I don’t know about you but I tend to buy fabric seasonally. Not necessarily for the season (we are in spring right now), but I tend to buy large quantities of fabric a few times a year rather than a steady dribble. Often, I don’t buy fabric for months, sometimes it can be a year. Then, however, I can go on a bit of binge and stock up on basics. I am low on as well as buy collections that really speak to me. Often, I will not buy an entire line of fabric, but rather buy yardage of my favorite prints. However, when I find a collection that really speaks to me, I don’t hesitate to purchase a pre-cut bundle of some sort.

As somebody who has been quilting for a long time, I sometimes have made the mistake of thinking that my complete fat-quarter bundle (or jelly-roll, or layer cake) has to stay intact and be used in one single project. However, as the years have gone by, I have learned that this mode of thinking rarely makes me happy and I have learned that it is more than OK to break apart a pre-cut bundle and use only the fabrics that are serving the project I am currently working on.

Long term, I am much more satisfied with quilts when I put the color and fabric scheme together myself. These quilts are much more interesting to me to look back on and usually, they are more delightful, with a bit of tension between fabric styles and colors that create more interest than just using a single line of fabric.

With that having been said, I have been surfing the web and perusing the most current fabric releases that I really love. These are fabric collections from different styles that I would like to add to my stash and use in quilts that I have mentally mapped out in my head.

I hope you enjoy it and I would love to hear your ideas for what you would like to do with these fabrics in the comment section below.

1. Faith, Hope, Love by Sue Daley for Riley Blake

Faith, Hope, Love is a sweet collection with sumptuous summer hues. I particularly love the mustardy yellow, dusty pinks, and icy blues coupled with black and deep coral. This makes the collection sweet, but not nauseatingly so. It has a freshness to it that I think would be amazing in a summer quilt.  

I think this fabric line would be lovely in a log cabin quilt coupled with pure white as a contrast in the blocks. The fabric line has a lot of color diversity in it so although I am not generally a fan of one-fabric-line-quilts (I prefer things a bit more scrappy and diverse), I think this collection could look really sweet all by itself. I can also see this sewn up quickly as an economy square quilt or even just half-square triangles for a simple beach quilt for summer. I may buy a fat quarter pack and buy extra yardage of one of the low-key prints in the collection to use throughout the quilt.

2. Kept by Carolyn Friedlander

I always buy Carolyn Friedlander’s fabrics and sometimes I buy them more than once. I find that they are often the perfect fabrics to add to any scrappy quilt to give it a bit of cool structure. Her fabrics are very contemporary and I would actually say they give an almost mid-century feel that is pretty minimalist. Surprisingly, I end up using these fabrics in a wide array of projects. Right now, for example, I am working on a square-in-a-square quilt with mostly reproductions, plaids, and Minick and Simpson fabrics in reds, whites, and blues. It turns out that some of the white and blue architectural fabrics I have from Carolyn’s Doe collection from years ago are perfect in this quilt. So although I don’t think I will make a single quilt with all the fabric in it, Kept will be added to my fabric stash because almost all of Carolyn Friedlander’s fabrics are absolutely amazing blenders and adds a modern-cool feel to otherwise sentimental quilts. 

3. Jane Austen At Home 

If you are a Jane Austen lover like me, buying this collection is probably a no-brainer. But even if you are not a fan of Jane Austen’s novels and films, these fabrics are exquisitely gorgeous. They are faithfully reproduced after the fabrics included in a patchwork coverlet that was paper pieced by Jane Austen, her sister, and mother. It is thought that the fabrics are scraps from clothing made for Jane’s brother’s family. 

Riley Blake and Jane Austen House made a short promotional video that can tell you a little more about how this new fabric collection was created. After I watched it, the only thing I wanted to do was to turn on the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice and watch Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy fall in love for the millionth time (preferably I would watch this while doing EPP and drinking tea.) 

Aside from the obvious Jane Austen connection, this fabric is truly gorgeous with all its delicious pink and brown florals. The colors are relatively muted since they are based on originals that would have been dyed with natural dyes like madder for the reds and pinks. The style and colors will play really nice with other civil war style reproductions and I also suspect that they will blend really well with previous collections from French General. 

The fabric collection actually comes with a pattern to make a reproduction of Jane Austen’s patchwork coverlet. I love the original, and if you want to make one for yourself, go for it. However, I bet Jane would love to see our creativity since she herself was such a creative person. I think the collection will really show off in a multitude of projects. My first hunch is to do something simple and rather traditional, like making simple pinwheel blocks or even snowball blocks to showcase the gorgeous prints. 

I also think these prints could be used very effectively on a large scale, not to a detailed applique quilt. 

4. Carolina Gingham by Robert Kaufman

For summer, few fabrics suggest sun, breeze, and lazy days with watermelon juice stuck to your chin like Gingham fabrics. They bring a light vintage flair to almost anything!  Personally, I would buy 1-3 yards of my favorite colors and check-size of these. I bet they will look amazing with cool pastels like 30’s reproductions, vintage feed sacks, Heather Ross fabrics, as well as contemporary floral pastels. There at many colors available but I think I may be gunning for the brown, apple green, red, and black versions. Yummy! 

5. Velvet by Amy Sinibaldi for Art Gallery

Amy has made another super sweet line of fabrics. I love her delicate use of color and pattern. Art Gallery is really good at keeping cohesive color stories from one designer to the next, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this collection would blend very well with fabrics from other Art Gallery designers like Sharon Holland and Maureen Cracknall. 

If you handed me a fat quarter pack from Amy’s latest collection and a comfy chair in the shade, I would spend a week doing EPP with large hexagons, and then I would join them together with chambray in a grayish-blue. 

6. Lilliput by Sharon Holland for Art Gallery

Sharon Holland’s collections are always delicious. She has an amazing ability to put together soft earthy pastels without making them look boring. In this collection, she is featuring a super cute strawberry print, treehouses, forest animals, and frogs. I am almost tempted to say she is thematically inspired by Heather Ross…those strawberries and frogs..but it doesn’t really matter because Sharon’s color schemes are so decidedly her own. I would love to fuzzy-cut some of her prints in this collection and use them as centers in economy square blocks, or maybe in a large-scale EPP hexagon quilt. I am also thinking this collection will be perfect to mix with other of her fabrics or with Maureen Cracknell fabrics. 

7. Jardin de Fleurs by French General for Moda

Is it possible to have too much French General Fabric? I honestly don’t think so. I come back to French General fabrics again and again. Though I don’t have any immediate plans for this collection, it is just a matter of time before I am ready to start another French General infused quilt. It is very likely I will split this fabric collection up into 2 or more sections and not blend them all together in one project. I think I would love to use blue and yellow fabrics in one project and keep the white, gray, and red ones for a separate quilt. Looking at the prints in the collection, I am really intrigued by the idea of a large but simple applique quilt with yellow as the background of the blocks… Maybe add some dark chocolate browns for the applique. It would give us a really striking contrast. 

I also often end up blending French General with Civil War-style reproductions and I am curious to see how they blend with Riley Blake’s Jane Austen at Home fabrics. 

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