Art Gallery Fabrics - The Creative Blog

Here’s a fun little fact for you, I write all the collection descriptions from AGF Studio collections! When I first joined the AGF family, I was so excited to start on all the ideas I had for social media, but little did I know that I would also have the responsibility to do so much writing. I was always intimidated at first by writing as I never thought I had it in me to express how I felt, but as these collections were released, I did feel something! Flipping through every print,  I always found myself in another world, and all was left for me to do was to put it into words. This came easy to me for the latest release, Season & Spice, because I was instantly reminded of the special moments that the fall season has to bring. 

I started to describe the unexplained feeling of joy when the temperature began to cool (finally a break from the Florida heat), going to my local farmers market to pick all the ripe fruits and vegetables, and hearing the sound of crunchy fallen leaves. These are the simple things in life that bring me joy, and it’s all illustrated in the most wonderful AGF Studio collection, Season & Spice! 

This collection comes with 16 premium cotton prints that range in the richest, warmest, dare I say “juicy” colors I have ever seen. I adore this collection’s special elements within each print, from the adorable jars of jam to ditsy florals. 

What a group of substrates! There is something for everyone here, from the mustard yellow rayon(if you’re a long-time reader, you already know how I feel about this color) print in “Handkerchief Nectar” to the rich burgundy knit print in “Bountiful Daisies Cherry.”  Let’s not ignore one of the stars of the show, the flannel print in “Seasonal Bouquet Plum” that would be lovely as the lining of a jacket or the softest pillows ever! 

Add on to the beautiful colors this collection has to offer with matching AGF Elements (blender fabrics) that coordinate with Season & Spice fabrics! 

Decostitch Elements in Borgogna & Pecan Praline.

Pure Solids in Apple Cider, Cabernet, Dried Carrot, Candied Cherry, Weathered Brick, and Sweet Tangerine.

Floral Elements in Russet Orange, Honey Mustard, and Sunset.

 Fall in love with our “Golden Harvest” free quilt pattern! 

DOWNLOAD PATTERN

Discover patchwork projects from tons of quilts to sweet apparel that are featured in our “Season & Spice Fabric Lookbook” below.

Check out the series on our YouTube channel called Sew Easy, where we show you fun and easy projects featuring the latest AGF collections. For Season & Spice, enjoy watching one of our most popular tote bags, our “Silas” tote bag made up with one big log cabin block! 

If fall is your favorite season, this collection is definitely the one for you! If you have your hands on these fabrics, please share your projects with us on social media by using the hashtag #AGFSeasonAndSpice. Thank you for reading along and until next time,

Happy sewing! 

 —Jannelle

This new year we promised you exciting releases, and today we want to present you a new monthly giveaway that will make your quilty hearts skip a beat. Welcome to our new event where we give you the chance to win ALL the latest AGF collection released in the month! 

--GIVEAWAY CLOSED--

For the month of January, we are giving away the entire collection of FLIGHT PATH by Jessica Swift, SEASON & SPICE by AGF Studio, and coordinating Elements for BOTH collections– that’s over 40+ fat quarters! All you have to do to enter is CLICK HERE, enter your info, and that’s it! 

THE WINNER IS SUE HEISLER! PLEASE CHECK YOUR EMAIL TO REDEEM YOUR PRIZE! 

The giveaway is OPEN INTERNATIONALLY. The winner will be emailed and announced right here on AGF Blog on February 3rd, 2022. Good luck! 🍀⁠

Please reply within 7 days to claim your prize (check your email by February 3rd!) If we don’t receive a reply, we will have to choose another winner as we’d like to be fair with all participants, and pass the opportunity to another contestant. Thank you! 

Disclaimer: For giveaways, we will never send you a direct message, link, or ask you for your personal or credit card information.💌⁠

Until next time! 

-Jannelle 

Hello makers! 

If you follow our YouTube channel, then you may have recently watched a video on how to make a 9-patch block using the strip piecing technique. If you haven’t seen the video, make sure you go watch it here: 

Easy 9-Patch Block Using Strip Piecing - YouTube 

This video is part one of the project that I will be sharing with you all below: a big fluffy patchwork pillow, which is part of our Patchwork Stories. To read up on our Patchwork Stories and the role it can play in our everyday lives, check out our past blog post here:

AGF Patchwork Stories: 45-Degree Strip Piecing - Art Gallery Fabrics - The Creative Blog (agfblog.com)

This pillow is super easy and simple to make and can use any patchwork you may have such as spare blocks, and it’s fat quarter and half yard friendly. This pillow has a finished size of about 20” x 20”, but the best part is that you can make it whatever size you may want! If you’re interested to see how we made this pillow, make sure to keep reading below. 

Here is what you will need:

• The patchwork block we made in part one
• A 20” x 20” piece of batting
• (2) 20” x 15” pieces of fabric for the pillow backing. I used Ikat Diamond Rustic from ‘Kismet’
• Scissors
• A 20” square pillow form or stuffing

Start with your patchwork block laying flat on your work surface.

Grab a template that is the size of the pillow that you want. I have a piece of foam here that is 20” x 20” but you can use a large square ruler, a piece of cardboard, or anything else square that you have. Position your template at an angle on your block and mark each corner. Your template should fit perfectly so that each corner matches up with a seam. 

You can either trace around your template if the edges are smooth, like a ruler or use a longer ruler to draw a line from mark to mark. 

Take a pair of scissors and cut on your drawn lines. 

Lay your cut block on top of a piece of batting and quilt as you see fit. I personally like my batting a little larger than the piece I’m quilting just in case there is any shifting. In this case, I decided to quilt a line ¼” away from each seam for a little rustic feel. 

Trim away any excess batting and set your pillow front aside. Grab your two backing pieces and fold one long edge on each piece down ½”, then down another ½” and topstitch in place. 

Lay your pillow front right side up. Take your two backing pieces and place one right sides together on top of the pillow front with your folded edge in the middle. Place the other backing piece right sides together with the folded edge also in the middle. The two folded edges will overlap. Stitch around the entire square at 1/4".

Trim your corners, turn right sides out, stuff with your pillow form or stuffing and you have a patchwork pillow!

I had so much fun making this pillow because there wasn’t really any pattern or rhythm to follow, I could just improvise what I thought looked pretty. You can use your leftover scraps for another pillow, or any other project that you feel like making! 

I hope you all enjoyed this tutorial and I would love to see what your patchwork pillows look like, so make sure to tag us on social media using the hashtag #AGFPatchworkStories.

Happy sewing!

Karli

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