Lucie Summers: Summersville

Wide, open skies, crisp Scandinavian interiors, and farm life all influence Lucie Summers. And they’ve provided the inspiration for her first line of Moda fabrics, the aptly named Summersville.

Those skies surround her at her home in Suffolk, England. “Where we live is very flat and not having mountains or hills means you get a different quality of light,” she says. “I appreciate the clarity of color.”

Though she’s not from Scandinavia, she loves its aesthetic, the simple white backgrounds and bright colors she sees in magazines. “I’m a homebody and have an obscene number of interiors magazines,” she says with a laugh. “But my home will never look like that because I’m not tidy enough. I bring too many things home from thrift shops.”

And finally, farm life: she share her days with her husband, whom she’s known since she was five. They and their two sons grow potatoes and onions on land that once belonged to her husband’s grandfather. “Living on a farm has a huge influence on my work,” says Lucie. “It’s things I see when I’m walking the dog: tracks left in the road by the tractor, corrugated iron, rust, growing things.”

Lucie’s also been influenced by her mother, with whom she owned a quilt shop (or patchwork shop, as the Brits say) for ten years. “People came looking for peach and green, but 80 percent of what we had was bright and modern,” she says. Lucie’s mom is a longarm quilter and they were the first shop in the United Kingdom to offer a quilting service online. Lucie’s mother still quilts—she did all the quilts Lucie brought to Quilt Market last October—but they closed up shop when Lucie had her sons, so that she could devote the free time she had to her design work.

Lucie’s designs have appeared on stationary and a book cover. She also screen prints fabrics, which she sells through her Etsy shop. And she continues to be an avid quilter, making at least one each year to enter in the Festival of Quilts show in Birmingham. She and her mother also collaborate on quilts. “I do the printing and piecing and she does the quilting and binding,” says Lucie. “She always miters the corners. My inclination is to chop them off. We complement one another, and she’s been a very patient, fantastic teacher.”

Lucie is thrilled to be working with Moda. “They’ve been brilliant, so open, and the colors are true to my originals,” she says. “It really looks like me and my fabric.”

What keeps Lucie designing? “I do my work because I’d curl up and die if I didn’t,” she says simply. “There are people who have to be creative, even if it’s just scribbling on a serviette, and I’m one of them. It’s an impulse, like breathing.”