A week ago I was in Houston, Texas, finishing up 3 days of
introducing my new collection of quilting weight fabrics, Lush Harvest, with
Troy Corporation’s Riverwoods International brand. A year ago I went down to the legendary
trade show to spend time with Renaissance Ribbons, who manufacture and
distribute my LFN Textiles Artist’s Ribbons line, and strolled around shopping
for someone who could produce quilt weight fabrics with my designs. Dorothy Troy stepped up to the job and was
delighted to take on the new vegetable designs and text-based towels I had been
working on, and now here they are!
That isn’t the real story here, though. In order to gear up for this new market I
have had to take a steep learning curve.
Being a textile and ribbon designer is not the same thing as being a
designer of fabrics intended to be cut up and made into pieced items! Some crossover is there, of course, but there
is always the context of how the fabric to be used to be grappled with. So instead of waiting demurely in my booth to
speak with potential new customers, I kept venturing out to try to get a feel
of what goes on here.
I took away a fantastic impression of intensive activity. What a complex network of creativity goes
into this business! You have the people
like me, who design repeat pattern. You
have the fabric companies who get that fabric manufactured and distributed to
the retail shops (who come from all over the WORLD to buy). You have the professional pattern designers
who delight in contriving new ways to cut up and piece these various fabrics
into sometimes traditional, sometimes modern, compositions. You have the publishers, selling books and
patterns to showcase the work of the pattern makers. And you have to have very deep pockets and a
genius for display to catch anyone’s eye in this hugely kaleidoscopic arena.
Herein I will simply post photos of some of the marvels I saw,
starting with my own humble first effort.
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| Aardvark quilt patterns |
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| Andover Fabrics |
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| Blue Underground, quilt patterns and fabric line for Troy |
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| Kaffe Fassett art quilt |
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| Kaffe Fassett art quilt |
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| Kaffe Fassett for Westminster |
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| Kaffe Fassett for Westminster |
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| Kaffe Fassett |
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| Modern Quilt Studio patterns and books |
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| Aardvark quilt patterns |
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| Weeks Dye Works, hand dyed fibers & fabrics |
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| Aardvark Quilt Patterns |
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| Andover Fabrics |
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| Add caption |
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| Starry Night Hollow for Troy |
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| Weeks Dye Works hand dyed threads |
