I've been designing fabric collections for Moda Fabrics for nearly two decades. If you've ever made a quilt from one of my collections — Terrain, Canyon, Good Fortune, Reef, or any of the others — you already know the design language that lives inside every floriori™ phone case. This is the story of how those two things are connected, and why that connection matters to me.
It started at Surtex
In 2008, I showed my work at Surtex, the surface design trade show in New York where artists and manufacturers meet to license art for products. That show changed everything. Moda Fabrics — one of the most respected names in the quilting fabric industry — saw my work and we began a relationship that has now spanned more than fifteen years and dozens of collections.
What Moda gave me was something rare: the creative latitude to paint the world as I actually see it. My coastal perennial garden in Connecticut. The way color moves through a landscape. The botanical detail that only comes from looking closely at living things. Every collection I've made for Moda has been hand-drawn and hand-painted, rooted in that direct observation. Terrain came from the woodland floor. Canyon came from the sculptural geometry of desert plants. Good Fortune came from a love of pattern and symbol that felt both ancient and alive.
Quilters found these collections and made them into something I never could have imagined alone — heirloom objects, community projects, gifts carried across generations. That's a humbling thing to be part of.
The floriori collection
Recently, I've created a new collection for Moda Fabric called floriori. The name — a loose weaving of "floral" and the Italian fiori, flowers — captures something essential about how I work, in my garden and in my design studio: the botanical as living and seasonal subject, as structure, as feeling. The florior fabric collection brought together some of the most characteristic work I've ever done for Moda: the Petaline pattern with its scattered small blooms, the Butterfly and Pink Butterfly designs, Botanica and Botanica Pastel with their specimen-style florals, the Botanica Pastel's watercolor lightness.
When it came time to name this shop, floriori was the natural choice. It points to something rooted in my creative life: an ongoing, obsessive, joyful study of buds and flowers, and trying to listen and feel carefully the music of the season.
From fabric bolt to phone case
Here's what I find genuinely exciting about floriori the shop: it takes designs that quilters have loved — some for more than a decade — and puts them somewhere completely new. The Terrain design that became a beloved quilting fabric in 2013 is now on a phone case. The Canyon collection that earned a following among color-forward quilters is now in your pocket. The Peacock Sanctuary pattern, born from my Cuzco collection, is on a case you can hold in your hand every day.
These aren't adaptations or approximations. The same hand-painted artwork that went into the fabric bolt is what wraps your phone. The ink density we use in printing is high enough that the detail holds — the fine lines, the botanical specificity, the color relationships I spent weeks getting right in my studio.
For quilters who already know my Moda work, I hope floriori feels like a natural extension — a way to carry a design you love into a different part of your life. For anyone discovering my work through a phone case, I hope it's an invitation to look further. There's a whole creative archive behind every design here, and Moda Fabrics has been the home for most of it.
What's coming
The floriori fabric collection is new — and if you're a quilter, I'd encourage you to look for it at your local quilt shop or through Moda's network of retailers. The phone cases that share its name are available now at floriori.com. And there are more Moda-rooted designs here than you might expect — Terrain, Canyon, Reef, Good Fortune, Honey Honey, Sunnyside, Cuzco, Fandango, Paradiso, and others all have phone case expressions in this shop.
Every one of them started with paint, paper, and a garden that never stops giving me things to look at.
— Kate Spain