From Spotted to Whisp: Same Quiet Magic, Fresh New Chapter

There's a fabric in almost every quilt I make that doesn't get much credit.

It's not the one people point to first. It's not the showstopper. But take it out — and suddenly the whole thing feels slightly… off. Like a sentence missing its punctuation. (Yes, I went there.)

That fabric is what I call a coordinate. And for years, the one I kept reaching for was Spotted.

A Little Backstory (Bear With Me — It's Worth It)

Spotted was a blender line I designed for Moda. The idea was simple: a fabric that reads almost like a solid, but with just enough texture to keep it interesting. No style cues. No trend signals. Nothing that screams "this belongs to a specific decade or aesthetic." Just a quietly confident texture that works with everything — florals, abstracts, batiks, traditional, modern. Whatever you're making.

The texture, by the way, is rooted in a printing technique called risograph — a method known for its grainy, layered, slightly imperfect quality. You don't need to know what that is. You just need to know it gives the fabric a warmth that photocopied solids simply don't have.

What happened next surprised even me: with every new Moda collection I designed, we added new colorways to the Spotted library. One season at a time. Until, at some point, we looked up — and there were 260 colors.

Shop owners had built entire libraries of Spotted. Their go-to basics. The fabric they always had in stock because their customers always needed it.

Enter Whisp

When I made the move to FreeSpirit Fabrics, I thought a lot about those shop owners.

They had invested in a library. And I wanted to give them something that let them continue that story — not start over.

So I designed Whisp. Same philosophy: subtle texture, timeless character, zero style agenda. Different enough to stand on its own as a new fabric for a new publisher. Similar enough that on a shelf, next to Spotted, you'd only notice the difference on second glance.

Same soul. New name.

FreeSpirit and I are starting with twelve colorways. And those twelve? They were anything but random.

Twelve Colors, Two Jobs

Six of the Whisp colors were carefully calibrated to work with Ampersand — my debut FreeSpirit collection. Black, white, charcoal, that warm tomato red, a grounded green, and mustard. High contrast. Graphic. A little bit bold and unapologetic. Exactly what Ampersand needed.

The other six extend the palette into quieter territory: a soft blue, a cool mint, a second green, a warm orange, a second neutral gray, and Limestone — a beautiful, creamy tone that goes with absolutely everything and asks for nothing in return.

Put all twelve together, and you'll notice something: no pink. No purple. No violet.

That was intentional.

I wanted these twelve colors to carry a Mid Century Modern mood — warm, graphic, a little retro without being costumey. The kind of palette you'd find on a vintage poster or a well-designed 1960s kitchen. It ties back to that risograph origin in a way that feels cohesive rather than coincidental.

My Favorite (Since You Asked)

Honestly? The tomato red.

It's warm. It's saturated. It doesn't apologize for being exactly what it is. In a sea of carefully curated neutrals, that red walks into the room like it owns it.

That said — the blue and mint tones? Quietly dangerous. Get them next to the right green or that soft gray, and suddenly you have a palette that tells a completely different story. Cooler, calmer, a little more coastal. Same fabric. Different mood entirely.

Which brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while.

Color Stories (A Sneak Peek at Something Coming)

One of the things I love most about a good coordinate fabric is how a single colorway change can shift the entire feeling of a project. Same blocks. Same pattern. Swap one color — and you've made a completely different quilt.

I want to start showing that more intentionally. Think of it as color inspiration, served regularly: a combination, a mood, an image that captures the feeling I'm after.

Consider this post the very quiet beginning of that idea.