On today’s episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast, we’re talking about building a career as an artist who makes quilts with my guest, Jane Sassaman. After a varied career in the design world, Jane Sassaman began to quilt in 1980. She found that these “soft paintings” satisfied the draftsman, the craftsman and the artist […]
In a press release today Jaftex has announced that it is intending to purchase the fabric company Free Spirit from Coats.
Coats and Clark took the quilting community by surprise last week when the company announced they’d be closing Free Spirit Fabrics, their premium quilting cotton brand, effective May 1. The closure signals a softening of the market for quilting cotton after a 20-year boom.
Free Spirit Fabrics will be shut down by parent company Coats. In a letter sent to designers today Stephanie Leichtweis, who became president of North American Crafts at Coats in October, stated, “We have worked diligently for the past few years to make this a successful part of the Coats Craft business here in North America. But I am sorry to say that, despite our best efforts, we have continued to struggle with an inherent weakness in the business model and have not been able to demonstrate a profit.” The letter goes on to say, “We will not be producing new Westminster or FreeSpirit Fabrics from today onwards.”
On today’s episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast we’re talking about illustration and self-publishing with my guest, Jenean Morrison. Jenean Morrison is a surface and textile designer, painter, and the artist and publisher behind a popular series of self-published coloring books for adults, first published in 2012. Her coloring books have been published by […]