Hi everyone, it’s your host Pat Sloan here today talking about fabric styles.

When I made my ‘first first quilt’ I did not have many fabric options. Calicos, Calicos, Calicos, and solids. By the time I made my official first quilt the variety of fabrics had greatly increased, let’s do a big cheer for THAT!

Quilters now have so much variety of fabric it is wonderful, but it could be a tad confusing. When you hear someone describe a ‘style’ of fabric what do they really mean?

The other day I did a very scientific study of quilt styles when my friends showed up for sewing night. I asked the first three who arrived their thoughts on quilt Styles (well we DID have a very thorough discussion on it…. Wink!)

These are my thoughts on style, and I’m sure I’ve missed one or you will have your own take on it.. that is what our comment section is for!

Fat Quarter Shop has been super generous and allowed me to share photos from their store.. and.. hold on.. you are NOT going to believe this.. Fat Quarter Shop is sponsoring this post with a FQ bundle give-away. Which FQ bundle? Well the winner can pick the Moda bundle they want.. be still my heart!! exciting eh? See the end for how to enter.

My first observation about style is that color matters. Take the paisley above. This is a very traditional if not leaning towards civil war type print. This is a Jo Morton paisley that she is famous for.

This is NOT traditional by anyone’s terms. BUT it does have a paisley in it. Interesting eh? (I say eh to fit in with Michele.. she is Canadian ya know). And scale. Look how much larger this paisley is.. and more playful. This is what I’d call a contemporary fabric, from Heather Bailey

So let’s look at some BROAD categories (remember the comment section down there!)

Traditional

In this group you will tend to find lots of warm toasty colors, some call them muddy fabric (wink!). There are really a lot of styles within the traditional category.

Civil war prints are loved by many. They are reproductions of fabrics from the civil war era and use the same colors and patterns. The photo above is classic from Judie Rothermel.

People who love and use civil war fabrics are often recreating quilts from that time period. Historian Barbara Brackman has a blog about civil war quilts… check it out to learn more!

Calicos are generally small prints… a bit harder to find in this day and age as we tend to want more from our fabric! But Calico’s are fantastic blenders.. as is shown by this piece in Prairie Paisley II from Minnick/Simpson.

I feel like a country style fabric is cozy. It does not need to be ‘brown’ but it should be warm, toasty and full of the feeling of a farm house or your grandma’s kitchen. This line from The Quilt Patch feels country to me.

Americana and patriotic, whether in a traditional design or a contemporary, is classic! This line from My Mind’s Eye is bright and fun and waves the stars and stripes proudly! Great for solider quilts and decorating for 4th of July!

The 1930s prints are like civil war, they are reproductions of a time period of fabrics. They tend to be pastels with some reds and blacks. Lots of small prints. This is a new favorite of mine from my friend Darlene Zimmerman. And this line is called Adventures with Alice… I LOVE Alice in Wonderland!

Not Traditional

There are so many fabrics that fall into what I call “Contemporary” fabrics. This line called Candid Paparazzi from Red Rooster fits the contemporary class for me. Clean shapes, clear colors, and big bold sweeps of shapes.

Fresh Cuts from Heather Bailey is a classic Contemporary fabric. So much so this is a repeat of the line loved by many! (me included!)

I asked my good friend, and 3 time winner of the Modern Quilt Guild challenge, what she thought a current modern style fabric is. Heather Jones of olive & ollie said:

John Adams, QuiltDad, is not only a modern style quilt maker, but one of the editors of the online quilt magazine FatQuarterly. I asked John what he considered some of the current Modern style fabrics on the market. John said …

• Echo by Lotta Jansdotter
• Curious Nature by David Butler
• Anything by Pat Bravo
• Hello Luscious by Basic Grey
• Lark by Amy Butler
• Grunge solids
• Hello Pilgrim by Lizzy House
• Anything by Kaffe or Brandon Mably
• Tilly by Daisy Janie

I also think that Miscellany and Cut Out & Keep by Cloud 9 Fabrics are great examples, too. – Thank you John!

Wow oh wow are Batik fabrics POP-U-Lar!! Serious.. do you have a piece in your collection? How many… wink! Many companies produce batiks. I feel the draw of a batik is the often subtle color changes and the tone on tone ‘feel’ with more pizzazz! This is a selection from Hoffman. Fat Quarter Shop has a whole category for batiks on their left side bar.. go cruise!

