Art Gallery Fabrics - The Creative Blog

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to experience how fabrics, colors, and designs positively affected me. I always thought that my style will never change as I always gravitated towards earthy and neutral colors, but there is something about color that always caught my eye. Although neutral colors will always be nurturing, I later discovered that it’s the bright and cheerful colors that complete the mix between cozy and happiness. Sometimes we just need a boost of joy, and today is the day you can experience that with Jessica Swift’s latest collection, Flight Path! 

Checking all the boxes with colors, this collection is more than color, but a celebration of one’s unique path! Jessica illustrates a magical world that represents and celebrates one’s unique path. To be reminded to trust your inner guidance and wonderful rhythms that will lead you directly to the heart of the life you are meant to bloom into!

Bright oranges, jade greens, and hints of prussian blues, these fabrics have it all for the perfect balance of cheerful colors! You have 12 quilting cotton prints that will surely spark creativity in creating something you have never tried before, whether it’s a patchwork project with a new technique or playing with a new substrate. 

Starting with the sweet knit print “Jubilee Morning” featuring happy suns and flying geese (not the quilting kind, hehe) ready to be transformed into apparel. The second substrate is flannel in the print “Fortunate Aglow” which is very exciting as this is the first time we introduce flannel to one of Jessica’s collections! This print features her signature rainbows in a light blue background, making it a great option for the backing of baby quilts or whole cloth quilts. 

Add some AGF Elements (blender fabrics) that match Flight Path in your patchwork projects! 

Squared Elements in Lox & King’s Road Turquoise.

Pure Solids in Turmeric, Tigerlilly, Emerald, Nocturnal, London Red, Night Sea, and Jade Cream.

Floral Elements in Nocturne & Orangine.

Let yourself go flying geese crazy with our “Dancing Breeze” free quilt pattern! 

DOWNLOAD PATTERN

Find something unique to create by flipping through the pages of our “Flight Path Fabric Lookbook!”

Introducing our latest series on our YouTube channel called Sew Easy, where we show you fun and easy projects featuring the latest AGF collections. For Flight Path, enjoy watching our most popular technique, the “stroked flying geese” put into action to make this wonderful pillow! 

This is our first collection release for the year 2022, and I would like to thank you for another year of great fabric releases. We knew we had to start the year on a good note and this lookbook is special to us as we really tried to push our creative limits. We hope you get to explore something new this year, and if you do it with these fabrics, we would love to see it! We encourage you to share your projects with us on social media by using the hashtag #AGFFlightPath, so we can give them a “like” and share with our incredible community.

Until next time,

Happy sewing! 

 —Jannelle

Hi makers!

The holidays are coming to an end once again, so it’s time for cleaning, eating leftovers, and deciding on New Year's resolutions. One of my resolutions for this next year is to try and be more eco-friendly and reduce my carbon footprint as much as I can. I was recently shown these super cute pin cushions that use those scraps that almost always get thrown away due to no usage… selvages. Here at AGF, we have so many colorful Pure Solids with selvages that include the name of the color, so what a great idea it would be to make my very own color card out of pin cushions! Sure, an actual color card takes up less space, but this way is so much fun and a great scrap buster, so what’s not to love? 

For this project we are using the selvages of our Pure Solids in Sweet Fig, Hydrangea, Plum Preserve, Bewitched, and Amethyst.

Let’s get started! 

Cut your selvage pieces 5 inches long by 1 ½ inches wide. Cut your backing piece 5 inches by 5 inches. 

Sew your selvage strips together at a ¼ inch seam allowance. 

Press your seams in one direction. 

Place your selvages and the backing right sides together and sew ¼ inch all the way around leaving an opening to turn

Trim your corners and turn your pin cushion right side out, making sure to poke out the corners. 

Stuff your pin cushion with your choice of stuffing. I used polyester fiber fill, but you could use batting scraps, walnut shells, scraps of fabric, or anything else you have. 

Hand sew the opening closed and your pin cushion is ready to be poked! 

If you want to create the other versions, I listed each color I used for the other cushions below. 

Blue: Tranquil Waters, Parisian Blue, Tile Blue, Night Sea, and Nocturnal

Green: Icy Mint, Tender Green, Jade Cream, Emerald, and Peacock

Yellow: Honeydew, Lemon Tart, Empire Yellow, Turmeric, and Raw Gold

Orange/Red: Georgia Peach, Dried Carrot, Mandarin, Burnt Orange, and London Red

Pink: Candied Cherry, Weathered Brick, Dried Roses, Miami Sunset, and Blossomed

Black/White: Caviar, Magnetism, Steel, Ash, and Snow

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! It was a fun one for me to recreate and since I love colors, I had to make one from each color of the rainbow. These would also be so cute with selvages from a collection, or selvages from complementary colors. Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or tips you’d like to share! 

What else can you sew with your selvages?

As always, please share your pin cushions by tagging us in your photo on social media with the hashtag #artgalleryfabrics! 

Happy Sewing!

-Karli

With the new year here, we want to share a story that is near and dear to our hearts, called Patchwork Stories. Here at AGF, we want to cover our world with beautiful fabrics and go back to what is most meaningful- creating things from our hands. This movement of patchwork is becoming more influential than ever, and it’s being represented not just in fashion but in all the things that surround us. 

This is the story of how we incorporate patchwork and the role it can play in your everyday life! This series shows you more than pretty fabrics, but a lifestyle that we live by in which we are so thrilled to finally tell it. Through the course of a couple of months, we gathered some of our favorite patchwork projects that include apparel, home decor, accessories, and much more to tell our story, and to show you a variety of ways you can incorporate this lifestyle yourself! 

Welcome to the first week of #AGFPatchworkStories, where we show you our first pride and joy, these eye-catching quilt coats on Instagram! We used Megan Nielsen Patterns - Hovea quilted jacket pattern for all three coats, all of them featuring some of our favorite patchwork techniques like reverse applique, bargello technique, and 45-degree strip piecing that we are showing you today.

Check out the making, tips and tricks, and what we created for one of our quilt coats!

Start by joining each 2½” x WOF strips from assorted fabrics 2” in from the previous strip. If you were to use 3½ strips, then you join each strip 3” in from the previous strip. 

We join the strips this way to save fabric. If we were to join the strips matching edges we will waste a good amount of the block and we will not be able to have as many strips as we want. See the example below.

Align your ruler at 45˚ to the top or bottom of your block and start cutting 2½” diagonal strips. The quilter’s ruler has different lines that show you different angles, look for the 45° line and align it as shown on the diagram below, and start cutting as many strips as you need.

To sew each diamond strip, don’t line your rows up so that the seams match right at the edges that you are getting ready to sew.  Instead, the seams should match ¼” in from the edge. That way, when you sew ¼” from the edge, the matching points aren’t lost in the seam allowance, but are instead right where you want them, making nice, crisp matching corners to make your diamonds.

We hope you enjoyed the first week of this series and we can’t wait to show you something new every week! Make sure to follow us on social media to stay up to date and we’d love for you all to join us in this movement. Show us how you incorporate patchwork into your daily lives by using the hashtag #AGFPatchworkStories! 

Until next time,

-Jannelle