new fabrics and a quilt market review

The dust has settled after another exciting Quilt Market, and I’m enjoying a little chance to breathe and reflect. I don’t have long, because our two new fabric collections, Meadow and Urban Patch, are due to arrive on Thursday! Before I launch into the flurry of shipping out the new stuff, I wanted to take some time to share an overview of the Market introductions here. There was a lot to show!

 

First of all, I have to give a shout out (and a round of applause) to my father-in-law, Ed Miguelucci, for building a powerhouse of a booth. We basically built a little mini-house inside the Houston convention center! Those walls weren’t going anywhere once we bolted them in place.

We got everything set up the night before the show, and then at the last minute we realized that our sign had reacted poorly with the spray mount I used to re-stick it, and had bubbled terribly. Luckily, we had used chalkboard paint on the walls, and so Dave and I did a little chalk fix the morning of the show. It worked out pretty well!

We had a bit of an urban-meets-woodland theme going on in the booth, with Edison lights, wooden pallets and galvanized metal accents along with birch poles and cedar boards. It was a pretty good fit with our Urban Patch collection, highlighting the farm-to-city theme.

I was lucky enough to get Melissa Lunden of Lunden Designs to whip up one of her Northern Exposure quilts out of Urban Patch for the booth, and it looked great! Here’s a photo, with an On the Go dress out of Bouquet in front:

On the other side of the booth, we had a gorgeous Wiley Way quilt by Sassafrass Lane out of our new Meadow collection. I loved how energetic and kind of retro it felt! We also had cute dress samples using the Bonnie Dress pattern by One Girl Circus, and the Ruby dress by Made by Rae.

The runaway hits from the show were our two new knit collections, the Woodland Knits and Raaga Knits. I couldn’t believe how popular they were!

They’re not expected to arrive until January, but I’m already contemplating a reprint. It helped that we also introduced three new sewing patterns specifically designed for knit fabric: the Little Bee Babysuit and the Ashland A-line Skirt and Culottes sized for adults and girls.

We also reintroduced our wildly popular Fox Hollow collection at the show! We have had so many requests for a reprint of this collection, and we finally decided it was time. We’ll have 5 prints back in stock in January: Wonderland Blue, Shroomy, Stripey Blue, A is for Apple and Happy Patch.

The ever-talented Karen LePage of One Girl Circus whipped up this adorable dress to show off the collection, and we’ll have the pattern available in the  spring.

Finally, we introduced some great new kits at Market, including two new versions of our Super Simple Skirts, and a new Super Simple Patchwork Quilt! Right now we are offering the Super Simple Patchwork Quilt in the Leaf colorway of Urban Patch, but we will be offering it in the Petal colorway as well, along with a version in our Meadow collection.

All in all, it was a great show! It was so good to see some old friends and familiar faces there, and fun to get such great feedback on the new stuff. I’ll keep you posted on the arrival of the new collections later this week!