Mind of Color

The year 2024 is coming to an end and the yearly announcements of the colors for the year 2025 have been published. What can we expect in 2025? Some years brought big changes, some did not. I will share some thoughts with you as I think 2025 will be interesting, especially for color! In 2024, the trend of bringing nature inside has reached its top. Neutral colors, hints of green and brown are dominant in interior design and very popular at every level of retail. The colors are seen in furniture, accents, housewares and walls alike. I took two photos this week at Pottery Barn, but could have taken it anywhere. These warmer colors have completely replaced the cool white and grey. Grey is still a little bit present as one of the natural colors, especially the darker tones, but white is definitely out. The natural colors are combined with a pop color, usually from the orange family. What can we expect for 2025? The nature inspired colors will stay strong but there are two new trends coming up with quite some intensity. In general we are going at a speedy pace and it is hard to keep up. In Jan of 2023, not even two years ago, white was still the leading color but I wrote that it was on its way out. It has been dumped out! First of all: we are moving to a much darker palette. Kona color of the year 2025 is Nocturne, a deep and saturated dark purple. It has been a while we had such a dark color selected! Yes, purple is definitely more in the picture, but not one single color is jumping out. The trend is using a lot of colors: MULTI is everywhere. In previous blogs I called this the "library look" as the inspiration is coming from libraries. The covers of the books with the little letters dancing around, are making a unit held together by the bookcases themselves. Books stand for leisure, journeys to unknown destinations, adventure, expanding experiences in comfort. A library is almost the opposite of the clean and uncluttered look we had during Covid. It is a little messy and the relaxed chairs and sofas look totally different than the white and grey living rooms we had for a while. Nocturne is a good selection not so much because of its purple but because of its depth and darkness. Very often the color of the year is not so much exactly that particular color, it is much more of an option based on a certain palette. Nocturne is selected by Robert Kaufman with quilters in mind and they could pick only one color. Purple is for many a favorite and a smart commercial choice. Benjamin Moore, the paint company, selected "Cinnamon Slate" as the color for 2025. "Mocha mousse" is the Pantone color for 2025. All these colors are not selected for quilters, but for interior design and clothing. As I have mentioned often before, interior design is the place where the quilt industry is getting its inspiration from. The quilt industry follows interior design. These newer brown colors fit in the trend of 2024 that brought many shades of unusual browns and greens to the front. They bring nuance to interior colors. They are the colors of little accents in nature, a microscopic look at twiggs, grasses, seed pods, herbs mosses etc. So in a way the selection is totally not surprising. It fits right in where we already are and it has proven to be well received by interior design businesses from Target all the way to the top. Consumers are buying these colors for somewhere in their homes. It may be a new vase, a sofa, an accent wall, just about anything. I expect these to be colors that are not inspiring to every quilter. Actually I read a lot of negative comments about the selection. These browns create strong opinions! Modern Quilt Studio called Mocha mousse the drugstore pantyhose color. Yes, maybe that is a good description if you talk to an audience of people over 50. But the younger generations have never worn, seen those hoses. I don't believe my daughters (mid and late thirties) have ever worn tights in those colors and a drugstore isn't their place of shopping either. They look at these natural neutrals much more positively and even use them as nail polish! Talking negatively about beiges and browns shows your age! Modern quilters are definitely incorporating these tones in their quilts and then, with a pop of color, they take a new dimension. It is not the drab from your memory.... I saw several quilts that made it into Quiltcon 2025 with these colors. Mocha mousse combined with Nocturne and maybe Aqua or Orange.... that is totally new!! Congratulations to Émilie Trahan who is a great sample of a modern quilter using modern color combinations!

