I love word fabrics.  I know they aren’t really a design, but I love text and fonts and writing and blogging and reading, and I teach English.  Need any more qualifications?  Here’s some of my latest fabrics, all washed up and pressed and ready to go.

And I love to travel to interesting places.  This is Sweetwater’s latest word fabric (they seem to do one in every line–I don’t mind) and they’ve arranged the words in blocks, as if this were some sort of word-plaid of some kind, sprinkled with numbers.  A local town is on here: San Bernardino, and Flagstaff is visible right there in the middle.  That’s where my daughter used to live.  They also have Montreal (where we will be traveling to this fall) and Paris and Rome and London–all great cities that I have a memory with.  So maybe that’s why I liked this fabric with words–it triggers lovely memories.  And yes, I’ve even been to Lehi (up there in the upper third, middle, in red).

And I’m getting ready for our little quilt group’s Halloween fabric swap, coming up in a few weeks. I think sometimes we quilters like to touch and play with our fabrics, looking at them, enjoying them.  I happened on a couple of posts yesterday for WIP where the bloggers talked about that very thing.  They liked to get out what they had and arrange them in new color combinations and monkey around with them.  I imagine those of us who buy fabric are like that.

But I’ve also wanted to reach out and touch the jacket of the woman in the pew in front of me in church.  Or when I sit behind some teenage girl with long beautiful hair and she’s fiddling with it during the service, I’m jealous, because my hair is short, and doesn’t lend to fiddling.  I like feeling fuzzy things, soft things, corduroy or the hair of my grandchildren, or my husband’s tweed wool jacket.  I guess I just like texture: both visual (the words) and tactile (fabrics).

A Japanese designer, Yohji Yamamoto, said: ‘Fabric is everything. Often I tell my pattern makers, “Just listen to the material. What is it going to say? Just wait. Probably the material will teach you something.” ‘

Amen.