We hope you enjoyed the Oliver + S measurement chart we posted earlier this week. Well, the holiday fun doesn’t stop there!

Today on the Lisette blog, we have another useful PDF giveaway: a swatch card set.

You can see the details and download the file on the Lisette blog.

Remember Moda’s Country Fair theme from Spring 2011 Quilt Market which was carried through to a designer blog hop last September? At that Quilt Market, all Moda’s designers contributed a favorite recipe and a pattern for a quilt block. Shop owners could stop by each booth to collect the complete set.

Well, this week is your chance to stock up on holiday treat recipes and interesting quilt block patterns, because the Moda designers are sharing their creations with you on their blogs all week long. And today is my turn.

The recipe I contributed is one of my favorite cookie recipies. I found  it in a Martha Stewart magazine years ago, and I’ve loved it ever since. Don’t let the title turn you off. The black pepper in these cookies actually helps to intensify the flavor of the chocolate. S will run screaming from any dish that contains a noticeable amount of pepper, but I can’t keep her away from these cookies.

Taking off from the country fair theme, I designed a block I called the Ferris Wheel.

You can download a printable PDF of the recipe and the quilt block by following this link.

Be sure to stop by the other designers’ blogs this week to see what’s going on in their kitchens and sewing rooms this season. Here’s the complete lineup.

December 5

• Minick & Simpson
• Bunny Hill
• Me & My Sister
• Deb Strain

December 6

• Kansas Troubles
• Fig Tree
• Cosmo Cricket
• Summersville
• Liz Scott

December 7

• Cotton Way
• French General
• Sweetwater
• The Long Thread

December 8

• Thimbleblossoms
• Kathy Schmitz Studios
• Laundry Basket Quilts
• Kate Spain
• Primitive Gatherings

December 9

• Basic Grey
• Brannock & Patek
• American Jane
• Pieces from My Heart

Now that Cape Ann is finally showing up in stores, here are a few quilts made from the collection. First up is the quilt we designed specifically for the fabrics.

When I went to the Moda website to find the link to this free, downloadable quilt pattern (Be sure to look at the last page of the instructions where they put each swatch in a little dress shape. So cute!). I also noticed that the company offers darling little tags you can download for your Cape Ann projects. (To find and download them, click on this link and type in “Cape Ann.” Then click on the yellow scissors icon next to download the labels.)

You can also download and print clever informational sheets about the collection, taken directly from the big, hard-to-get-your-hands-on catalog, called the Playbook, that Moda produces for each Quilt Market. These pages are really well-designed and show off all the fabrics in addition to project ideas, coordinating patterns, etc. They’re a lot of fun, I think. Aren’t they clever over at Moda? Love them.

Ok, next. Here is a simple quilt kit from Fat Quarter Shop that shows off the prints nicely, especially the Virginia’s Closet print with all my little dress drawings. You can buy the kit here.

I’ve seen some other quilts popping up all over the place. I love this little one over at Pink Suede Shoe, which she made from the little 2 1/2″ square sample packs (we call them petit fours) we hand out at Market. No quilt pattern for this, but it doesn’t really require one, does it? Very quick and simple.

So where can you buy the fabrics? Well, a quick search brought up the following right away, with many more to follow as the fabrics arrive:

Fat Quarter Shop, obviously

Hancocks of Paducah

I can’t wait to see what you make with the fabrics! A few items have already shown up on the Cape Ann Flickr group. We hope you’ll join them and show off your projects, too.

It’s finally time to introduce my newest fabric collection for Moda, Cape Ann!

I’m very excited to share these fabrics with you. Over the past few months you may have seen images of some of the prints, especially when we released our fall sewing patterns. But now that the fabrics are shipping to stores I can give you the whole treatment.

Cape Ann is inspired by the work of well-known illustrator Virginia Lee Burton. You’re probably most familiar with Ms. Burton’s work through her classic children’s books The Little House and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, which she both wrote and illustrated.

While I’ve always loved these books and her illustrations, it wasn’t actually her children’s books that inspired me to create this collection. Instead, a few years ago I found an article in a magazine about the Folly Cove Designers, which was a co-operative group of artisans in the Cape Ann area of Massachusetts that was founded and led by Ms. Burton. The artists in this group worked together to create hand-printed textiles which they sold themselves. The Folly Cove Designers grew out of  a renewed interest in the Arts and Crafts movement that began in England in the mid-1800s, and the group found inspiration in the environment of Cape Ann and its flora and fauna. They believed that their art should be both useful and creative.

