The Pattern Post: Green Won the Year

The Pattern Post · Tuesday, October 20, 2026

The people, patterns & possibilities shaping the creative industry.

If you're new here, The Pattern Post is my free weekly read on surface pattern design, art licensing, and illustration news, every Tuesday. This is issue one, sent October 20, 2026.

This week in a sentence: Green won the color this year, and the human hand has won the consumer. Design accordingly!

From Bonnie's Desk

Welcome to the very first Pattern Post!

Hi friend, and happy Tuesday! Welcome to the very first issue of The Pattern Post.

Here's the idea. Every morning I read a newsletter called Morning Brew. It's how I know what's happening in the world before I've opened my laptop, and I've wanted something like it for our world for years. So, I'm making it! Every Tuesday I'll gather what's happening in surface pattern design, art licensing, and illustration, filter it through what I've learned from designing since 2012 and teaching this craft for the better part of seventeen years, and tell you what I'd do about it. A place to stay informed and encouraged.

It's a big week at our house. Our English Cream Golden Retriever puppy, is coming home today. On the desk, I'm writing the spring volume of Pattern Magazine, and Volume 6, Marking the Moment, just hit the shelves at Barnes & Noble (you can find a copy right here). I'm drawing a brand-new gift wrap design for Your Print & Pattern Payday (the workshop I'm hosting next week), and Thursday is a photoshoot day for the winter trend report, which means a long table of mockups... and a lot of coffee.

Out in the wider world, Benjamin Moore made it official that 2027 is a going to be green year, Etsy told us exactly what shoppers are typing into the search bar this winter, and the fabric houses posted their November and December lineups.

☕️ Pour something warm, and let's dive in. We have news!

In this issue

• Benjamin Moore named Webster Green its 2027 Color of the Year last Wednesday, with an eight-color palette, a gorgeous pink called Wild Aster, and a surface designer's illustrations on the campaign. Green has officially won the year!
• Etsy's Fall/Winter trend report says "More is the mood this season," searches for hand painted items are up 280%, and ruffle tablecloths are up 841%. Yes, that's eight hundred and forty-one.
• Riley Blake posted twenty-two November collections, FreeSpirit has twenty lines coming, and Cotton+Steel's 2027 calendar announces three new names to its designer list.

The fabric houses are busy, friends!

Making Headlines

Benjamin Moore picked green. It's a sweep!

Image: Benjamin Moore

Benjamin Moore announced last Wednesday that Webster Green HC-130 is its Color of the Year 2027, "the quintessential shade of green," a mid-tone the company says "echoes the past while embracing the present." It sits at the center of an eight-color Color Trends 2027 palette: Nelson Blue ("Watery pale blue that emanates casual elegance"), White Down, Wild Aster ("A graceful pink with notes of pale gray"), Shakespeare Tan, Antique Copper, Townsend Harbor Brown, and Durango, "A deep neutral with rooted olive tones." Andrea Magno, who leads color for the brand, says the pick pairs "reassuring stability with optimistic energy." And the campaign illustrations are credited to Tanu Vasu, a surface designer. I love it so much.

🧹 That makes it a sweep. Sherwin-Williams chose Celery, Behr chose Grounded, Dulux chose Soulful Sage, PPG chose Country Soil, and now the last big American brand has landed on green too. When every paint deck points the same direction, the pillow, bedding, and wallpaper buyers follow about six months behind, because their customers are standing in a freshly painted room wondering what goes with it. So this week I'd pull those eight colors into a swatch group and recolor a hero print against Webster Green, with Wild Aster and Shakespeare Tan doing the talking. Green walls need something to sing next to them, and I'd like it to be yours.

Etsy counted the searches, and more is more

Image: Etsy Seller Handbook

Etsy published its Fall/Winter 2026 Seller Trend Report last Wednesday, built from three months of US search data compared with last year, and the first trend is called Merrymaxxing: "More is the mood this season." The second trend, Mark of the Maker, is the sentence I'd tape above my desk: "Visible brushstrokes, hand stitching, and uneven edges are becoming a coveted sign of quality, not a flaw." Searches for hand-painted items were up 280% and hand-woven items up 230%. Then there's Table Dressing (ruffle tablecloths up 841%) and Family Reimagined, where "Pet gifting-related searches have doubled."

Etsy also handed its shopper-facing F/W Trend Edit to a guest editor for the first time, the creator Mandy Lee, who summed up the season in a sentence: "We want our things to look like they belong to us."

