What are Low Volume Fabrics and How Do I Use Them?

What are low volume fabrics and how can you use them to make a beautiful quilt? All your questions are answered here.

I LOVE sewing quilts with low volume fabrics. To me, they are modern and traditional, using lots of fabrics that don’t necessarily match, but look beautiful as a whole. We’re not starting something new, just borrowing ideas from early quilters who cut fabric pieces from clothing, sheets, and even flour sacks, piecing them together in beautiful patterns.

I used lots of low volume fabrics in my free Baby Heart Log Cabin Quilt Pattern.

What are Low Volume Fabrics?

The term ‘low volume’ usually refers to cream or white fabrics with a small or geometric design. Even though the print has a secondary design, it still ‘reads’ neutral so you can use it as a background.

Dots, grids, and text prints are all staple low volume fabrics. Low volume fabrics are most effective when lots of different prints are mixed together.

You can build up your collection of low volume neutral fabrics by buying fat quarters, yardage, and even bundles that are curated for you by fabric shops and manufacturers.

I use both cream and white low volume fabrics, and I don’t mind a just a little color sprinkled in. Can you see how the quilt below has bits of color in the neutral areas?

Now what about the rest of your quilt? You are going to need more than just low volume neutrals.

Mix Low Volume Fabrics with Other Print Fabrics that ‘Read’ Solid

In the color world we may say that low volume fabrics ‘read’ pale gray or cream. That means what we predominantly notice the neutral color from a distance.

Colorful print fabrics can read a solid color from far away even though they have other colors included in the pattern. You have to practice a little to identify how different prints and sizes read.

How to Identify Color Groupings

Look at each fabric in your stash carefully and consider this:

• When you cut your fabric will all of the pieces still read the same color?
• Is the print so large that the cut up pieces will now read different colors?

Large prints that have lots of different colors are beautiful, but I save them for the backs of my quilts (where I can appreciate them better). Small prints that keep their color personality even after you cut them up make the best low volume quilts.

Let’s practice choosing fabrics with my green stack below.

If I wanted to put together a selection of fabrics that read green (not turquoise) I would make a stack. Looking at only the edge of the fabrics, I can make a pretty good guess what the pieces will look like cut up.

The large floral on top is beautiful, but it has so many colors and probably none of my cut up pieces would read green. The second fabric reads more turquoise than green. My best picks are the prints in the middle. That cute zig zag print is an obvious ‘no’ because even though I remember it’s mostly green (that’s why I put it on the green shelf) – I can’t trust that it will look green when I cut it up – it looks orange on the edge.

Pro Tip: Don’t choose too many color families for one quilt

It’s going to be busy enough with all the scrappy-ness that comes from the many different fabrics you are using. The quilt above has just 3 color families: neutral, navy, and pink.

Scrappy low volume quilts like this one are a great way to mix in fabrics that you have leftover from other projects or ‘ugly’ fabrics that don’t match with anything else.

When I’m mixing ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ fabrics, I try to have at least 90% of the fabrics read my ‘target color’ and then the remaining few can be ‘wildcard’ fabrics.

The wildcard fabrics like the too-light butterflies in the pink section above don’t match the same deep color value as the other pink fabrics, but overall the pink section still works. The lighter butterfly fabric sparkles – it makes the quilt look like glitter! Oh, yeah, that’s why I call it a Glitter Quilt. 🙂

Full Glitter Quilt Example

• See all of my low volume Glitter Quilt patterns so far here.

Pro Tip: I use strip piecing to save time and never cut a single square.

• See all my free quilt patterns here.

xoxo,