Summers in Iceland

I grew up in Selfoss, in the south of Iceland, and the thing I miss most is the summer light. In June the sun barely sets. The days run together into one long, bright stretch, and after a winter of near-total dark, the whole country seems to wake up at once. The meadows green over. Wildflowers come up along the roads and the rivers. Everything grows fast and all at once, because it does not have long.

That is the feeling I built Nordic Summer around, the fabric line I designed for Andover.

My grandmother's garden

Some of my earliest summers were spent in my grandmother's garden. In Icelandic we call a grandmother Amma, and my Amma's garden was full of poppies that grew wild all over it. She would let me loose to pick them, as many as I wanted. My grandfather was there too, and he was the one who taught me to make something every day. A lot of who I am as a designer started in that garden.

Years ago I turned that memory into a fabric line and called it Amma's Garden. Nordic Summer comes from the same place, only bigger. Where Amma's Garden was one garden, this is the whole landscape: the wild flora, the meadows, the still water, the light that will not quit.

What the season looks like in fabric

When I laid the collection out, I wanted those few weeks on the cloth. The prints carry the names of what is actually there: Wild Flora, Angelica, Groundcover, Meadow. Angelica grows tall and wild across Iceland the way it has for as long as anyone can remember. The colors follow the season, soft creams like the summer light, berry and jam tones, the teal of a cold lake, the green of a field that has finally come in.

If you have quilted with our fabric before, you know I like range: a spread of tones and scales that give a quilt somewhere to breathe, prints that mix with each other and with what is already in your stash. I have written before about how I pull a collection together. Nordic Summer was built to work exactly that way.

The line is here

The Nordic Summer collection is available now. If you want the whole range in one piece, the half-yard bundle carries the full line, and the Kite Runner in Nordic Summer kit pairs it with a quilt made to show the prints off.

I hope it brings a little of that long northern light into whatever you make. That is the summer I grew up in, and it is the one I wanted to hand you.