One change we noticed at market this year was the increased prevalence of Japanese fabric companies and we give a big woo! for that.  It wouldn’t be right without the talent and aesthetic of the master Japanese quilters.  We saw some exquisite taupe quilts.  (The Japanese taupe movement, associated with Daiwabo and Kinkame fabrics, among others, is a look of muted color saturation with hues and motifs from nature.  )  Just a corner of this quilt was breathtaking.  This is “Nantucket Basket” by Yoko Saito, a Lecien fabric designer.

Check out the detail of the intricate hand quilting, hand applique, and hand embroidery.  All those french knots! Amazing and delicious.  We are looking forward to getting Yoko Saito’s new prints into the shop but whatever we make with it will never compare to this.

Speaking of applique, Piece O’ Cake’s new book Applique Outside the Lines is an inspiration and seeing their quilts close up is a treat.

But which quilt to make first?

By the last hour of market, we forced ourselves to quit working and wander the exhibits.  Among the antique quilts on display, I mostly ended up with photos of intricate log cabin quilts.  I must want to make one.

This one is particularly lovely in silk.

I am my mother’s daughter, I love the bitty pieces and the detail.

I mean really, where does the seam allowance go?

Well Market, you’ve overloaded our brains and filled up our project queues. Until next time. (7 months and counting…)

Ah the quilts!  I could stare at fabric all day. I mean, I do stare at fabric all day.  And I love it, but when they are put into a quilt they take on a whole new life.  The quilt I kept coming back to every day of market is this Denyse Schmidt quilt featuring her new fabric line, Hope Valley.  These colors are more muted than her previous collections, which is part of why I’m so drawn to this quilt.

I also love that askew cream diamond between the print and the off-white background.

This will probably end up being a free pattern from Free Spirit and there’s a good chance I’ll be making it as soon as the entire Hope Valley collection arrives here in a month or so.

Speaking of muted colors, one of the directions that fabric is going that I’m liking is the trend towards less saturated colors.  We love the brights at Suppose, but I also like the sophisticated look you can get with grayed down colors, like in the Japanese Taupe movement.  And in this Jean Wells quilt seen in her schoolhouse series presentation.  I wouldn’t call them pastels, but low-intensity hues.  Gorgey.

More quilts of new fabric lines… Here we have Amy Butler’s “Sexy Hexy” quilt showing off her new Love collection.  A free download of the pattern can be found here.  There are some gorgeous prints in this collection including laminates (like oilcloth) that we’re looking forward to.

This photo is unfortunate because it doesn’t give the true effect of the colors in this quilt.  The salmon and greens are so bright.  This quilt features the Botany fabric collection by Lauren and Jessi Jung, new fabric designers for Moda. They have a great website where you can get project ideas and preview the fabric, which will release this March. (And yes, we will carry every single print in the collection too!)

Getting excited about all these quilts is exhausting.  I’ll save the last few for next time…

There is so much to see at market it can be a bit overwhelming. With all the appointments and to-do’s there’s not a whole lot of time for leisurely checking things out, but we try.  How could you not stop when you see all these pretty trims sorted by color?

Of course we make time to visit the booths of our favorite designers and stroke all the pretty things like the little dresses in Little Folks at Anna Maria Horner’s booth.  The entire fabric collection will be arriving at Suppose in December and we’re nearly peeing our pants with anticipation.

Heather Bailey’s booth was homey and oh so happy.

This adorable dress she made shows fabric from her new line, Nicey Jane.   I couldn’t help but harass her to start making clothing patterns.  (It’s pretty hard to find cool, well-fitting adult clothing patterns for quilt shops. In the mean time, at least there’s Built by Wendy’s patterns.)  The Nicey Jane fabric will start arriving in the shop within weeks!

Whenever I was near the Moda booth and caught a glimpse of this homemade mannequin, I got a little freaked out.  The photo would have been better but I didn’t want to get any closer.  I can only imagine what my mannequin-phobic cousin would have done had she been there.

At least there was the Moda home booth to distract us with it’s giganto learn to sew cards.  Watch out for that sword-sized needle, Mom.

More to come about market including a certain quilt I’m now obsessed with.

Whether or not we have recovered from market yet is questionable, but we are ready to show you the awesomeness.

I love these patchwork looking installations in the park across from the convention center.  Quilt Market had it’s 35th anniversary this year, and is in Houston each fall along with International Quilt Festival, so we like to think they are in honor of quilting, but I have no actual knowledge of artist Margo Sawyer’s inspiration for creating them.

The day before the exhibition floor opens is Schoolhouse Series where we shuffle around crowded halls from mini-class to mini-presentation like 7th graders. Except with way cooler teachers.