I mean, friends, Etsy just described the way we work. Pattern on pattern, hand-drawn marks, a ruffle or two. The practical move is to stop cleaning everything up so much. When you Image Trace a gouache motif this week, leave the brush edge a little bit rough. Shoppers are searching for the very thing we've been good at for years!

The fabric houses just showed us January

Riley Blake's November 2026 coming-soon page is live with twenty-two collections, and two of them are nostalgia licenses: The World of Strawberry Shortcake, six designs in three colorways each plus panels and kits, and Winnie-the-Pooh Baby, seven designs in three colorways each. Around them sit batiks, flannel solids, a canvas, and designer lines, and the December page already lists thirteen more. Thirty-five collections in two months (I think somebody in Utah needs a nap).

Image: FreeSpirit Fabrics, Ampersand by Zen Chic

Every fall, while the rest of us are pressing leaves and lighting the first fire, the fabric houses are already living in January. FreeSpirit has eighteen collections waiting on its coming-soon shelf right now, and I’ve been reading the stories behind them the way I read seed catalogs in winter: slowly, with a pencil.

Zen Chic’s Ampersand is described as “layered prints that work together as a cohesive modern design system.” Alongside it sits Whisp, a twelve-color basic “designed to read like a solid,” which is the quiet companion every loud print needs.

Shell Rummel’s Saltwater “began with translucent washes of watercolor.” You can feel the brush in that sentence.

And e bond’s IMPRINT began as a hundred-day Instagram project, carving rubber erasers into little relief prints, one a day. “While printing them for yet another idea,” she writes, “it finally clicked that these marks would make incredible fabric designs.” A hundred days of carved erasers, and now it’s a fabric line. The junk drawer is officially a studio.

Cotton+Steel is telling the same kind of story a few months ahead. Its 2027 “I” season brings Space Cadet by Chelsea Ekberg in February, Rifle Paper Co.’s Garden Club in March, Flower Farm by Erin Silliman in April, and Happy Mail by O’Yeah Designs in May.

Image: Cotton+Steel Fabrics, 2027 collections

I've lived on the other side of a coming-soon page since my first collection with Art Gallery Fabrics in 2012, so let me tell you what that shelf looks like from the designer's chair. The artwork you're seeing for January was likely finished last January, approved over the spring, and the designer is already deep into the collection after the one after this (at least I know I am). That's why the time to pitch Christmas is usually Christmas. If you have a holiday collection in you, the fabric houses are choosing 2027's right now.

Pattern POV

The thing you used to erase might be the thing that sells

I want you to notice what Etsy's data and Benjamin Moore's campaign are saying in the same week. The shoppers are searching for brushstrokes, and the paint company hired a surface designer to illustrate its color of the year. The market is not asking us to be more polished and it's certainly not asking for AI to do the work. It's asking us to show up and show more humanity in our work. What they're paying more for now is the evidence that a person made it: the wobble in a line, the puddle in a wash, the edge that didn't quite close. So this week, loosen the hand, the thing you used to erase might be the thing that sells!

More news in brief

Image: Chasing Paper

🏷️ The rugs at High Point have artists' names on the labels. Fall Market runs through tomorrow, and the buyers' guide reads like a licensing roster: Surya is showing more than fifty handmade rugs and pillows with textile artist Liora Manné, and Loloi has seven new Chris Loves Julia collections including Ramona, "its first washable line." Ruggable launched "our first-ever wool collection" and Sara Story's Hill Country for Christopher Farr, which she says "evokes the quality of a hand-drawn line."

Image: Surya, via Home Accents Today

🛍️ Spoonflower refreshed the shop-template article. The help article was updated last Wednesday with a few clarifications: "All updated shops will go live at the same time" in December, your old shop URL "will continue to redirect to the new shop page," and you "can continue making changes, previewing updates, and republishing your redesigned shop as often as needed." The hard date is still "Existing artists must complete their shop update by November 5," which Spoonflower calls "the deadline to publish your new Artist Shop updates to avoid delisting." Bless them for the redirects!

🗓️ Etsy's biggest sale of the year wants your yes by next Tuesday. Cyber Specials runs November 23 to December 1, and Etsy says to "Opt in by October 27 offering at least 25% off for a chance to be featured in Etsy's marketing."

Image: Jewel Branding & Licensing, via License Global

💡 A surface designer's new line of lighting! Jewel Branding placed Nikki Chu with Quorum International for an eight-piece collection of pendants, sconces, and flush mounts in glass, leather-look textures, and hammered metal. Her design director said she "has a distinctive ability to layer materials, patterns and influences."

