Quilting Fabric Brands: A Guide to Who Makes What

1. How the fabric industry is layered

There are five layers between a cotton field and the bolt at your shop, and the names on the selvage usually belong to the middle one.

1. Mills. Weave the base cloth (greige goods) and often print it. Most quilting cotton today is woven and printed in South Korea, Japan, Pakistan, India, and China. Mills rarely have consumer-facing names.
2. Converters, which quilters call "manufacturers." Moda, Robert Kaufman, Riley Blake, Andover, and the rest of section 2. They specify the base cloth, commission or license designs, manage printing, and sell finished bolts wholesale.
3. Designers. Artists and studios who license artwork to a converter. Their name goes on the selvage next to the converter's. Some stay with one house for decades; others move.
4. Distributors. Regional wholesalers carrying many converters' lines so a small shop can place one order. Invisible to the consumer, but they are why a shop in Montana can stock a Japanese import.
5. Shops. Independents, big-box chains, and online retailers. Independents buy bolts of roughly 15 yards and choose collections a season ahead.

Some names on our manufacturer list are labels inside a larger company (Kona inside Robert Kaufman, Paintbrush Studio inside P&B Textiles); we list them separately because that is how quilters ask for them.

2. The big US quilting-cotton houses

The converters whose bolts make up most of the shelf in an American quilt shop. Descriptions are short on purpose; the linked pages have websites and retailer lists where known.

• Moda Fabrics — the house most shops build around, operating since 1975. Enormous designer roster, and the company that made precuts (jelly roll, layer cake, charm pack) a standard vocabulary.
• Robert Kaufman Fabrics — wholesale supplier since 1942 to quilters, garment makers, and manufacturers. Home of Kona Cotton, the solid most quilters mean when they say "a solid," in hundreds of consistent colors.
• Riley Blake Designs — bright, clean modern-traditional prints; basics, flannels, sparkle cottons, organics, knits, and laminates.
• Andover Fabrics — a broad catalog from classic to contemporary, and the US home of several well-known designers including Alison Glass.
• Windham Fabrics — quilting cotton, batiks, and flannels; strong in both reproduction and modern lines.
• Free Spirit Fabrics — the designer-driven house: Tula Pink, Anna Maria Horner, and the Kaffe Fassett Collective are all distributed through Free Spirit in the US.
• Michael Miller Fabrics — novelty and conversational prints, plus its own solids line.
• Benartex Fabrics — 100% cotton designer prints; a big traditional and seasonal catalog.
• Henry Glass Fabrics — traditional, folk, and country-leaning prints.
• Hoffman Fabrics — Hoffman of California; best known for Bali batiks and for metallic and digital prints.
• Timeless Treasures Fabrics — a very wide range, from blenders to novelty.
• Northcott Fabrics — the Canadian house behind the Stonehenge textured blenders and a large seasonal and landscape catalog.
• Marcus Fabrics — the reproduction specialist (Civil War, 1800s, 1930s prints), with more than a century in fine cottons.
• Maywood Studio — 100% cotton for patchwork, known for blenders and flannels.
• P&B Textiles — designer quilting-weight cottons, now operating under the Paintbrush Studio brand, which also makes a well-regarded solids line.
• RJR Fabrics — a longtime house; its Cotton Supreme solids are the usual alternative to Kona.
• QT Fabrics — the current name of the house long known as Quilting Treasures; vivid color and a large licensed and novelty catalog.
• Wilmington Prints — a precut specialist: 2½", 5", and 10" bundles in more than 45 colors, plus its Essentials blenders.
• Blank Quilting — cotton prints sold to independent shops and wholesalers; "Blank Quilting Company" is one of the most common searches that reaches our manufacturer pages.
• Clothworks — a smaller, curated catalog of quilting-weight cotton.
• Dear Stella Design — traditional prints with a modern edge; a favorite for novelty and children's quilts.
• Art Gallery Fabrics — premium quilting cotton with a noticeably silkier hand than most, plus knits, flannels, and rayons.
• Ruby Star Society — a designer collective founded by former Cotton+Steel designers; distributed through Moda.
• Cotton+Steel — contemporary prints and solids for modern quilters; the label whose original designers went on to form Ruby Star Society.
• Cloud9 Fabrics — 100% certified organic cotton, modern prints; the standard answer to "who makes organic quilting cotton?"
• FIGO Fabrics — contemporary cotton and specialty fabrics, bold modern designs.

