We have a brand, spankin’ new line of fabric! This line was inspired by my favorite clothing catalog. When the monthly JCrew catalog comes in the mail, I always flip though to see the pretty clothes. Of course I like the clothes, but what I really like about the catalog is the graphic design, the beautiful photography, the cool fonts and the way they style the whole thing. I usually throw out most everything- I’m the opposite of a hoarder. But I do keep the JCrew catalogs. They give me design inspiration when I’m stuck- whether it’s a color combination or a way to stylize a photo- there are lots of great ideas in there.
Which leads me to the day we were stuck without an idea for a fabric collection. We can generally get great ideas if we actually get out and venture into the city a bit. We have found inspiration in store windows, street signs and t-shirts. But this day we were stuck in our office, no time to take a shopping trip just to find some inspiration. So we drug out all our old magazines. My mom starts with Country Living, while my sister and I dig into JCrew. It didn’t take long. We were immediately drawn to a photo of about 25 men’s plaid oxford shirts stacked up. We quickly flipped the pages and found similar shirts for women- but this time the plaids were mixed up with florals, dots and strips.
And that was it! We all decided that stack of shirts would make the most amazing quilt and Oxford was born! Oxford is a combination of wovens and regular cotton prints. All the plaids and stripes are woven. We hope you love it as much as we do!
There is no question that the blues are my favorite. I LOVE these blues. In fact, I think I love this stack of fabric more than any fabric we have ever done.
I could probably just sit and stare at my stack of blues and it would make me happy. As usual, my mom and sister are partial to the reds. I do like the red, but come on, did you see the blue?!!!
We also put a touch of green in the collection. The green is my second favorite.
Here they are all mixed up. So yummy.
We are working on the patterns for this collection. We can’t show you yet, but here is just a peek at one of them.
We will have the details of the quilts soon. We also couldn’t help to make a few projects from Oxford. These will be in our booth at Quilt Market in May.
This next pillow is one of my most favorite things ever. My mom made it for me and my family has been warned to never, ever lay on it! To be honest, not every piece in the pillow is from Oxford. At the time she made it, we only had a few scraps of Oxford so she used a few blues from other collections, plus a few pieces of denim from my nephew’s old jeans. Oh how I love this pillow.
Now for the hard part. Oxford is being shown to stores now and will ship in August. August seems like a long time away, but it will be totally worth it. We are planning to have the Oxford quilts ready to show later this week or maybe early next week. It depends on how clean I think my house needs to be for Easter.
Have a great week!