Jittery. Uncertainty. Traditionally, election years are hard for businesses. People don't know what will happen, they want things to be over with and know what it is going to be. I have seen multiple markets and festivals in election years and it is always the same. There is a reluctance in the air, a cautiousness that makes spending more hesitant. Somehow we don't like this uncertainty. Going to a middle ground seems for many to be safest move but it doesn't bring out the best. That is exactly what this market was: uncertain, hesitant about a direction and moving towards the middle. It was very, very safe and also a little uninspiring. Of course there are some beautiful fabrics to be found ( and I felt tempted multiple times to buy entire collections) but overall it was not exciting for the eyes. Moda, always good for a beautiful display, had a "wonderland" theme and a big focus on Christmas fabrics. Modaland is wonderful, and I hope it pleased many. With 80 plus degrees outside, I could have been less for me. Moda is so big, you can always find something beautiful, but the displayed collection did not cover as much depth as in the past. It was less broad and quite repetitive. Here, the competition of the H&H market in Chicago can be seen and felt. That wholesale market in May has grown stronger in 2 years, which means that fabric companies will show the newest collections again in just 6 months. It makes the timeframe for Houston small and opens up - again - the question of "do we need two markets per year"? We can drive ourselves pretty crazy. On social media we have instant updates on what designers are working on as they are giving us views inside their studios. No market can ever keep up with that as it not the same real time. Social media is the friend and it is the enemy. It shows creativity, it kills creativity. Already a few minutes after opening, an avalanche of the same posts came into my inboxes. I decided that I would withhold most of my photos for later at lectures. Nobody is waiting to see me too talking to Tula Pink or anyone else. I spoke to a big shop owner from Germany who came to Market for the first time 20 years ago, but who hadn't been back since 2019 because of Covid. She said when she looked through Houston's most famous windows that she was shocked to see how small Market has become. The booths from the past are mostly gone and replaced by a few tables. "Why do I have to come to Houston when I can't see the fabric. They tell me to look at lookbooks online"? She has a point. Still, I have met people, including her, I would have never met otherwise and each discussion is such a point of connection, inspiration and learning. See more below. The booths are not always inspiring, but the people always are and market gives us an opportunity to communicate face to face. I love that. Karen Bresenhan, the founder and director emeritus of Market and Festival was honored in a special toast for making this possible for 45 and 50 years. Yes, she has influenced my life so much and I am grateful for "her" Houston. Mark Dunn, president of Moda, led a toast in the presence of many of the industry under the beautiful red/white/blue display of quilts. Attendance at Market seemed to be down. I have seen the general opening of Schoolhouse much more packed. It is a concerning trend. The biggest excitement for me was the Anna Marie Textiles' presentation as a new division of Northcott. She is not only designing for Northcott, she will get her own division in this company. Wow! Northcott is doing such an amazing job these last years. Coming from a strong traditional background, the last few years Northcott has added other segments of the quilting industry to its company. Young divisions like Banyan Batiks (batiks), Figo Fabrics (modern), Patrick Lose (basics) and now Anna Maria Textiles. They are covering more and more of the market and with great success. Anna Maria Textiles clearly found joy in the work and she is full of ideas for future collections. The first collection is coming in March 2025 and I bought all fabrics for collagefabric.com because they will work for collage as well! Her collections have a vision, color, good scales. They are not hesitant, but energetic and convincing. It is fabric of the year 2025 and I was impressed. It is certainly not for everyone and that is ok. None of us can sew with everything and designers should help us with options in styles and colors. They are our inspiration, or should be! Anna Maria most definitely is, but there is a lot of fabric that is new, but doesn't feel new at all. Not only reproduction fabric. Some "modern" looked dated as well. It could have made 5 or 10 years ago just as well. Why would customers be excited about this? It is as if they are all doing the same thing. Another Block of the Month with the same layout? Very, very few new patterns don't help either and most of them are nothing new and simple. I do think we need new beginner patterns, quick patterns, but we also need more intermediate and advanced patterns. We don't need the same pattern of yet another star with a different color border. Certainly not for $14.00. Sew Kind of Wonderful had the best new patterns, again. They are amazing and I will bring them with me to talks. Another designer that stood out to me: Emily van Hoff for Moda. Her Groove collection is truly modern. It is almost like improv piecing printed on fabric. Solids with curves...with great cutting it should open up some possibilities for funky