modern workshop from moda is now shipping

Last month I previewed the next Oliver + S fabric collection, Modern Workshop. I’m happy to announce that the collection starts shipping to independent fabric stores worldwide today.

As I mentioned earlier, Modern Workshop was inspired by the Wiener Werkstatte, a circle of artists and craftspeople based in Vienna at the turn into the twentieth century. I’ve long admired the aesthetic that this group pioneered. As I’ve said many times on my personal blog, one of my favorite places in New York is the Neue Galerie, a museum devoted to modernist Austrian art which often features exhibitions related to this movement.

I have a particular affinity for the philosophy behind the Wiener Werkstatte. These artisans were living during the height of the industrial revolution, which for the first time in history made mass produced items widely available at low prices. Contemporary society is experiencing a similar situation (a second industrial revolution?) with the rise of the Chinese economy and the proliferation of extremely low-cost imported items that were not available even a decade ago.

In response to their economic environment, the members of the Wiener Werkstatte created hand-crafted homewares and other objects that were beautiful and that are noted today for their enduring quality and their design sensibility. As you can imagine, I have a strong admiration for this philosophy, and I highly value today’s unique, hand-crafted items that stand in opposition to the cheap, mass-produced objects that flood our store shelves.

For Modern Workshop, I re-interpreted the aesthetic pioneered by the Wiener Werkstatte for the contemporary, twenty-first-century crafting community. This collection includes 32 prints in both floral and geometric motifs that make use of a fresh, twenty-first-century color palette. The collection includes small scale and large scale prints which makes it ideal for both garment sewing and quilting. You can preview all the prints included in the collection by viewing the line list on the Modern Workshop page in the Fabric section of our website.

We showed Modern Workshop to fabric shop buyers at the last International Quilt Market. Here’s a little video that Moda filmed during Market that highlights some of the prints and base fabrics (wovens, interlock knits, and waterproof coated fabrics) included in the line.

Modern Workshop should begin arriving on store shelves in your area next week. But if you can’t wait to try the fabric, we still have some pre-cut fabric packs available right now in our web store.

I’ll be back next week to show you some of the things we’ve been making at the studio with the collection.