Cherrywood Fabrics

Cherrywood Fabrics isn't a typical quilt shop — it's a Minnesota hand-dye house, woman-owned, known specifically for a suede-look cotton that's become its own kind of signature. Quilters who work with fiber artists' techniques, especially anyone doing painted or landscape-style quilts, will likely already recognize the name, since Cherrywood's hand-dyed cotton shows up in projects well beyond Minnesota.

The shop sells wholesale as well as retail, which tells you something about the scale of the operation — this isn't a small dye studio doing a few yards at a time, it's a real production house that's built a following among quilters specifically for the depth and richness of its hand-dyed color.

If you've ever admired a quilt with unusually rich, saturated, almost suede-like fabric and wondered where it came from, there's a good chance the answer is Cherrywood. Worth seeking out directly if you want that particular look in your own stash, whether you're buying a single fat quarter or ordering wholesale.