Just Add Sugar…The Making of a Fabric Line

4 years ago Elizabeth and I spent hours sitting on the family room floor in Elizabeth’s old house dreaming about designing fabric.

We would talk and talk and dream and dream and meanwhile I would draw or paint little images on tiny scraps of paper…

One day we finally put together a pile of drawings we were particularly proud of and gathered up the courage to set up a meeting with Riley Blake Designs.  In we marched with a manilla envelope full of drawings and high hopes.

The line was to be called “Clementine” and we were in love with it.

Sadly, we were to learn there was much, much, MUCH more involved in creating a fabric line than organizing hand drawings and our citrus dreams were crushed.

But Elizabeth and I don’t give up easily…we just keep coming back and back…like, well, like flies.  And after sharp learning curves and several other failed fabric line ideas our first fabric line (Four Corners) was born.

And we must admit it was a perfect debut line for us…a terrific blend of our styles, aesthetics, and roots but we couldn’t forget about that first trip into the office and those pencil sketches.

Other fabric lines were to follow….When Skies Are Grey, By Popular Demand, and a whimsical double gauze line…but we still thought about that first line and that first meeting.

So we re-tooled “Clementine” a bit and this month we are thrilled to have “Just Add Sugar” released into stores.

“Just Add Sugar” may look like a fun line for summer sewing, and it is.  But to us it is a lot more than that.

It represents to us having the courage and the stick-to-itness to make dreams come true…and it represents overcoming hard things…things that may seem to have gone wrong but by adding just a little (or a lot) of sugar can turn into something even better than you had ever imagined.

This past year we have both faced some difficult situations in our personal lives and the release of this fabric line feels very timely as a good reminder of what to do when life hands you lemons.

So it is with great pleasure we announce the release of “Just Add Sugar”.

And are happy to show you a few more behind the scenes images of the redesign process.  Yes, we still did hand drawings.  Like for the palm tree:

Which we digitized and turned into a fun tossed print:

And my personal favorite print…the flies!

Which were also hand drawn, digitized, and reduced to a small blender print….that I reallly am in love with.

Elizabeth was the driving force behind getting this line revised and ready to print and I’m glad she worked so hard to get it completed.  It is just what we needed and the entire month of June is going to be dedicated to projects, recipes, tutorials, kits and ideas that were inspired by this fabric line.

We hope that you enjoy it as much as we do!

It’s been a long time coming and we can’t wait to get started.