Anna Maria Horner debuted her new fabric collection, Little Folks, which is printed on luscious voile and will make the softest quilts and cutest blouses and dresses. It will come in flannel too, which will make for the most sophisticated baby quilts ever. We still can’t stop freaking out about Little Folks.

Heather Bailey also debuted her new fabric line called Nicey Jane, after her husband’s grandma. It’s gorgeous stuff. You can see one print used in her Daily Spice apron here and we’ve some shots from her booth for later.  I also learned that Heather is a fellow BYU graduate. Go cougars!

One of our most anticipated schoolhouses is always from the Kaffe Fassett Collective. Westminster is putting out prints from the Liberty Art Fabric archives done in new colorways by Kaffe. Last market we heard rumors that Liberty of London would be putting out quilting weight cottons and now we know the details. There couldn’t be a better collaboration than Liberty and Kaffe. Here Kaffe shows a quilt made with his Liberty prints.

We got to see some glorious Kaffe quilts from Australian designer and applique queen Kim McLean.

And Brandon Mabley demonstrated what, as he said, he looks like in bed. Kaffe explained that for this quilt he chose fabrics that had circular motifs in them and kept the circle theme going with snowball blocks.

We left schoolhouse pretty anxious to get to the Westminster booth to do a bunch of ordering of all our fave designers. Stay tuned for more photos from market and details on when we’ll be getting in all these pretties.  If you want to cheat you can see all of our market photos on Flickr.

with lots to tell, very soon!

Everyone’s been all a buzz about Texture Magic, the stuff that shrinks your fabric to give it a gathered, puckered texture.  I experimented with it recently and every time I give it that first burst of steam and it starts to shrink it’s a bit of a thrill, especially if someone who hasn’t seen it before is there to shout in surprise when they watch it.

Out of the package, the Texture Magic feels like a synthetic satiny lining type material, but after the heat of the steam has shrunk it, it takes on a more plasticy feel, so you’d probably want a lining in whatever you’re making with your Texture  Magic.  Next we want to try putting batting between the layers to see how that feels.  On this piece I sewed the TM to the back of my fabric in a grid pattern, 3/4″ apart.

Based on the chart that comes with the TM, I calculated how big to cut my rectangle to get the finished size I wanted, but it didn’t shrink quite as much as it could have.  I sewed a second piece just like it but increased the stitch length to see what would happen and that one shrunk a little better.  I used those first textured pieces to make a handy little pouch (with fabrics from the Hushabye collection).  Haven’t decided yet whether it’s for lip glosses or pens.  This was just a quick little project to see what the TM looked like in something instead of just on a piece of fabric, but people are doing some really interesting things out there like using it as a substitute for smocking on the bodice of little girls’ dresses, or for visual and tactile interest in applique.

Here you can see a visual of the shrink rate. The piece on the right started out the same size as the piece on the left.  I sewed the Texture Magic to it with wavy lines that curve around the circles on the fabric.

You can create great effects depending on how you sew the Texture Magic and fabric together, for example straight lines can make it look similar to simple gathers.  Everyone around here thinks this one with stippling looks like brains. I’d like to try sewing it to a Kaffe Fassett print by following the design on the fabric and see how that looks.  Some have even tried quilting it into their entire quilt!  Surely there will be more Texture Magic experiments to follow.  Some of us started as skeptics but things are getting curiouser and curiouser.

The Creative Guild ladies have got it down. We are killing two birds with one stone in a program Dara, Emma Jean, and Faye have planned.  Each month we get to learn how to make a different quilt block.  When we go home and make our block, we make an extra and at the end of the year we take all those extra blocks and put them together into quilts to donate to humanitarian aid!  Pretty sweet, right?  You totally wanna join the guild now, right?

This month we learned the rail fence block.  Here’s a little review on how to make it.

1.  Choose 4 fabrics.  This example was made with fabrics ranging from light to dark.  From each fabric cut 4-6.5″ x 2″ pieces, or if you have pieces of fabric at least 26″ wide, cut 1 long 2″ strip of each.

2.  Take one of each fabric and sew them together for each quadrant.  Here, the varying shades are arranged in this order: light, dark, medium-dark, medium.  You can sew pairs together, and then sew those two pair sets together to get your set of four. If you cut long strips, sew the long strips together, long sides to long sides, then cut them into 6.5″ squares.

3.  Sew two quadrants together, one oriented horizontally and the other vertically.  Sew the other two together the same way.  Sew the two pair sets together, matching the center seam.

And there you have a rail fence block!

Have you noticed a theme in the Creative Guild show & tells?

These ladies have a habit of playing hide & seek.  A pretty bashful bunch of show-offs, right?  Check out more of the show & tell from our meeting last night at the Suppose Creative Guild album on Flickr.