Asian Style Traditional or Modern? This classic piece of Asian style fabric is from Kona Bay. They really do a wonderful job with this style. From a focus piece like this one to blenders and overall florals. Visit their web site for loads of inspiration!

Good Fortune by Kate Spain is a contemporary take on Asian fabric and I love it.. I even used it in a quilt for my latest book!

Other

“Other” is a lovely category. A place to slot solids, Novelty prints and seasonal.. which are a form of novelty but I think they deserve their own category!

Bella Solids by Moda are so darn popular you can even get a color card!

Also Michael Miller solids.

and Robert Kaufman solids.. oh yeah!

Going Coastal by Emily Herrick is a perfect example of a novelty print. Who uses bottle caps with seaside images.. umm…err… I do!

Or Peace Love and Rock and Roll man.. yep… any fabric with funky fun images is good to be called a novelty

one more!! Space fabric from Andover.. gotta love it!

Seasonal for me are those Christmas, Halloween, St. Patrick’s day, Easter or any other fabric that is very focused on the season. I tend to make quilts using them that stay within that theme. And these tend to lean heavy towards a novelty print feel. Like this Halloween print from Teresa Kogut.

And the Fat Quarter shop loves Christmas fabrics ALMOST as much as I do.. wink! They love it so much they put them ALL in one place for us Christmas crazy collectors! I’m loving this Basic Grey line.. all for that snowman!

Kathy Miller of Michael Miller fabrics does a fantastic job on the company blog with fabric inspiration boards. I am currently obsessed with Gray and Yellow combinations, so I really loved this board she did called Citron Gray.

Cruise the fabric company blogs and web sites for great fabric selections.. here are just a few of the many fabric companies out there today:

• Moda Fabrics
• Robert Kaufman
• FreeSpirit
• TimeLess Treasure
• Riley Blake
• Andover
• P&B Textiles

and I could go ON and ON and ON! Love a company? Put their name in Google and see what you find!

A few weeks ago I interviewed 4 fabric designers on January 30th including Kathy Miller of Michael Miller fabrics. And I interviewed Kimberley Jolly of the Fabulous Fat Quarter shop too!

Give-Away

Enter to win a Moda fat quarter bundle of your choice from the Fat Quarter Shop! Tell me below in the comments What is YOUR favorite Fabric Style?

One winner will be randomly selected next Wednesday, March 21, 2012.

Winner announced: Congratulations to #573 Renate. Check your email for a message.

Pat Sloan is owner and founder of the quilting design and publishing company Pat Sloan & Co. She has published over 25 books, more than 100 patterns, nearly 10 fabric lines, and has had her work featured in all the major Quilt magazines. In January 2010, Pat started hosting her weekly Internet Radio show called Creative Talk Radio.

Find Pat here:

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Please join me in welcoming today’s guest blogger, Scott Hansen of Blue Nickel Studios as he shares with us a bit of his own quilting journey. He’s also giving away a Moda layer cake, see below for details on how to enter his give-away.

I’m so thankful that Michele has invited me to be a guest blogger here today. Thanks for stopping by.

I always wonder how to start these sort of things off, you know? I could talk about so many things. I think the thing most quilters ask me is how did I get started quilting because being a man, I am somewhat of an anomaly in this arena of life, but not as much as I used to be. There are more and more men popping up in the quilt-o-sphere.

So how did I get started quilting? Well back in 1976 when I was a young teenager, Americana was a very big theme due to the Bicentennial of the US and all, and so I really was into “old-fashioned” stuff. Probably more Victoriana than Colonial, as the crazy quilt idea really interested me. I had learned to sew in a Home Economics class back when they still had those in school, and my mom was always sewing clothes for us. So I decided that I wanted to make my own crazy quilt.

My mom had put an old quilt top together for me earlier, but it was really just a comforter as it was simply tied, not quilted, but that was her limit of quilt-making knowledge. It wasn’t a heritage in our family as it is in many people’s lives. I am the first that I know of. Anyway that first quilt was my own design all done with cardboard templates and heavy as a lead blanket. I have no idea what we used for a batting. After that first quilt, I didn’t really sew until I was married years later.

