Sewing room to nursery: Matching paint to a quilt

Last night I finished hauling the last of the sewing stuff out of the sewing room. It looks so empty and will look even more so once my husband moves the furniture out and into the basement this afternoon.

The plan is for me to bring the dogs to my parents for the weekend while my husband paints the room, really starting the transformation into a nursery for our baby.

The nursery will be designed around Aspen’s Line by Avlyn, the line of fabric I bought years ago to use for my first baby’s quilt and nursery decor. The Puppy Love quilt I designed for our little one is already done and will be the focal point of the decor.

That means besides creating valances, a crib skirt, Boppy covers and a fabric baskets, the paint scheme has to work with the colors in the line as well.

You can’t color match to fabric, the light the painting pros use to determine and replicate the exact color of an object is just too bright. It shines through the fabric and distorts the color.

The next best option is to bring in a selvage of the fabric you want to match. The colored dots on each selvage represent a true depiction of all the colors in that fabric. You can use it to find other coordinating fabrics for your quilt or, in this case, to find a paint chip that would be an exact match.

I went with Almond Brittle in Pittsburgh Paints, available at Menards. Also since this isn’t our first rodeo when it comes to redoing a room (my husband and I have remodeled just about every room in the house including a complete kitchen renovation) we had the primer tinted to help cover up the earthy green that is in the sewing room now with less coats.