YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA, USA
When Alison Glass’s children were three and five, her husband went back to school to get his PhD, and Alison started a home-decoration and organization business. Within a year, she had left behind the organization services in favor of project management. Working closely with clients, Alison created custom looks for new or remodeled spaces, including sewing and reupholstery projects. “I was using fabric from the quilt industry—mostly from FreeSpirit, because they were the ones doing home decor weight,” she says. “I became fascinated with the idea of designing fabric; the elements of color and repeat especially appealed to me.”
As her husband neared the completion of his dissertation, Alison designed several fabric lines. “It was a challenge to figure out how to present them to manufacturers. I didn’t really know people in the industry.” Alison decided to attend International Quilt Market, where she met with several fabric companies. After careful consideration, she signed with Andover Fabrics and worked closely with art director Kathy Hall: “She was my biggest mentor in terms of how fabric actually gets made and how to design in a way that works.” Alison’s first collection, Lucky Penny, was launched in 2012.
When designing, Alison begins with a theme. “Not a theme like ‘elephants’; it’s more what I’m thinking about. It probably has more to do with thoughts than visuals.” Some themes are layered and deeply personal; others are inspired by the exquisite details of the natural world as well as the man-made. “Making a conscious decision to see those beautiful elements creates a nearly endless stream of ideas and thoughts. I love the process of taking these glimpses and translating them into my own ideas, colors, and patterns.”
Alison’s lines are typically named before they are drawn. She begins with lists of design ideas and colors, working to develop her theme, then enhances the lists with simple sketches: “just enough to get the right shapes and lines.” Her first real designs are drawn on tracing paper, where she refines the lines and gets a sense of the repeat. “Fabric is weird. You can have a small element of a theme, but it becomes a bigger thing when you repeat the design across the fabric.” Once she gets immersed in drawing details, Alison says, she “can’t stop!”
When layer upon layer of tracing paper drawings reveals the final repeated motif, Alison takes a photo with her phone and uploads it to Illustrator, where she retraces the design. “Then I do some color work on the computer,” she explains, “not to perfect it, but to get an idea of what I want. Once I know where all the color placements are within the repeated design, I send it to Andover.”
Charlotte City Tote by Alicia Miller of Swoon Patterns, made from Alison’s “Art Theory” panel from her Ex Libris collection
The team at Andover digitally isolates the color areas and returns the design to Alison. She makes selections from the “kajillion colors that are possible with the printing system,” to translate the colors in her imagination and on her computer screen into information for the mill. “Fabric is not flat; it has texture. It looks different because of how the light hits it.” Alison sends her color selections back to the company, where a sample is printed. The process may be repeated several times to achieve the perfect palette. “I love the system,” Alison laughs. “It allows me to be highly controlling, which is apparently my favorite thing to be.”
While Alison refers to herself as “a super-boring dresser,” preferring gray, black, and brown to brighter shades, the colors she uses in her work are vivid and saturated.
I want the colors to be sophisticated and to last. I do colors [that] tend to be a little offbeat...Nothing is just red or just blue—it’s a few steps away from those colors. With highly saturated colors, you need other colors that are super-dull and pukey to make the saturated colors look really good. The contrast makes the brighter colors shine.
In addition to her print collections, Alison has developed three extensive coordinating lines of fabric: Mariner Cloth, Kaleidoscope, and Handcrafted. Mariner Cloth, a yarn-dyed cotton, adds texture to her fabric line and color palette. Each colorway uses only two colors, with alternating widths of textured weft stripes that highlight the contrasts.
Kaleidoscope is a range of shot cotton fabrics. Two distinct colors are woven together: one in the warp, the other in the weft. These intersecting colors create a third color, and as the cloth moves, the two-tone shadowing creates depth. In order to create the 40 fabrics in the line in shades consistent with her color palette, Alison sent more than 150 color combinations to the mill. “It’s a huge guessing game to know how two colors are going to look when you put them together in that manner....It took almost a year to get the colors right.”
Handcrafted is a modern interpretation of batik fabric made using a traditional process. Skilled artisans in Indonesia stamp designs in wax on undyed or colored fabric to create a “resist” where the original color of the cloth will remain distinct after the piece is overdyed. Each bolt of fabric is produced individually; the many hands crafting the cloth imbue the designs with perfectly imperfect variations.
“I want the colors to be sophisticated and to last. I do colors that tend to be a little offbeat...Nothing is just red or just blue.”
The “Lumen” quilt, a pattern designed by Nydia Kehnle for Alison Glass using Alison’s collection Sun Print 2019. Color layout design by Alison Glass, pieced by Kelley Paz, and quilted by Gina Pina
For Alison, running her business is key. “I’m definitely not sitting around drawing all day. I spend much more time running the business and marketing than I do designing, but that’s starting to shift because I don’t have enough time to do everything.” Alison’s brand has expanded from fabric design and collaborations with quilting and sewing pattern designers to other products that feature her surface designs. “The artwork morphs...I’ve changed the way I draw lines because I want the lines themselves to be more usable for other products, such as embroidery patterns, gift wrap, notecards, enamel pins, and art prints.”
When designing, Alison is extremely conscious of the end use of her fabric: “I’m not creating a finished item; I’m creating material for somebody else to use. If I don’t do that in a way that is easy for them to translate into their own projects, then it’s not a great line.” Alison aims to create designs with timeless qualities. She wants to produce materials that are worthy of the time and effort it takes to create something by hand, materials that embody her company’s motto: Beautiful, useful, high-quality design.
