We’re on the cusp of autumn. It’s a new year, and the air is blessedly cool. Sukkot is coming, and so is Thanksgiving, and so are all the warm memories that come with cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg.

And to celebrate the season, here’s an original Sew Jewish fabric print: Vintage Apple Harvest.

Newsletter subscribers learned about this design last week, but I didn’t go into the background of the design there. A friend asked if I designed the print. I did! It’s one of my first fabric designs. So I thought I’d tell you more about it here.

Autumn in the Hudson Valley means apples

The concept was inspired by autumn in New York’s Hudson Valley, where I did a lot of my growing up and where I now live. Apple orchards dot the land along the river valley here, and in the fall, driving along the river means passing acres of apple trees and stopping at roadside farm stands to pick up a wider range of varieties than you can find in stores. In the past few years local distilleries started selling craft ciders, giving indie breweries a run for their money. And the season doesn’t feel complete without an afternoon of apple picking.

So for me, autumn apples aren’t just about the fruit itself, but about the orchards and the harvest, climbing the ladders up among the trees, the feel of wooden crates and baskets, the sense of the rich soil.

Vintage Apple Harvest captures that feeling. The individual images of ladders, buckets, and other apple harvesting motifs that make up the print were collected from nineteenth and twentieth century orchard management books. All the details are presented in a deep red color that captures the feeling of fall.

Get the fabric at Spoonflower

The design is available to order in a variety of types of fabrics through Spoonflower. If you’re not familiar with Spoonflower, it’s a specialty fabric printing company. If you go to their website, Spoonflower.com, you can order the Vintage Apple Harvest design in more than a dozen types of fabrics, including:

Cotton fabrics for quilting
Linen cotton, which is great for tea towels and table linens
Velvet and minky for cuddly throw blankets
Linen or canvas, for a great autumnal pillow cover or a tote bag to carry those apples home from the farmers market

Or let Spoonflower do the sewing

Spoonflower will even do the sewing for you, if you prefer, as you can order home decor items made with the print. Order these items and more and have them shipped to your door, ready to bring that autumn richness to your home: