Every January the seed catalogs arrive, and gardeners spend happy evenings circling varieties with names like Summer Glow and Cherry Belle. Quilters understand the feeling completely. We just do our circling in fabric catalogs. Blooms in Every Stitch is our collection of designs that blossom, from sunflower-covered sewing machines to hometown scenes framed in flowers, so we have written it up the way a good seed catalog would. No green thumb required.
Sunflowers, for full sun
Sunflower Sew Dayz is a vigorous grower, covering a whole sewing machine in golden sunflowers, red roses and swirls of turquoise stitching until hardly any metal shows. Seeds of Stitches is a gentler heirloom, a vintage machine with a few big sunflowers tucked around its wheel and a spool of red thread waiting nearby. Both are hardy and cheerful.
Southern bloomers
These varieties grow best with a little humidity and a lot of hospitality. Stitchin' in Augusta bursts with pink blossoms around a velvet green lawn with a small red flag on it. Stitchin' in Jackson sets a capitol dome and city towers above a bed of creamy white magnolias, with a few music notes drifting overhead. Stitchin' in Georgia fills the state outline with little houses, green hills and a juicy peach, and Stitchin' in Mississippi lets a blue river wind through white blossoms beneath a pair of guitars. Stitchin' in North Carolina rolls its landscape from mountain to shore across the whole state shape, sprinkled with blooms along the way.
Tropical and coastal varieties
For warmer zones, Stitchin' in Honolulu frames a green crater and a curling wave in hibiscus and plumeria, and Stitchin' in Maui opens onto a lush coastline with a volcano on the horizon and a whale spouting offshore. The Stitchin' in Hawaii eruption design is the showiest specimen in the catalog, a volcano puffing fluffy clouds above palm trees and a golden beach. Further north, Stitchin' at Mount Rainier grows a wildflower meadow beneath the snowy mountain, where a bear wanders past a quiet lake. Stitchin' in Rhode Island and Stitchin' in Virginia round out the coastal beds with sailboats, grand old houses, mountains and a bright red cardinal.
Rare and collectible
Every catalog saves a page for the unusual. Fray-da Kahio, from our Resting Stitch Face series, is an artist crowned with roses, sitting inside a floral wreath and piecing a patchwork quilt across her lap. Patch is a quilted character with pink cheeks, pointed ears, a thimble nose and a stitched smile, which somehow makes the resting stitch face look friendly.
For the quilter who grows things in fabric
She is the one who picks a flower print first and builds the whole quilt around it. Maybe she tends a real garden too, or maybe her only plants are printed on cotton. Let her choose the variety that is SO her. Planting instructions are simple: keep in a bright, happy sewing room, water with coffee, and expect it to bloom all year.
Written by Jacqueline. Thanks for reading.