🏛️ Heritage archives are busy, too. Historic Royal Palaces renewed with Olympia Le-Tan for three book clutches inspired by Hampton Court, "Hand-embroidered with silk thread and felt appliqué," and the British Museum is expanding Bastet, its illustrated cat character, into Japan and more stationery.

🦃 Jewel Branding already knows what Thanksgiving 2027 looks like. The agency's Key Trends: Thanksgiving brief, posted last Friday, calls for "deep, saturated florals and block-print patterning that feel hand-stamped," surfaces that are "generously layered rather than sparse or minimal," and a Nature-Led Harvest direction of wheat, gourds, heirloom pumpkins, foxes, and hedgehogs. Agencies publish these so buyers can request the art, which means the art has to exist first. Consider this your nudge!

🛏️ Rifle Paper Co. is making beds now, and Chasing Paper is at the lake. Rifle's Artichoke Garden bedding with The Company Store landed on Saturday, "a soft, hand-stitched quilt, an embroidered pillow cover, and more cozy, tonal styles," with the quilt from $349 and the pillow cover at $139. Chasing Paper's Cedar Lake collection launched last Tuesday with seven wallpaper patterns (plaids, a paisley, a loon) in four materials plus fabric by the yard, sheers included. Wallpaper companies selling fabric, paper companies selling quilts. This tells me you can truly draw for the motif, and let the substrate sort itself out later.

Image: The Company Store, Rifle Paper Co. Artichoke Garden

Open Doors

Opportunities open right now

Everything here is open right now, closest deadline first. (Times are the organizers' own.)

• Tue, Oct 20, 7 PM UTC: Spoonflower's Added Texture wallpaper challenge. Free; $200, $100, and $50 in Spoonflower credit for the top three, $20 for 4th through 10th, top 100 featured. That's today, friends.
• Fri, Oct 30: FreeSpirit's 25th Anniversary Block Party. A 12 1/2" unfinished block in any FreeSpirit fabric, with purple; free; 25 blocks become a quilt auctioned for Nest, and each chosen maker gets a tote "valued over $650."
• Fri, Oct 30: h+h americas 2027 retailer scholarships from the Craft Industry Alliance. Five awards worth about $1,418 each for shop owners who have never attended. Send it to your favorite quilt shop.
• Sat, Oct 31: the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition, extended from the 26th. Five pieces on a single theme; €25 plus VAT.
• Sat, Oct 31, 11:59 PM EDT: QuiltCon 2027 quilt entries, $20 per quilt, Modern Quilt Guild members.
• Sat, Oct 31, midnight: Illustration West 65. $35 per entry ($20 for members); worldwide.
• Sat, Oct 31, 7 PM EST: SAQA's Fungus Among Us, $50 for up to three entries, members only.
• Mon, Nov 2: early-bird pricing ends for the 38th Louie Awards, the greeting card industry's own awards, open to "designers, artists, creators, and publishers from around the world." $60 for members and $75 for non-members until then; entries close January 14, and there's an Artist of the Year category. Hint, hint.
• Tue, Nov 3, 8 PM UTC: Spoonflower's Cozy Cabincore. Same prize tier.
• Thu, Nov 12: the Booooooom Illustration Awards. A free entry for a single image, a Product & Merchandise category, five $1,000 prizes.
• Tue, Nov 17: The Hopper Prize, $40 for up to ten images, grants of $4,500 and $1,000; and the John Ruskin Prize at 5 PM GMT, £9,500 in prizes including a £3,000 first prize, textiles included, worldwide.
• Thu, Nov 19: AQS QuiltWeek Paducah 2027 quilt contest, $25 for AQS members and $40 for non-members.
• Mon, Nov 30, 7 PM ET: SAQA's Color in Context: Green. Entries open November 1; $40 for up to three by November 15, $50 after. Green again!
• Tue, Dec 1: the World Illustration Awards 2027 call opens.
• Fri, Dec 4: priority deadline for the American Craft Council's new Craft Objects & Design Atlanta show (November 2027), with a $450 Early Career booth.
• Thu, Dec 31: QuiltCon 2028 faculty applications. The guild still says "we have very few surface design based classes."
• Mon, Jan 4, 2027, 5:30 PM GMT: the Post Wave Prize for Illustration, free and worldwide for illustrators not yet published in children's books; £3,000 and a spot at Bologna.
• Rolling: Camp Minted 2027 (March 8 to 10, San Diego) takes workshop proposals through tomorrow, Wednesday the 21st; Threadless opens "Secret Societies" on Friday, October 23 at 10 AM CST, free to enter with $1,250 and a $250 gift code for first place, and Minted's November rounds (Wedding Day-Of Signs & Tabletop, Baby Shower, 2027 Disney Stationery & Art, and Samsung Art) are on its calendar.