quilts. Totally different from Anna Maria and anyone else....Good!! The fabric is not particularly good for collage and I can live without it, but I do appreciate how she is different and creative. In general, the newest prints have a lot of busy and small - itsy bitsy - designs. Multi-colored or tone on tone, but definitely more multi-colored and busier. In colors the market was holding back as well. White was absent and replaced with colors in more oats and taupe shades but these colors are still much lighter than where the home interior design world is. I have mentioned in previous blogs that the quilting industry is always following home interior trends. It felt like historic/vintage colors are the most popular ones. I know that is not the case. It was just shown more. Richer, more saturated and moodier colors were present but just in bit and pieces. Are they still too outspoken in the current climate? Anna Maria got it right as one of the very few ones. She is spot on in her color selection! I also missed the renewed interest in stripes. Yes, Kaffe is coming out with new stripes, but stripes are much more dominant on social media than this market showed. And what about the color of quilting thread? The latest is to quilt quilts in threads that are not matching the background so much. More contrast. Now you can use a yellow thread on an black and white quilt for instance. I didn't see this. It was all still very blended. There is nothing wrong with that, but I would have loved to see more newer color options in quilting as well. It was safe. Very few art quilts. Most quilts have blocks that are back to smaller pieced blocks, and I saw more traditional applique coming back. That is a good idea, because applique is an essential technique. Wonderfil has a gorgeous new thread coming out for sergers. It is SoftLoc and its beautiful color combinations almost made me wish for a serger! Wonderfil will also expand the Efina 60wt thread with 60 more colors, making the total 120 colors. Love it! Scanfil, organic thread, too is coming out with variegated threads. (Funny story: I met Boy, the vendor of Scanfil last year for the first time and discovered that he lives in the same village in Holland where I was living in 1994, just before we left for what we thought would be a temporary assignment in the US. He actually lives around the corner from my old house. We know each other's houses! He gave me a spool of his Scanfil organic 50wt thread and I loved it. It is really flat, with no sheen and sews beautifully. Highly recommended!). There were many, many booths with luxury notions coming (mostly) from Asia. Beautiful packages, beautiful tools, is the market ready for these? New rotary mats, gadgets... how many seam rippers do we want? Where do we store all these things at home? My thinking is still very much like a shop owner.

While I was cutting, folding and packaging all these fabrics with a big smile on my face, Jan, my husband said: "Carly, Houston is your holy grail, why else would you do this? " I think that he is correct. Houston is celebrating 50 years, I spent the last 20 years there. Still every year is new as well and this is the first time I am flying to Houston! This will also be the first time that I will teach two classes, have a quilt in the exhibition hall of the convention center and do 3 x 2 hours presentations in the Open Studio Section on the Festival floor. Instead of my unforgettable team, I will have three of you helping me with this. We are all volunteering for I don't know what exactly yet, part of the adventure. Thank you Jen, Laura and Daryl! I have prepared many lines in colors, because I am supposed to tell the same story about freestyle color collage every 15 minutes... I'm sure I will be quiet after the two hours are over. Roomie Lisa may like that! I am looking forward to seeing the newest trends of the industry, which I will share in my lectures later with guilds and maybe in blogs. Two talks are scheduled for later in November: they will get it fresh from the press! And I am looking forward meeting all the other fabric people, my friends, students, customers, colleagues. Big news: My publisher, Fox Chapel, has set the launch date of my book for 2/25/25! I saw the cover this week for the first time and now it is starting to feel so real. I can't believe that a year ago I didn't even know that I would be asked to write a book! That was the Houston surprise of 2023. 365 days later and I am a published author attending the cocktail party of Fox Chapel and meeting my incredible editors for the first time. How crazy is this? Yes, Holy grail!! They designed a postcard for me to hand out to people interested in the book... I will get these in at market...The first one is mine! Counting my blessings. It has been a very busy travel year. The colors of Sedona have been put down in a new quilt, that just got finished. "Vortex" is made from my memory, not even a photo, after having hiked for days in that area. It is not how Sedona "is". It is how Sedona is stuck in my memory. How I remember this powerful place. The vast landscape, the red rocks with their horizontal lines and the turquoise of Arizona that like magic ended up as my sky. For a girl who grew up in Europe the incredible vastness of the American West is almost incomprehensible for the eyes. I soaked it up and the vortex helped me stitch it down with the tiniest fabrics. Not a freestyle color collage quilt like the ones of my book, but still very much collage and freestyle.

