Clermont Farms by Minick and Simpson

When we started to work on this collection the first thing we were sure of were the colors. What we wanted to capture were the colors of denim, chambray shirts, and red bandanas.  Once we had that we started on the designs. In a rare occurance, we were at this stage when we were in Houston last fall for International Quilt Market. Also a rare occurrence, we drove to Houston. It wasn’t too hard to convince us for a small detour to Dallas at the Moda Fabric Headquarters immediately following booth take down in Houston.

At a fortuitous meeting with Cheryl Freydberg, the head of design, we started to play with motifs, scale, and texture. As usual, we had too many fabrics and had to weed it down some. Cheryl was a tutorial in design efficiency. She quickly sorted, stacked, and resorted our collection into a smaller, more concise grouping. While moving scraps of paper and color swatches around into groupings, she said she thought we achieved our goal of denim, chambray and bandanas. “It looks like clothing from an old farm”, she said. “Do you have a name?”. Uh, no. Polly and I groan at our poor attempts at names. It isn’t our strong point. We tried to come up with some, but they sounded too much like other recent Moda collections. “How about a real name that has some meaning to you both.” Oh! Okay. That is how Clermont Farms came into being.

Clermont Farm was a horse farm outside of Lexington Kentucky owned by our cousin. He raised champion trotters and pacers. The descendants of his horses are champions today. As kids we were regaled with stories of the farm and it’s beautiful inhabitants. We are proud to be able to keep the story alive.

– Minick and Simpson

We also get to announce the Red Rose Farm Giveaway today!  I have read a lot of heart warming and hilarious poems this past week!  To be fair I am only choosing from those that followed all of the rules.  


So here we go!  The 2 randomly selected winners that followed ALL the rules are….