Many of you know of Rashida Coleman-Hale from her lovely sewing books featuring zakka projects, Zakka Style and I Love Patchwork, or maybe from her Washi fabric collection released through Timeless Treasures last year, or perhaps through her beautiful blog I Heart Linen. Here at Spoonflower, we first heard of Rashida through her Spoonflower storefront where she sells her unlicensed designs (just before they’re snapped up by fabric companies, it seems), and we definitely count ourselves among her biggest fans!

That’s why we’re so excited that this week, Rashida is beginning a series of International Quilt Market reports for the Spoonflower blog! In this series, which we’ll be posting throughout the month of October, Rashida will be sharing her preparations for Quilt Market as she debuts a gorgeous new collection of Japanese-inspired designs called Tsuru which is being put out by Cloud9 Fabrics. I hope you’re all as excited about following Rashida’s progress and the progress of Tsuru as I am!




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Hello everyone!  I’m SO over the moon excited that the lovely folks at Spoonflower invited me to do this! Spoonflower??? Asked me to do a guest post??? *faints*  

Quilt Market Season is the greatest time of the year for me (Seriously, it’s right up there with Christmas in my book.) and I’m so thrilled to have the opportunity to share my QM adventures with you!   I’ll be debuting my newest collection at the Cloud 9 Fabrics booth as well as walking the floor and taking in all of the fantastic that will be there and I hope to share as much of it with you as I can.

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I thought I’d start off the series with a glimpse of the strike-offs that I received from Cloud 9 for my new collection!  Aren’t they pretty?  Hooray! ^_^ ( A strike off is “a test length of fabric specially printed in order to check the pattern registration, pattern repeat and the matching shades in the design.” )

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Right now, I’m just busy getting everything prepared for the show and this is the first time that I won’t be a frantic mess trying to sew samples!  Unusual, yes.  I wish I could say it’s because I’m a super rad, organized, cool as a cucumber, sewing machine and I’ve been cranking out tons of amazing quilted goodness and garments and giving the Project Runway contestants a run for their money.  But nope.   

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The strike-offs JUST arrived last week and some of the colors are wrong! Womp woooomp wooooomp.  It took everything in me to not edit these photos to make the colors richer.  But I wanted you to see them as they are currently, so I resisted.  The S/Os are quite rough and crunchy as they haven’t gone through the treatment that the final yardage will.  There’s also some misaligned registration and a few splotches and bleeds.  

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As you can see from the Cloud 9 site, the blue should be waaaay more Indigo and far richer than it appears here. The pink is also quite pale so this will be punched up a bit.  The red is too hot and should have been a little milkier.  My speckled cranes are dissappearing on the pink moon! Noooooo!   So there will be a bit of tweaking in this area. 

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We’re waiting for a second round which, fingers crossed, will arrive before the show.  I doubt there will be sample yardage available for us to make samples, but fabulous Art Director, Michelle has her backup plan in action so we’re good to go!     

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Overall, other than the color errors I’m really, REALLY pleased with how these came out!  I absolutely cannot wait to see what everyone creates with them.   

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I’m especially excited about the Graphic Motif print. See that cute little blue motif there in the middle?  Yup, two inches. The scale is GINORMOUS!!  LOVE!

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This floral border print also makes me giddy, but I’m dying to see it with the dark indigo that we have planned.  So we’ll wait for round two and see how it goes!  

I have lot’s to do and show and tell between now and Quilt Market, but I’ll keep you posted on my little Tsuru adventures!  See you next week!