About us
So who are What The Fabric?
The first important thing you should know is that we're quite chatty - we cannot even have a 5-minute conversation to each other on the phone! Grab a cuppa, and then come back to this to read and digest who we are, what we're about, and where you'll find us.
There comes a point in time when two best friends can add nothing more to a few casual ''what if we did this....'' type chats that we'd been having over the past couple of years. After assuring ourselves that the idea of launching a new modern quilting business just simply just boiled down to pooling some money together, using our respective contacts and experience from already being in the quilting industry, ordering and buying an excessive amount of fabric, patterns and notions to sell to a modern quilter which can be tricky to find in the UK, making several quilts with what we've purchased, and then launching their new business venture at Festival of Quilts 2024. Surely it couldn't be more simple than that. We've quickly moved on from the 'oh boy, are we crazy and really going to do this?' stage to 'its very real, theres no turning back and its definitely happening' stage' - What The Fabric? launched in August 2024.
The two best friends are Jo and Kim - unbeknown to each other, we both started our respective quilting businesses around the same time in 2014 - one in Wales and the other in Scotland yet we frequently saw each other at quilt shows, very quickly becoming friends resulting in their businesses benefiting from each other as we're at opposite ends of the quilting spectrum. You see, one sells quilting fabric and the other is a professional longarm quilter.
Having made wedding dresses, bridesmaids dresses, christening dresses and clothes for herself in her teens and early twenties Kim always had a pipe dream of starting a fabric based business, especially when she became hooked on patchwork and quilting. An opportunity presented itself in 2014 when she was made redundant working for a bank for 10 years. She recalls her then line manager telling her she had a 2-week period to hand her redundancy papers in - she took only 2 minutes to sign them! Living in her home town of Biggar, it didn't take long to come up with a business name - she started Biggar Stitches from scratch. Initially liking most genres of fabric designs and colours available for a quilter, however in recent years made a conscious decision with her business partner to just focus on selling traditional, rich, warm and cosy designed quilting fabric, including flannel, alongside their own patterns. She has a knack of really becoming familiar with a fabric designer, their collections and their colour palettes, even recognising them and starting to chat to them at Quilt Market. From the outset, Kim has had a tendency to make large bed sized quilts to help sell the fabric at quilt shows, and even encouraged their local town's quilt group to do a couple of year-long BOM style projects which also resulted in large quilt tops being made. But what does one do with one's large quilt tops which are just way too big to be quilted using a domestic sewing machine?
Perfect timing to introduce Jo - she started her business of Lou Lou Rioux around the same time as Biggar Stitches. Already an owner of a domestic sewing machine, but just using it to sew and quilt purely for pleasure, she visited Festival of Quilts where Gammill had a stand. Maybe it was love at first sight, or maybe it was a lightbulb moment for a career move from spending decades in the music industry (she still owns one of the biggest recording studios in the UK)? Or both? She recalls phoning her husband and telling him that she's going to buy a new sewing machine. "I think the whole of the NEC heard him shouting "HOW MUCH???" down the phone"... she meant a Gammill Statler and would need to clear some space for a 4m wide one! She'd also invest in herself to receive some professional training to start longarm quilting for a living. She took to it like the proverbial duck to water, has built up her reputable business from recommendations, and with Biggar Stitches showing off their quilts at shows they attend (which have been longarm quilted by Jo) she constantly has a queue of work - so much so that she now has two Statlers which she has cutely named Humphrey and Hamish. As well as individual quilters, her clients also include a very well known fabric and pattern designer, Alice Caroline, numerous interior designers, Oh and her quilting skills are starting to become a regular sight on the catwalk of London Fashion Week, in front of Dame Anna Wintour of Vogue no less.
We still live 350'ish miles apart (though Jo persistently tries to persuade Kim to make the move to Wales) so What The Fabric? is here online. Keep an eye our for us trading at a few quilt shows up and down the UK too. We'll keep in touch via socials, and we'll come to you and your quilt group to do a trunk show and a choice of workshop if you wish. Between us, we have so many more ideas we want to put in place to constantly excite and give the modern quilter something to look forward to seeing and then buying - they say that Rome wasn't built in a day ........... well, What The Fabric? has only just started too!
Follow us on our socials - Instagram and Facebook are already active, with TikTok, a YouTube channel and Pinterest following soon.
Lastly, just because of the subtle titles we've given ourselves - not (ha ha) - we're very friendly and approachable - please don't be strangers if you see us exhibiting at a quilt show.
Jo is Ambassador of Awesome, and Kim is the First Lady of Fabulous, xx