Anna Maria Horner is an inspirational, strong, powerful, creative, and all around magical woman. She is one of those industry icons you’ll love even more after you’ve met her. Her personality is magnetic, her generosity and compassion endless. We’ve long adored her designs and have a feeling that many of you understand exactly how excited we feel every single time a new collection gets introduced.
Now, Anna Maria is celebrating 15 amazing years of fabric design with her latest collection, Hindsight. It feels like a personal tribute, pulling inspiration from her favorite and best-selling prints. We’re honored to have collaborated on a limited edition, custom-designed tin which holds 4 mini thread collections. Six large spools of 12wt, three large spools of 50wt, five small spools of 50wt, and 5 small spools of 80wt in Anna Maria’s signature colors, providing the tools needed for all of her go-to techniques. (Grab your very own tin right HERE.)
To give a proper introduction, we thought we’d let Anna Maria take the stage, with our sincere gratitude!
Hindsight is a joyful look back at my body of work over the last 15 years in fabric design. It is impossible not to mention how much the community of quilting has continued to inspire my work and therefore this collection. Traveling and teaching classes allows me to watch various coveted pieces of fabrics from all points in time come together to create beautiful vignettes. That celebratory mingling as well as my own desire to look back at my art and reimagine it with fresh eyes were the guiding inspirations in Hindsight.
The showy “Guest of Honor” flower got a sparkling “Center” and now floats among the boisterous “Summer Totem” blooms and branches. “Sinister Swarm” moths invade and dance through the thicket of “Small Gathering”. The abstract “Volumes” stack of books gets painted with “True Colors”. “Echinacea” breaks its own norm and a single field is now dappled with many sunset rich hues. I hope that Hindsight feels like a treasure hunt of favorites and contributes to new discoveries in art and in patchwork.
Note: Hindsight is shown above in both the Fresh and Jewel Colorways. Prints include: Honorable Mention, Ghost Nouveau, Piecework, Stitched Bouquet, Sinister Gathering, The Classics, Fresh Echinacea, and Honeycomb.
The Honorable Mention print is a gutsy mashup of past prints that I felt were just asking for it. Reacquaint yourself with Guest of Honor from Garden Party (2008), Summer Totem from Loulouthi (2011), and Centered from Mod Corsage (2016).
The original, giant Guest of Honor print was so fun to use as Applique but there was only ever one scale of flower repeated. So the new print updates the center of the large flower, and offers a few more scales and styles of blooms, all floating amongst some effervescent flowering vines from Loulouthi. This has become a favorite that continues to inspire new ideas.
This print is called The Classics which is a play on the stack of books idea that the original print was based on. The structure is owed to Volumes from Drawing Room (2008), my first cotton sateen collection for home decor use. All the printy bits come from all sorts of collection sources, there’s: Cathedral and Filigree from Bohemian (2005) which both got reprinted in Good Folks (2009); Sealing Wax and Haystack from True Colors (2013).
This print is such fun to chop up because it’s easy to cut strips across the color and treat it like cheater patchwork, and it’s also fantastic as a backing or home decor piece.
This print is called Stitched Bouquet in honor of the original inspiration piece, a needlepoint that I made as an 11 year old girl. This is a story of two prints coming together to form a new one — Handpicked from Honor Roll (2014) and Twill Bouquet from Dowry (2013). These prints just work so well together in terms of scale balance and their common spot color style florals, that it was no real work to develop the resulting print.
Years ago when my mother was visiting, she took my lonely unused needlepoint and sewed it into a pillow sham for my bed that I still love to use everyday. She taught me to use the things that are hand made, special, imperfect or all of the above. It’s what makes us who we are, and our homes an extension of that.
This is Sinister Gathering which is a print that combines Small Gathering from Good Folks (2009) and Sinister Swarm from Field Study (2011).
It’s funny that even as I type those collection names and years, I picture the @quiltmarket booth where I presented each. My fabrics have become like mental markers, and help me remember other details of life as related to what I sewing with at the time. I digress. I do love the airy springy-ness of this new variation and feel that the moths flying through those branches create a movement and breeze that the trapped, static bouquets of the original did not. When I compare the moths’ new environment to their former background of wing relics, they appear to be set free. And that feels just right to me.