Pattern Forecast

Green is the color, and more is the mood!

Green closes out the 2027 season, and the scorecard is remarkably consistent: Celery, Grounded, Soulful Sage, Country Soil, Glidden's Artifact, Valspar's Cottage Door, C2's Pueblo, and Little Greene's Marle, "a perfectly balanced mid-tone brown paint." Green and earth, with pink and copper for warmth.

Etsy's Merrymaxxing is the shopper's version of the pattern-on-pattern we've been seeing all fall, and Patternbank's SS28 forecast rests on three macro trends it calls Wilding ("Nature unbound"), Origins ("Culture reimagined"), and Transcend ("Reality expanded"). Nature unbound, in green, with ruffles.

💪 We can do that.

Further out, Maison&Objet named "Sensory Shift" the theme of its January fair, and Business of Home's High Point preview flagged stripes as the pre-Market signal. The Style Spotters picks land after Market closes tomorrow, so the full report comes next week.

Worth your time

• Watch: Textile Talks tomorrow, Wednesday, at 2 PM ET: Jamie Swartz on "New Acquisitions at the International Quilt Museum," free on Zoom and always recorded.
• Learn: Patternbank's plain-English guide to exclusive versus non-exclusive print licenses, posted last Monday, with a rule worth borrowing for your own pricing conversations: "if you'd be upset to see the print on someone else's product, buy it exclusive."
• Read: Linocuts: A History by Gill Saunders and Ella Ravilious (Thames & Hudson and the V&A, out last Tuesday, 189 color illustrations), and Women Textile Designers, from May Morris to Lucienne Day to Althea McNish.
• Browse: Rifle Paper Co.'s holiday shop, twenty-three named patterns where "Each design starts with an original gouache painting by Anna Bond," and Spoonflower's Patchwork Revival entries before voting closes today.
• Save a seat: Adobe MAX, November 10 to 12 ("Free online registration includes keynotes and Sneaks and access to online and on-demand sessions," with Marisol Ortega and Adam Kurtz on the speaker list); the Eric Carle Museum's "Weaving Words: Fiber Arts and Picture Books", opening November 21 with Dinara Mirtalipova and Faith Ringgold among thirty-two books; and Christmas at Biltmore, opening Tuesday, Nov 3, just about an hour from me!

Repeat After Me

Word of the week

Colorway. The same design printed in a different set of colors, the same drawing in a new wardrobe. Riley Blake's Strawberry Shortcake and Winnie-the-Pooh Baby each ship in three colorways per design, Zen Chic's Whisp comes in twelve, and Ruggable's new wool rugs are eight designs in fourteen colorways. The practical bit is that buyers think in colorways before they think in new designs, because a second colorway costs them almost nothing and doubles the shelf. So when you finish a hero print, build two more colorways before you move on, give each a name you'd be happy to see on a selvage, and pitch the family, not the print.

Until next Tuesday

Thank you for reading the very first Pattern Post! I have wanted to write this for years, and now I get to read it with you, with a cup of coffee going cold next to me.

If you have a friend who'd love a weekly date with the creative industry, send this along, and they can sign up right here. I'll be back next Tuesday with the High Point report and, if all goes well, a puppy asleep under the desk. Same time, same place. :)

Grateful for you!

P.S. Your Print & Pattern Payday starts Tuesday, October 27, three days of pattern design with a live session at 3 PM ET each day, and the seat is ten dollars. Head on over and grab yours.

New here? Get The Pattern Post in your inbox every Tuesday.

From my studio to yours

Ready to create & grow?

Here's how we can make it happen together.

Transform your passion into a career. Join me in the Surface Design Immersion Course and take the ultimate step toward creating a life and career you love through surface design. Enrollment opens once each February. Learn more

Come play with pattern in Pattern Play. A monthly membership for anyone who loves pattern and wants a creative practice to come back to, month after month. Come play

Teach what you know with Artisan Educator. My course for artisans and creatives of every kind who are ready to turn their craft into an online course, from choosing what to teach to welcoming your very first students. Learn more

Soak in the pages of Pattern Magazine. A quarterly print publication for surface designers, filled to the brim with artist interviews, licensing insights, trend forecasts, and heartfelt inspiration. Read the latest issue

Pitch with confidence. The Ultimate Licensing Handbook is a must-have guide with over 400 licensing partners and everything you need to pitch your work. Grab your copy

Tune in to The Professional Creative. Creative business inspiration on the go (bonus points if you listen while doodling!). Apple · Spotify · Show notes