Hey wait, are you sensing a theme here? Modern Workshop, my last collection, was inspired by the Wiener Werkstatte and its emphasis on hand-crafted homewares and other objects that were both useful and beautiful.  That concept of usefulness and quality seems to be striking a chord with my designs lately, hasn’t it? Must be my practical Midwest upbringing.

Anyway, back to the Cape Ann collection. I love Ms. Burton’s charming textile designs and illustrative work  and wanted to try something like this myself. So although I don’t think of myself as an illustrator, a few of my illustrations sneakily made their way into this collection. For example, this print is called Indian Summer, which is my version of a toile and features drawings of children playing. If you look closely, you’ll even see S and Bear! (She loves it that her favorite dress has a drawing of her on it.) My favorite drawing in this print is the boy and girl playing dress up. He’s wearing scuba flippers and she’s got butterfly wings and an over-sized hat. The images are sweet and a little quirky, to keep the feeling of the print a bit lighthearted.

The Virginia’s Closet print is taken more or less directly from my sketchbooks and includes many Oliver + S pattern designs. When we introduced Cape Ann at Quilt Market last spring (was it really that long ago?) I drew some of these clothing designs directly onto the chalkboard walls of our booth, just for the fun of it. (Sorry they’re a bit hard to see in the photograph below. Click on the image if you want to enlarge it.)

Like the Folly Cove designers, I was also inspired by a lot of the flora and fauna of our own neighborhood, right here in New York’s East Village. Last fall when I was designing this collection we walked by loads of chrysanthemums plants on our way to S’s school every day. Those autumn flowers inspired two chrysanthemum prints, Chrysanthemum Swirl and Starburst Mums. We also pass some gingko trees on our way to the library every weekend, and the fallen leaves inspired the Gingko Toss print. As far as the rest of the prints go, you know I like a good stripe. This one is reminiscent of a classic ticking stripe (but hand-drawn in this case, to give it a little charm and character). It is great for boys, too.

And of course the collection includes a polka dot. I’m a sucker for polka dots. You too? I think this one turned out really fun and versatile. I added a surprise along the selvedges of the polka dots. They’re little labels you can sew into your finished projects to personalize them a bit. I’ve been sewing them into samples, and they add a sweet little personalized detail to the clothing. S likes them because they’re soft and they help her to identify the back of her pants. They’d be a nice addition to anything you sew, really.

Here are the colorways and all the prints for the collection together:

The Cape Ann prints work nicely together for quilts as well as for apparel. Like the Folly Cove Designers, the fabrics are sort of a co-operative of designs, I guess? I’ll show you some quilts soon, but here are a few examples of Oliver + S patterns that combine multiple prints, just to show you what I mean. Nothing overpowering in these print combinations. Instead, they play nicely together. They’re a little like a well-behaved playdate where the parent doesn’t have to constantly intervene and can let the kids play nicely on their own. You know what I mean.

And there’s one more special aspect to this collection: all the prints are also available in a brushed cotton! This is a fabric that’s similar to flannel; it’s so soft and cozy. I think you’re really going to like it. Quilters have been telling me how much they prefer brushed cotton over flannel because it doesn’t pill and shrink like flannel. I wasn’t aware that you could tell that much of a different, but I just like it because it feels amazing.

So there you have it! Cape Ann starts shipping this week. Of course I started a Flickr group for it, and one of these days we’ll get around to adding buttons for Flickr groups to the sidebar here so you can easily find them.

I can’t wait to see what you make with these fabrics. I hope you’ll enjoy them!

For the next two weeks (through October 11, 2011), we’re offering a 40% discount on our Modern Workshop fabric packs.

To receive the discount, use coupon code MW40 at checkout. Please note that supplies are limited, and the discount is only available on remaining in-stock items.

You can view a short video of Liesl introducing the Modern Workshop line here.

To make this tote, I selected these prints from Modern Workshop because I thought the saturated colors, combined with the chocolate brown, make a nice transitional palette as we start to think about fall. But it still looks pretty OK hanging out at the pool at the height of summer, doesn’t it?

In fact, it looks even better in the pool with all that blue surrounding it. (I took its place on this air mattress shortly after shooting this photo.)

Maybe I like it there because the lining reminds me of water.

You can find the free instructions for making this bag right here. We call it the Mother-Daughter Tote because it’s great for grown-ups to carry along just a few essentials (it’s big enough for a book but small enough to work more like a handbag) and because children like it too. Maybe because they want to be like their moms? I don’t know, but S certainly manages to find all sorts of uses for hers.

We still have some fabric packs available if you’d like to sew your own bag with Modern Workshop.