On the left is Echinacea Glow. To be very honest, it was hard to feel like I could play around with the structure of what has proved to be the most widely used and most useful of all prints I have ever designed for quilting. So instead I played with the color and could not be more pleased that we now have four multi-colored fields of echinacea to choose from. Inspiration for this print was, of course, drawn from the original versions of Echinacea that were first printed in my Pretty Potent collection from 2014. That collection was inspired by the need to heal, and for imagery I looked to the flowering plants in our world that have provided balm.
This print is called Piecework and it could be my favorite. It is pretty close in structure to the original Centerpiece print from Garden Party (2008), but I altered the background design to include some swooping birds and different florals. The birds are from my Cutting Line print from Honor Roll (2015). I am all but broke on the 3 original Centerpiece prints- none of the original green, the yellow only exists in a doll quilt I made for Bela years ago, and just a scrap of the brown/navy! So… I’m personally very happy to have these bouquets in my life again!
Honeycomb is a slightly enhanced version of the original Little Honey print from Little Folks (2009). As simple as this design is, it’s always been so incredibly useful and I’m glad to have it back in the fold.
On the left is Ghost Nouveau! This print is combines the Nouveau Bouquet design from Drawing Room (2008) and Ghostwing from Field Study Linen (2013). The multicolored, day-glow result of the new fabric makes me really happy and the moths and bouquets are only slightly smaller than the originals in scale. This one is really fun to cut up and use as borders, or for vertically inspired projects like backings and curtains.
Links:
- Hindsight @ Free Spirit
- Hindsight Lookbook
- BUY Hindsight Tin + Threads @ Anna Maria’s website
- BUY Hindsight Fabrics @ Anna Maria’s Website
HUGE thanks to Anna for sharing her inspirations with us! What will you be making with Hindsight Fabrics & Threads? Follow along with Anna Maria Horner via Instagram & Facebook.
ABOUT ANNA MARIA
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Anna Maria Horner grew up in a house full of her dad’s paintings and with a closet full of her mom’s handi-work. Beds were warmed by the hand-loomed wool blankets sent by her grandmother from Greece. The busy bodies of her and her siblings were warmed by the beautiful hand-knits of their grandmother in Indiana. As a kid in the 70’s, she passed up store-bought Barbie dresses and instead created them from her mother’s fabric scraps.
In 1995, after graduating with an Honors Fine Arts Degree in Drawing from the University of Tennessee, Anna Maria opened Handmaiden, a clothing and housewares retail project. The shop served as home base for Anna Maria’s clothing line which she designed and produced, together with her mom. Eventually, the label was offered to the wholesale market, where it sold at several stores across the Southeast
Designing clothing for five years served a lifelong interest but Anna Maria kept her hands in many mediums on a daily basis. She stayed active artistically by exhibiting in galleries regularly. Her paintings, both small and large scale, are a part of hundreds of private and commercial collections.
Somewhere around 2001, her fascination with taking an idea through all the necessary steps from her sketchbook to a store shelf sparked the momentum to create a brand. Anna Maria’s fresh perspectives within traditional markets and her vision of being surrounded by the work of her own hands has led her to partnering with more than two dozen manufacturers to design homewares, gift items, and textiles. Her focus has intensified in the craft, sewing and quilting community where her creativity was first planted as a girl, and she has authored three sewing books, and self publishes a continuing collection of sewing, quilting and needlework patterns.
Anna Maria and her family make their home on a rambling two acres in Nashville, Tennessee. She works from a lofty, attic studio filled with fabric, thread, drawings, schemes and the remnants of intermittent playtime with the children. She is the mother of seven (6 to 27) and has been incredibly thankful to be able to seek out her creative goals in the presence of her family for almost 3 decades.
What a feast for the eyes!! Her work is so inspiring & her inspirations seem to come from another world. I love the joyful color & prints just bursting off the quilts! I’m just not sure I could ever ‘go there’ to make one myself!
It’s a stunning range!