Author: thelongthread

I went to Quilt Market in Kansas City over the weekend and thought I’d share a few photos. Here were some of the highlights for me:

Melody Miller‘s booth was a hit (pictured above and below). She had all kinds of cool retro things in her booth, along with an awesome upholstered couch, vintage phones, record player and two ladies painted on fabric on the sides of her booth. I felt it captured her style perfectly and her new collection featuring vinyl records will sell like crazy, I’m sure. And her new book Ruby Star Wrapping, co-authored with Allison Tannery, is now available for pre-order. You should get it before her screaming legions of fans buy them all to build their fan clubhouse.

And of course all the Free Spirit designer booths were lovely, but my favorites were from Denyse Schmidt (above) and Tula Pink (below).

Everything in the Cloud 9 Fabrics booth was amazing (pictured above). I’m particularly excited about the next Ed Emberley collection (yes, more!). And there was even more organic goodness at Birch Fabrics (below), who have some really nice new collections coming out soon. Monaluna also has some great things on the horizon.

Echino. Love every bit of it.

And this is my favorite Heather Ross collection so far. Put a mouse in clothes and you’ve got me. These little drawings are so incredibly sweet.

Carrie of Such Designs had some adorable new patterns, including this quilt. I think you’ll be seeing a lot more from Carrie!

And Carolyn Friedlander‘s work (pictured above), was new to me and so impressive. She sells these interesting quilt patterns, but it’s the intricate detail in her top quilting that I found most amazing. Must take incredible patience.

And I was unfamiliar with Kelly Lee-Creel, who has a new fabric collection with Andover. The collection includes panels for making soft toys, like the ones above. Her booth was really cute and filled with oglers.

Green Bee Patterns is a pattern company new to market. Run by a mother-daughter team from Nashville, they sell quilt and clothing patterns. Their skill for fabric choice and mixing is what made their booth really stand out.

Here’s my favorite fabric of the market — these bunnies from Yuwa. Yuwa really had the most interesting things I saw at market, simply because they were different. So refreshing to see something unique.

Oh, and Liberty. Liberty Art Fabrics on quilting weight cotton. How can you not love that? More images here. There were many other nice things to see that I don’t have time to mention here, but I took some photos for Kim at True Up, so you’ll get more sneak peeks of fabric collections soon to be released.

And now for some opinion. For those of you who read blogs but have never been to quilt market, you may picture aisles of brightly colored modern fabric. Not the case. There are rows and rows of brown fabrics in country and traditional styles. So, everyone has their own style and as I tell my children all the time: taste is subjective. But the quilting world hasn’t changed as much as you might think.

A few trends that I saw this time around were: lots of cut and sew panels, cheater prints, and still more trendy chevrons. I didn’t really see much in the way of color trends, other than gray becoming more of a staple, some pastel trends, and bright colors on white moving from modern to mainstream. I think we’ll see a return to navy, yellow and red coming soon. Please?

Now, I’ll tell you what I would like to see more of at Quilt Market.

More collection mixing. I think it’s helpful for the consumer to get ideas about how to mix fabrics and to realize that you don’t have to get stuck within one collection.

Fewer collections. I think the manufacturers are not helping the fabric shops with this 6-month collection cycle which forces the stores to buy all new fabrics every six months. And personally, as a consumer, I’m getting tired of the cycle. Maybe designers could each have a set of basics that changes colors with each collection, but the basic patterns give the collections some continuity? And don’t you just love a basic that comes in twenty colors? I do. I realize that some companies do this and I’m hoping to see more companies challenge the traditional sales model.

Fewer trends. I’d love to see more fabric companies get back to the basics with ginghams and dots. When I’m investing in a quilt that I want to pass along to my children, I hate to think it might look dated in just a few years. I don’t think we should confuse modern with trendy.

More organic from the big companies. So, there’s no market for it? Then there’s a need for consumer education.

But to leave on a positive note, there were so many talented designers at Quilt Market! And it’s an incredibly supportive community.