My favorite fabric designers

Sewing involves a lot of fabric. 

When I started reading quilting blogs a few years ago, I started noticing something: everybody seems to have their favorite kinds of fabrics. Favorite fabric brands. Favorite fabric weights. Favorite fabric designers. 

Since I'm a regular mom who makes regular quilts, I've never thought much about fabric designers.

I buy fabric I like. I buy fabric that fits my budget. And I sew. And I love it.

So, the fabric-designer name-dropping is all kind of Greek to me. Moda? Kona? Kaffe?

To my knowledge, I've only ever bought one yard of any of the latest, greatest brand name fabrics. It was because I needed a very specific color, and Kona was the only all-cotton fabric at that store that came in 15 different shades of dark blue ... 

I live in a little town, that's next to another little town, that's next to another little town ... Around here, thrift stores outnumber fabric stores by a ratio of about a dozen to one.

And so ... thrift-store fabric (or shirts and shirt fabric, as the case may be!) is a lot more accessible, and a lot more practical, than quilt-shop fabric.

Well-chosen and carefully inspected, this kind of fabric suits me very satisfactorily.

That fabric in the second picture of yesterday's post was cut from several thrift-store shirts.

Cutting up shirts is more trouble than just cutting into a neat yard of fabric. But, as usual, I love the "leftovers": 

Buttons ...

More buttons:

And, a stack of small fabric pieces for my next "made-fabric" project or English Paper Piecing project:

So ~ I'm just a regular quilter who doesn't know much about famous fabric designers. Naturally, I do buy most of my fabric by the yard at the store, but my fabric stores mostly sell small-name brands. And that's fine with me.

But I've gotta say: today's favorite fabric designers do strike me favorably:

Tommy Hilfiger ...

Jos.A.Bank, Banana Republic, et. al.:

With honorable mentions for a few more:

So ... all that to say ... I'm well on my way to getting a really fun quilt top made ... Hoping to post more progress pictures of this one soon. 

For now,  here's my stack of over 30 blocks, 15"-square each, ready to be cut up and reassembled. Like I said ... more pictures soon!

Update: The quilt top pieces in this post became a quilt top - See progress posts here and here, and the post about the finished quilt top here.