3. UK and European labels (and the Rowan question)

• Liberty Fabrics — the London house famous for tiny florals. Classic Tana Lawn is lighter and finer than quilting cotton (and well above $20 a yard); Liberty also makes quilting-weight lines that behave like ordinary cotton in a quilt.
• Lewis & Irene — a British house with a large catalog of traditional and contemporary prints.
• Makower UK — a UK converter closely tied to Andover, known for seasonal and blender ranges that show up in US shops too.
• Tilda Fabrics — the Scandinavian label with the "perfectly imperfect" cottage aesthetic: soft florals, small-scale prints, coordinated color stories.
• Oakshott Fabrics — UK-based, specializing in shot cottons (warp and weft in different colors) that shimmer as they move.
• Dutch Heritage — 17th- and 18th-century reproduction prints from the Netherlands, designed by Petra Prins and Nel Kooiman. See also Den Haan & Wagenmakers, the Amsterdam reproduction specialist.
• Stof Fabrics — a Danish supplier to the quilting and craft trade, from basics to Christmas prints.
• QuiltMania — the French magazine publisher that also produces fabric collections.

Is Kaffe Fassett still with Rowan?

This is one of the most common questions that brings people to our manufacturer pages, so here is the direct answer. For many years the Kaffe Fassett Collective (Kaffe Fassett, Philip Jacobs, and Brandon Mably) was sold under the Rowan Fabrics name in the UK. Today the Collective's quilting cottons are currently distributed by Free Spirit Fabrics in the US, and that is where a shop orders them. Rowan remains a UK brand name, best known now for knitting yarn rather than quilting cotton. Older bolts marked "Rowan" are the same designs from the same people; only the distributor changed. Brand relationships shift, so if you know this has changed again, tell us and we will update the page.

4. Japanese fabric

Japanese quilting cotton has a reputation for print quality and unusual bases (linen-cotton blends, double gauze, lawn). It costs more, typically $16–$24 a yard in the US, and it is worth it for the right project. Bolts are often narrower than 44", and linen blends shrink differently from cotton, so prewash a test swatch.

• Kokka — Osaka manufacturer founded in 1948; the base for designer collaborations including nani IRO (watercolor artist Naomi Ito's painterly prints) and Echino (bold graphic designs).
• Yuwa — finely crafted cotton for quilting and patchwork; often lawns and florals.
• Daiwabo — the source of "Japanese taupes," the sophisticated yarn-dyed neutrals used in taupe quilts.
• Sevenberry — part of Fujie Textile; charming small-scale prints. In the US you will often find Sevenberry prints on Robert Kaufman bolts.
• Cosmo Textile — traditional Japanese textile expertise applied to quilting cotton and craft materials.

5. Batik makers

Batiks are wax-resist dyed cottons, mostly made in Indonesia for the US quilting market. The base cloth is a tighter, higher-thread-count weave than printed quilting cotton, which is why batiks feel crisper and are a favorite for appliqué.

• Island Batik — hand-dyed batiks in rich, complex color; the same team runs White Owl Textiles for printed cotton.
• Banyan Batiks — Northcott's batik label; layered, hand-dyed color.
• Hoffman Fabrics — Bali Batiks, the line many quilters learned batiks on, including the Bali Hand-Paints watercolor blenders.
• Anthology Fabrics — premium cotton and batik collections, known for vibrant batiks.
• Batiks Etcetera — a retailer rather than a converter, curating hand-dyed batiks from Hoffman and other producers; one place to compare lines.

