It's Sunflower Season!

Drive by a farmer's field right now and you might see this: 

Drive to your local quilt shop right now and you might see this:

Ann Lauer's latest collection, Here Comes the Sun, is available in quilt shops now! We asked Ann to talk about her new fabrics:

Why did you choose to do a fabric line with sunflowers?

I think they’re universally loved. You see a lot of sunflower fabrics, but I wanted these to be different. These are realistic but with artistic license, which makes them even prettier.

What makes the sunflowers so gorgeous?
There’s more shading on the petals, and that creates more movement than in nature. If you look, you’ll also see an extra layer of translucent petals on the outside. I love that look—it turned out really terrific. The sunflowers themselves are dusted with gold.

 The seeds are arranged just like in a real sunflower—the fibonnaci mathematical formula. It’s such a great spiral design.

This isn’t a traditionally colored sunflower collection.

No, I didn’t want to go with the seasonal yellow-brown palette. By putting jewel tones in, the line became brighter, and we could use black instead of brown as an accent. Yellow is beautiful on purple and also on teal. The purple is paired with fuchsia, and the teal with lime green. Both really set off the sunflowers.

Tell us about the sunflower prints.

In the focal print, the spacing is such that anywhere you cut, you’ll get a great combination of flowers.

Another print has the sunflowers more spread out—it’s intended for fussy cutting. The flowers are set up in clusters of one, two and three, and there are leaves and buds as well. More of the dappled background shows through.

What about the stripe?

It takes these same really wonderful sunflowers and alternates them with a narrow geometric print. This time the flowers have leaves and buds around them as they undulate up the stripe. There’s also a nice delicate gold scroll tossed in. The narrow part of the stripe is actually swirling seeds. Both the sunflower and the geometric stripe alternate four times across the fabric, so you can cut four borders from a width of fabric.

Tell us about some of your favorite coordinates.

I’m just thrilled with the mosaic spirals. They’re actually interlocking spirals of little segments of mosaics. There’s really wonderful movement and color variety.

The swirling seeds is a tonal print. The seeds look like they’re in a wind tunnel. Five layers of value create nice depth.

The scrolls are interlocking and delicately lacy. It’s a very soft textured background, and one layer of scrolls has little squares in it. I love the interest that it adds.

The dappled texture is a coordinate that’s the same as the background behind the sunflowers. It’s outlined beautifully with the gold metallic. It works really well as a background and comes in natural, purple and teal.

Love the Here Comes the Sun fabric? Throughout the week we'll be sharing a tutorial, a magazine project, and a virtual trunk show, so be sure to stop by to see more! 

Click here to see the entire Here Comes the Sun collection.

Click here to visit Ann's website and see her patterns featuring Here Comes the Sun. 

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