When I started selling online 21 years ago, there were hardly any companies available to help small businesses with the development of a website. I was so fortunate to have a husband with a background in mathematical engineering who enjoyed building and thinking about software. It was my husband who suggested that I should have a "shopping cart", when I asked him how someone from South Bend, IN could pay me. Together with a small consulting firm, he developed my website. Everything was difficult and very minimal: shopping cart, checkout procedure, (no) inventory control, bookkeeping, mailing lists etc. In those days we even had to take a picture of every piece of fabric as well, putting them slowly, one by one online, on the "world wide web". This Summer a customer planted a seed. I was chatting with her on Facetime about color and showing her fabrics that could help her create whatever she had in mind. She, familiar with website development, gave me some convincing points and I followed her advice and took a look at e-commerce again. These days, it is easy to create a website without any knowledge of code. There are so many integrations that up to a few years ago were impossible to have. Now you can find building blocks that you can use or skip. At the same time, everything has become so much more affordable as well. It made me wonder: can I have a website that works for me and my students? A website where I can show fabrics but where I can still be flexible for when I want to be "closed"? Something super simple? I found a way and built www.collagefabric.com , fabric with a focus on collage, without the help of my husband, who really is not a fan of me doing this in "retirement". He is afraid that I will get consumed with it again, but I have made my decision and will have time for family, volunteering and my own art. All this is not always asking for my attention and then I can and love to help my students and others. That has been going on at such a scale these last two years (it actually has never really stopped) that having a website will make it easier for all. I can show possibilities in fabrics great for collage to anyone at the same time and I don't have to send invoices as the website takes care of that. Even chatting can become easier! Most important factor to go ahead with this: It is now possible to deactivate a website temporarily. People can browse 24/7 but they can only order when the website is open. Sure, that will be the case most of the time, but I don't have to be open 24/7 nor will I have the financial responsibilities that force me to be open 24/7. That means when I am away at shows, on teaching or family trips I can announce in the top bar when ordering is available again. I can control the amount of work I can handle as I will not have any employees. I am the one who is selecting, cutting, packing and sending your fabrics. I have the flexibility I want to have. My students/ customers have been really understanding and accommodating and it is this attitude of no rush of all of you that can make new ideas a reality. Of course I will ship as soon as possible and of course it means you will get the fabrics quickly, but I am not filling orders late at night, hiring a team or so as I did in the past. Reasonable is the word. I use business tools to help my students with their creations and since I am having more and more students (and customers from the old days who stuck with me), it's nice to have better tools. Especially with a book coming out. But, my goal is not a financial one like every "real" business is. I am a hybrid, lol! International people will not be able to order online. Sorry, but after Covid, shipping has become so expensive and so complicated it doesn't make sense to work that out on a website my little scale. If an international customer would like to get fabric, we will do it on a case by case basis via email. I just mentioned this to my students in France last week as well. Collagefabric.com is for people who need small amounts and big variety. It is all tiny, unless I think a fabric is sooo good for my community, I can have fat quarters or even bolts, in which case you can order yardage. Like the new Kaffe Fassett August 2024 collection that just came out. This collection has just amazing fabrics for collage and I ordered bolts in those that arrived the day I returned from France. Those bolts have now been cut into Yards, Half Yards, Fat quarters and especially Builders. Builders are packages that help you build a collage. Each package has 20 different pieces of fabric in size 4.5" x 10" and it is these Builders that my students love. I make ranges in colors that can make good flows and connections to other colors. This is about detail in color and I don't think something like this is anywhere else available online (or in brick and mortar shops) at that level of detail. It is my way of playing with color, my passion, that I share with my community of "fabric people"! People making applique quilts will appreciate this as well as they can get many different reds for let's say little berries, without having to buy fat quarters. Also quilters enjoying piecing with many different fabrics may benefit. You can make a "planned scrappy" quilt super easy with my Builders. They can make wonderful backgrounds! The website is open now and I am sure some things will have to get adjusted as we go. But it is a start and I hope you will be just as excited as the person who suggested it to me. The site will be closed for the first time when I go to Houston for Market and Festival. I will teach 2 classes and have also been invited to present three Open Studio Sessions during Festival, which is again a new experience. In total, I will spend quite some days on the road and during that time customers can browse collagefabric.com but not order. When I return home, the site gladly takes orders again. Sounds pretty perfect, not? No long waiting for you, no backlog for me, no inventory problems, no credit card authorizations waiting to be processed. Simple and straightforward. Carlymul.com will not change except that most shopping has moved over to collagefabric.com . I will continue sharing my blog here, my teaching and my own quilts. We will see how the journey continues!

