is as easy as finding a bundle you like with at least as many fat quarters as you need (extras means you have some color inspiration for your background and binding!)
Pre-curated bundles can be a “shopping list.” If you prefer to buy yardage but want to make sure your colors coordinate, use the color list from a bundle as a way to narrow down which colors you want
Ask for Help
If you’re a creature of habit like me, you probably patronize a relatively small number of fabric shops, both in person and online. Get to know your local shop owner, and don’t be afraid to slide into their DMs or Inbox and ask for help with colors, especially if you’re needing to color match with some fabrics you already purchased from them. We’ll do our best to make good suggestions that coordinate with your project, and if you need to match a print we don’t carry, we can always point you toward the color cards.
Resources
Shop our patterns and books here— All of which are perfect for solids!