Pattern brings personality to a room. There are two ways to introduce pattern into a space, the safe calculated matching way and then the clashing quirky way.
To clash or match that is the question?
As I have mentioned in my blogs before I often look to fashion to see what will be trending in interiors. Currently pattern clashes are trending in the fashion world and beginning to seep through to interior design. The vintage interior theme is popular at the moment, this theme carries clashing prints really well. But is there a right and wrong way to clash prints? I think the key is to have a bit of fun, mix up your prints and go with what you like. I think clashes work well as long as your colour scheme is similar then patterns can clash. For instance small or large print floral, paisley, bold abstracts, images and checks and stripes all can work together when they are in the same colour family. I think the unexpected element of surprise of mismatch can bring individuality and personality to a space.
To match is much easier in theory. For example one way to achieve a perfectly matched interior is to pull your theme from the supplied stories that come in soft furnishing fabric sample books as fabric houses have generally designed them to match.
Mood boards work well to help you design your scheme, using small samples of the fabrics prints that your are considering will help steer your scheme.
Let me encourage you to clash a little, push the pattern boundaries, explore what different patterns look like together and have some fun with pattern.
All interior images from Houzz