The European Patchwork Meeting or Carrefour Européen du Patchwork in St. Marie-aux-Mines, France has ended. What an event it has been! I feel so lucky to have experienced this show that in many ways is the same as any other show, but in many other ways totally different. I hope my students appreciate their classes as much as I feel enriched by their attendance and this teaching opportunity. Collage is relatively new in France, much less known than in the US. So those that signed up were the more adventurous quilters, willing to expand their horizons. Merci pour votre courage! Maybe I will write at a later time about my travel before and after the show. We, that is my husband and I, had flown into Zürich, Switzerland where we picked up our camper. We are travelling around with the quilt show as an in-between stop. Here are my impressions of the show days, September 12-15, 2024.

In the world of quilt shows, Sacred Threads has a very special place. This is not a regular quilt show with a mix of quilt styles, vendors and classes. No, when you see the quilts at Sacred Threads, be prepared to see a lot of emotions that are so well translated into fabrics and threads, your eyes will get wet. The show has a focus on quilts dealing with the most intense emotions we all experience sooner or later in our lives. When quilters experience joy, grief, spirituality, inspiration, peace etc they sometimes go to fabric to deal with the intensity. They express their feelings in quilts. This show is letting you in to all those personal journeys. For years the show was held every two years in Herndon, VA and it has a special place in the hearts of many Northern Virginian quilters and quilt shops. Virginia Artistic Artifact s and Nine Patch Fabrics are still sponsors (as is eQuilter ), but next year, in 2025, the show will move to Indianapolis, IN. I am convinced many visitors from all over will visit. Aside from the big show, there will also be a travel exhibit that will hit many places in the country. This travel exhibit will have its debut in Houston at Festival and I know some readers of this blog made it into the selection. Congratulations! That will be a powerful section in the total show!

Wandering around the beautiful buildings of the college and sleeping in a bed that will be in a few weeks the bed of a teenager made me feel nostalgic. Who would ever thought when in was in law school in The Netherlands that I would sleep in a dorm in the US, in Gettysburg PA? My classroom was in a building for history, classic studies and philosophy and all the papers on the hallway walls with important and less important announcements were just the same as in my days. What were my dreams in those days and what has life done with those? In bed, a mix of nostalgic and grateful thoughts danced around in my head until i said to myself: Stop it, Carly, go sleep, you can't even study quilting in college! Then I fell asleep on that not too bad mattress. I had made my own bed with a pillow and sheets from home. A towel as well.... My room was clean and very, very empty, except for a roll of toilet paper. It has been nice and an oasis after all the color talk during the days. The enthusiasm of my students was great as always. The shared breakfasts, lunches and dinners in the dining hall were much better than the ones in my memory and the evenings gave us a fun and informative program with lots of goodies that quilters like to get. Julie Belin of Blue Oaks Quilting gave an excellent lecture on Friday night on the use of paper in quilting. On Saturday all teachers and their students were one by one invited on the stage for a gigantic show and tell. It is a nice way for all the students to find out what they want to do next year. I was proud of my class! (thank you Lynne for taking this photo and sending it to me). Organic color collage is so different from any of the other classes. We won the "award" for the messiest classroom! After two days of working, our floor itself looked like a collage with all the little snippets from 12 students sticking to the carpet, that worked like Lite Steam a seam 2. I felt it, this MAQ. Your quilting will get better because there are so many classes to choose from. In every style and at every level. Your life gets better by all these encounters with quilters. I met many old customers, who recognized me from my shop and show days in Hershey and Philadelphia, PA. That was sweet! I also met many nice new people, just by sharing quilting talk at the table. I loved the ladies in my class: Experienced quilters, strong personalities, all in love with color. Next year it will be held June 5-8. The date was mentioned on the second evening for the first time and that is too late for me. Unfortunately I already know that I can't return because I will be teaching at a guild that weekend. Those commitments are often made a long time in advance. I do hope I can return another year! Thank you MAQ for this great opportunity. You are one of a kind!