Emily Herrick of Little Old Ladies fame, has designed a new collection of fabric.  Usually I’m a scrappy, find a piece-here-and-there sort of quilter, but I am quite taken with this line.  She has a giveaway going on now (leave a comment, have a chance to win the collection) that I thought you’d like to know about, but really–this is quite a cool line of fabric.  And I don’t say that just because I live in Southern California.

When we lived on the East Coast, I wanted to make a memory quilt with all things beachy.  We stopped in a quilt shop on our way home from the shore and I found a little lonely fat quarter in the bottom of the bin, bound with a rubber band–but nothing else.  There are lots of fabrics of flowers, cars, baby things (is it just me, or does there seem to be an explosion of baby-themed fabrics lately?), holiday lines–but no beach line.  Until now.

Here’s the orange-y colorways, with that fantastic Bermuda shorts plaid we all associate with the beach. (Click to enlarge.)

While I love it all–the dots (of course), the stars and the kelp (so Northern California!) and those fabulous bottle caps–the grays remind me of our days at the shore.  It’s the color of the beach just after the sun sets and we’re waiting for the traffic to clear so we can go home.  We’re picking up our beach chairs, shaking out the towels, fighting the gulls for our trash so we can throw it away.  We sit on our coolers, soaking up the last of our day at the beach.

She also has quite the story about how she came to create this line.  She writes: “Last year while I was going through my Radioactive-Iodine treatment for Thyroid cancer I had to be in complete isolation for 10 days. I set up camp in my bedroom with my laptop, a few DVDs, a stack of mags, and some drawing paper. I was flipping through magazines and I saw a picture of a throw pillow with a huge crab on it. I was in love with that crab. I thought, I wonder if there’s a quilting fabric with a crab on it and so I started searching.”

Sometimes I find the stories behind the lines as intriguing as the fabrics themselves.