Where Fabrics Come Together
Stonemountain & Daughter is known for our apparel fabrics, but we’ve got a lot of great stuff in the shop—including an amazing assortment of cotton wovensthat are perfect for quilting and patchwork! At the Berkeley store, we refer to our main room as the cotton room—it’s where we keep our quilting prints, solids, and so much more. Today’s newsletter is all about bringing fabrics together from every corner of the cotton room to make something special.
Fableism has created beautiful yarn-dyed fabrics for several seasons now, and we were delighted to hear that they were adding a group of Indian block prints to their collection. While the fabrics vary only slightly in weight (Fableism fabrics are all in the 100–170 GSM range, so you really could use any of them together in a quilt), the nature-inspired color palette is used throughout all of their fabrics for lots of potential mixing and matching.
When we look at our collection of cotton wovens, we’re thinking about fabrics we can put together in interesting ways for our newsletters—and the same can be true for your sewing projects! Here’s a great example we discovered this week: the five fabrics in this photo look like they could be a capsule collection, but they’re actually two quilting fabrics and three cotton batiks from different manufacturers. We can see using these fabrics together in a quilting project, or making them into separate garments that can be worn together.
We also love an opportunity to add texture into a group of fabrics to increase visual and tactile appeal. Marcia Derse’s new collection The Plaid Oneincludes printed plaids featuring textures of the handmade original art that inspired them. We’re delighting in pairing these plaids with Bay Area quilter/designer Tara Faughnan’s new collection of Handloom fabrics—slubby yarn-dyed cottons that add lovely texture and depth to any sewing project.
getting started
No time or space to quilt? A gentle reminder: you can absolutely get into quilting without sewing an entire bed-sized quilt! We love working on small patchwork and quilting projects in between bigger sewing projects—it’s a nice break from the constraints of garment sewing, and an opportunity to experiment with little bits of fabric. Now is the perfect time of year to start sewing quilted potholders for holiday gifts. We love these examples from Farm & Folk Quilt Alchemy—they are both beautiful and useful!
Bags are a wonderful way to incorporate elements of patchwork and quilting into your everyday! Combine a group of coordinating fabrics (think prints, patterns, and textures) for the different sections of a 241 Tote. The Sandhill Sling is the perfect bag to highlight your mini-quilting skills—create a pieced block slightly larger than the bag’s front pattern piece, stabilize it with a bit of interfacing (we like Pellon Shape-Flex 101), trim it to size, and then construct the bag as per the pattern instructions.
One of the most fun things about making your own clothes is getting to choose your own fabric, so why wouldn’t you want to use as many gorgeous fabrics as possible? We love the idea of color-blocking and pattern-blocking to add even more visual interest to our handmade wardrobe. The Eucalypt Dress is designed with two front panels, all the excuse we need to combine two great fabrics! The Florence and the Azure have ruffled tiers, the perfect opportunity to play with coordinating fabrics. And please consider the quilted Tamarack Jacket an open invitation to craft a quilt top from your most favorite fabrics and make it into a unique garment you’ll treasure for years.
One of the things we love most about quilting and patchwork is that there really are no rules. Mix a favorite quilting cotton with a yarn-dyed plaid, add a handloom texture, throw in a batik or a print you simply can’t resist—and see what happens! Playing with color, print, pattern, and texture is part of the fun, and sometimes the most unexpected fabric combinations are the ones that make a project truly special.
At Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics, our Berkeley cotton room has been inspiring quilters, garment sewists, and creative makers for decades. Our collection includes hundreds of quilting cottons, solids, batiks, yarn-dyed fabrics, handlooms, and unique cotton wovens from around the world, all carefully chosen with an eye toward color, quality, and how beautifully they can work together. Whether you’re shopping with us in Berkeley or browsing our fabrics online, we hope you’ll think of our collection as your own big fabric palette—ready for mixing, matching, and making something completely your own.
And remember, quilting doesn’t have to begin with a bed-sized quilt! Start with a potholder, a patchwork bag, a quilted jacket, or even a few treasured scraps pieced into your next handmade garment. We hope you’ll pull together some fabrics that make your heart sing, try a combination you might not have considered before, and simply enjoy the process. After all, sometimes the best sewing projects begin with a little pile of fabrics that just look wonderful together.
Looking for more quilting content? We’ll be back on Friday with a newsletter about our wonderful quilting solids and how to use them!
Thank You and Happy Sewing!