Fabric Reference - Blog Posts

What are your go-to sites for finding fabric in period prints/colours, specifically cotton? I'm starting a quilt that's going to be entirely of repro or plausible-looking 18th/19th century prints and while I've had some luck with 'traditional' collections from brands like kona, was wondering if you knew of any smaller purveyors I might look at?

Ooh, I don't think I'm the best person to ask about historical cotton prints, since I've never sewn a historical garment from a reproduction print. Someone who's sewn 19th century day dresses would probably know some much better options.

My personal favourite places to get fabric are:

Pure Linen Envy, which only carries linen.

Pursilks, which has a variety of silks, cottons, and synthetics, but they're not historical.

Burnley & Trowbridge, which focuses on historical fabrics and reproduction notions, but have barely any printed cottons.

Renaissance Fabrics, which has a few cotton prints, and some nice silks and wools.

Williamsburg also has some reproduction cotton prints, and Virgil's Fine Goods has a few as well.

However! If you want a bunch of different little pieces and are willing to do some editing, one option is to dig through Smithsonian Open Access, and The Met's collection, both of which have a huge amount of public domain high resolution images of fabric swatches & fragments, including lots of 18th & 19th century printed cottons. Some are pretty stained and ragged, but there are plenty of nice looking ones too. Make a pinterest board for them!

You could make a blank document the size of the printable area of a yard of fabric at 150 DPI, and fill it up with all your favourite fragments (cropped and resized to be the right scale) and then get it printed on a basic cotton on a site like MyFabricDesigns, ArtFabrics, or DesignYourFabric. (Spoonflower is also an option, but they print with inks, and the other 3 I linked use reactive dyes, which are more colour fast and don't make the fabric stiff and crinkly like the inks do.)

I plan to eventually make repeating patterns of some of those swatches, but it's quite a lot of work for each individual pattern, and I think you could get enough small bits for a patchwork quilt pretty quickly of you just arranged them all in one big rectangle.

I don't know if you have any photo editing programs, but if not then photopea.com works, and is one I use sometimes!