When we first saw these subtle prints, we walked on by them. They really don’t jump out at you. But then we looked at them again, and kept looking, and looking. What we ended up seeing were some of the lovliest, soft-toned, subtle fabrics we’ve yet seen, anywhere. And the quality, the first thing we look for in fabrics, was astounding.
So, we asked our Maywood rep to sit down with us and explain these fantastic
Serenity - Daiwabo Taupes from Maywood
fabrics to us. Since she lived for several years in Japan, and made a study of Japanese fabrics, aesthetics, and lifestyles, we figured she would be well-equipped to answer our questions about these intriguing fabrics.
She explained to us that Daiwabo is a very old Japanese fabric mill and design house that has been designing prints to appeal to the real Japanese aesthetic for many many years now, long enough so that many of their fabrics are now considered antiques. The Taupes are Daiwabo’s unique fabric line that are very popular with Japanese quilters. Here’s a description from Daiwabo’s own website:
“In Japan, Daiwabo is known for the antique look of its prints that is realized by delicately mingling colors. The Taupe’s prints take their inspiration from nature — with a twist. Stylized plant and leaf motifs, reinterpreted from antique designs from the 1870s to the turn of the 20th century, feature muted hues that gracefully change to blend with two or more color families. For instance, Taupe’s smoky pink that lends itself to either the gray or the rose palette. It is Daiwabo’s proprietary coloration technique that allows quilters to create more freely — without being limited to a single color palette.”
11505-D from our Taupe Collection
Most of the Daiwabo Taupes are printed on highest-quality cotton but in a lighter weight than that preferred by US quilters. Many of these fabrics are used for garments, such as kimonos. And most of the Japanese prefer a lighter-weight fabric with less give than we prefer for quilting. If you see other Daiwabo Taupes, or increasingly, copies of them, they are likely to be printed on this lighter weight, stiffer fabric.
Maywood Studios has made a special arrangement to have Daiwabo print a number of their taupes on luxury quilter-weight fabrics. These fabrics are outstanding in every way, in quality of goods and quality of execution. They have the fantastic feel, finish and sewability that you’ve come to expect from Maywood.
Well, after we learned about the fabrics, we were looking through the many prints available and wondering just exactly where to get started on choosing our beginning collection. The fantastic thing about the Taupes is that everything works pretty well with everything else, so the real problem is in choosing what to start with.
Our rep led us through a process that helped us select a nice, coordinated mix of fabrics, 11 in all, for our first Taupe collection. First she had us go through and select a bunch of our favorite prints, the ones that appealed most to us. As usual, we had a little trouble agreeing on them, but it really wasn’t too bad. Then we narrowed down our original set of selections for focus prints to just a few. That became the heart of the collection. We then did the same thing for various sized prints and complemented them with various tones of lighter and darker, picking up different colors in the feature prints to form a nicely balanced collection. After all, the Japanese aesthetic is, if anything, to strive for balance.
We hope you like our opening collection of Serenity Daiwabo Taupes, we sure do. And we’ll most likely be adding new ones as time goes by. Cindy has a lot of plans for small and very pretty projects using these fabrics, she’s already grabbed about a gazillion patterns to look at for them.
Our rep Lynn, who’s an expert not only on these fabrics but also on quilting in general and has had many of her own patterns published, tells us these fabrics will also work incredibly well in patterns made for batiks. So, grab your favorite batik pattern, get some of these fabrics, and create a fabulous new look!
We also managed to get a few of the “Sweet 16’s” bundles of various Serenity fabrics, and a couple of large fat quarter towers that will be going on to the site in the next day or two.
Take a close look at these fabrics. If you ever wondered what true oriental fabrics were like, and what quilters there prefer, you might be pleasantly surprised.
See these fabrics on our web store by clicking this link.
