Patriotic Salvage Mystery -- early prep

To make some of the prep work for the mystery quilt on the upcoming long weekend a bit easier, I thought I would give you some ideas of how to choose your fabrics.

The 3 fabrics you see just above will be what I plan to use.  These are fairly old fabrics from my stash, they are not quite the RED And WHITE of the Canadian Flag, but this is what I have.  In this case the dark brick red is going to be my main, or background fabric, with the pink and very light polka dot as the two contrast fabrics.

Here are a few more variations of fabric choices.  As you can see you do need to choose three fabrics for this project, each fabric should be quite a high contrast from the other two.  Choose either the light or the dark for your main or background; with the middle or medium fabric as your "important" contrast.

Your secondary contrast will be using the least amount of fabric, say in the above choices, the blue is the secondary contrast, so you will use less than a fat quarter, the white may be your background and will use the most fabric, probably about 3/4 of a meter, and the burgundy is your first contrast and will use about 1/3 to 1/2 meter.

This last choice of fabrics might be an interesting christmas choice. So keep in mind that as long as you have three strongly contrasting fabrics they should work very well in this project.  Just because it is called Patriotic Salvage, doesn't mean you have to go with these colours -- perhaps dark blue, mauve and a very light yellow -- wouldn't that be a pretty one. 
Also for those wanting to make this a scrappy adventure I would suggest that for the maximum effect o this pattern that you should stick with not just the choice of light to dark, but if you choose as your background say light blues, you should stick to perhaps a variety of light blues all very closely related, the same goes for the other contrast fabrics, if one is a red contrast, make sure that you use a number of similar reds in the positions called for.

I would also like you to consider fabric for to  border  this top.  It is planned to have a single border, and you will need about 1/2 meter of fabric for it...  You might want to use the same fabric as your main background fabric, or something that co ordinates but that is completely different.  The border will have a interesting technique and will be the last step of the project and does require, two more supply items that I hope you can gather from your stash --- some worsted weight yarn about 2 meters or less in length, any brand, can be acrylic or even cotton, but should be a green, light or dark or in between, then you will need some felt -- as little as 8" square and it can be real wool felt or just the synthetic felt that kids use, try to match it fairly closely to your green yarn.