6. Designer labels

A designer label is an artist's name that has become a brand. The fabric is still printed and distributed by a converter; the designer's name is what quilters shop by. The ones most often asked for at the counter:

• Tula Pink — saturated, whimsical, hidden-animal prints, available through Free Spirit. Her solids and thread lines have their own following.
• Anna Maria Horner — painterly florals and large-scale prints, produced by Free Spirit.
• Alison Glass — modern, color-forward prints and the Sun Print series; produced with Andover.
• Tanya Whelan — vintage-inspired florals and shabby-chic prints.
• Kaffe Fassett Collective — the bold, large-scale florals and geometrics described in section 3.

Designer collections sell out and are not reprinted the way basics are. If you love a print, buy what the quilt needs plus a little; in two years it will be on eBay at three times the price.

7. Print-on-demand, licensed, and specialty labels

• Spoonflower — print-on-demand fabric from more than a million independent-artist designs, plus your own uploads. Digitally printed to order, so expect higher per-yard prices and a slightly different hand from screen-printed cotton; the trade is a print nobody else has.
• Camelot Fabrics, David Textiles, and Springs Creative — the licensed-character houses (Warner Bros., Hasbro, Disney, Marvel). This is where a Star Wars or Peanuts quilt starts.
• Shannon Fabrics — not cotton at all: the Cuddle line of minky and plush, the usual backing for baby quilts that need to be soft rather than crisp.

8. What the bolt label means, and how to judge quality in hand

The bolt end gives you the converter, the collection, the designer, fiber content, width, and sometimes a thread count. What the common words mean:

• Quilting cotton / quilting weight. 100% cotton plain weave, roughly 4–5 ounces per square yard, 42–44" wide. The category almost everything in this guide belongs to.
• Thread count. Threads per inch, warp plus weft. Most quilt-shop cotton is in the 60×60 to 78×76 range; big-box cotton is often lower and looser; batiks run higher. Higher is crisper and more opaque, not automatically better, and very high counts are harder to hand quilt.
• "Quilt-shop quality." Not a standard, but honest shorthand for converter-grade cotton: consistent weight, good dye penetration, minimal shrinkage, prints registered on-grain.
• "Premium." Marketing. Some houses use it for their long-staple or finer-weave lines; others put it on everything. Judge the cloth, not the word.
• Big-box cotton. Often a lighter base with more sizing (starch) to feel crisp on the bolt. It softens and thins after the first wash.

How to tell quality in hand, in the shop:

• Hold it to the light. An even, tight weave with no thin patches. If you can see through it clearly, it will be sheer in a quilt.
• Check the print against the grain. The print should line up with the weave at the selvage. Off-grain prints never square up.
• Rub the back. Good dye penetration shows the print faintly on the wrong side. A stark white back means shallow printing that fades.
• Crumple it. Quality cotton recovers with a soft crease; heavily sized cotton feels papery and holds a sharp one.

9. How collections and precuts work

Converters release fabric in collections: 20–40 coordinated prints in a few colorways, designed to be used together. Collections ship to shops on a schedule (two or four "seasons" a year), stay on the shelf for a year or so, and are then gone. Basics and blenders (solids, tone-on-tones, Stonehenge, Grunge, Kona) are the exception and are reprinted for years.

Precuts are a collection pre-cut into a standard shape so you get one piece of every print:

• Charm pack — 5" squares, usually 42 pieces. $10–$14.
• Layer cake — 10" squares, 42 pieces. $40–$55.
• Jelly roll — 2½" × width-of-fabric strips, 40 pieces. $40–$55.
• Fat quarter bundle — 18" × 21" cuts of the whole collection, roughly $3.50–$4.50 per fat quarter.

The trade names (Jelly Roll, Layer Cake, Charm Pack) started as Moda's; other houses use generic names (2½" strips, 10" squares) for the same thing. Full definitions of these and the rest of the jargon are in the quilting glossary.

FAQ

Related guides

• Local Quilt Shop vs. Online Fabric — where each tier of fabric is best bought, and when online wins.
• Quilting Glossary: Frogging and 22 Other Terms — precuts, selvages, blenders, and the rest of the vocabulary.
• How Much Does It Cost to Make a Quilt? — what all this fabric adds up to by quilt size.
• How to Market a Quilt Shop in 2026 — for the shop owners deciding which of these houses to stock.