Towards the end of college, I had picked up counted cross-stitch which interested me because I found I could be successful with embroidery that way. I really didn’t feel good about my ability to embroider any other way. I counted cross-stitched like crazy because I could create things and keep my hands busy. I am very fidgety. I was making my new wife and I cross-stitched Christmas stockings and didn’t have a way to sew them together, so I bought my own sewing machine – a $200 Singer that is still my little workhorse and a great little machine. Then my wife and I went to a quilt show, and I thought it would be fun to try something in that arena. I bought myself a book and taught myself the basics…still using cardboard templates. I made a lap quilt for my grandma in the nursing home and then baby quilts for my kids.

About the time that my second son was born, I fell in love with the idea of opening my own quilt shop someday, and got in touch with Mary and Connie at Country Threads and they invited me to Quilt Market in Portland, Oregon that year to help them with their booth. Oh WOW!! that was it, and it hooked me ever since. I also at that Market met my neighbor who invited me to her quilt guild near our home (funny how that was, meeting someone from home there five hours from home). Being part of that guild the Busy Bees was what settled me in to this arena pretty much for life I am sure.

Fast forward to now. From the get go, I liked designing my own ideas for quilts. If I saw a pattern I liked, I just figured out the measurements and made it. Now I find inspiration from life all around me, and I like translating things from everyday life into quilt concepts. I did a whole little series of blocks for Generation Q Magazine for the winter holidays. You can find them all together pictured here and if you look up “Playdate” on the Generation Q main site, you can locate the instructions for those. (Starlings is by John Adams not me.)

My favorite part of the process is designing and piecing. I love seeing my ideas come to life before me. Usually they work out just as well, or better than I thought they would, although on occasion there are some clunkers. I do not particularly care for the quilting process, and usually hire that out. But I love the binding portion…particularly sewing it on the back by hand at the very end. I think there is something very satisfying about that.

I have done work for fabric companies, designing quilts and writing patterns for them, many of which you can find on my site under the free projects tab. I am very excited to be teaching this summer at the Quilter’s Affair in Sisters, Oregon this year.

I am working on my first book (finally, I have been wanting to do this for years, working a full-time job and trying to be a good husband and dad make that pretty hard for me…I am amazed at how other people accomplish these things.) I am also working on my first set of patterns to sell online as PDFs and eventually in shops. So, yeah, I am busy!

I try to blog fairly regularly, but lately I have been so busy with projects, I have had trouble keeping up. But I love blogging because I have met so many wonderful people through it. Please stop by when you can, or you can sign up to receive my posts via email, then you get an email when I post and can keep up with me and my little fabric adventures. also you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook….the links are on my site.

Give-Away

I’d like to offer up a prize for all you Quilting Gallery readers as well. I will send this layer cake of Moda gems to one lucky reader.

Head over to my blog to enter the give-away.

Thanks for letting me share a little about my Blue Nickel Life, and everyone, keep sewing on!!

Scott Hansen
Blue Nickel Studios

Hi everyone,

I hope you’ve been enjoying the new Learning Center section here at the Quilting Gallery hosted by Pat Sloan.

After our first month of the Studio Organization series, Pat and I did an evaluation of the month in terms of content quality, amount of time we are spending to create the posts and feedback from readers. What we’ve decided is that doing two posts each week is requiring more time than we anticipated and that we have available. We both have other commitments and businesses that we need to run too. Plus, two posts was proving to be too much content for our readers too.

So, we had two choices: cut back on the length and quality of posts or scale back to one post a week and continue to maintain the high quality we both want. We definitely don’t want to sacrifice quality, so we’ve decided to do one post a week. New Learning Center posts will be published each Thursday.

Pat’s post on Fabric Types and Styles will be available on Thursday … it’s a huge post with tonnes of information and the Fat Quarter Shop have donated a Moda fat quarter bundle too. Stay tuned!

As always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me or Pat.

Cheers,
Michele

P.S. Did you enter last week’s give-away? The good folks at Sullivans are giving away two 6.5″x24.5″ The Cutting Edge rulers.

Enter here!

Also, I’m giving away five copies of this gorgeous pattern created by Erin Russek.

Enter this give-away here!