Danhui Nai was born and raised in China by parents who were artists. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a painter. After college, she worked in the textile industry in Manhattan and took courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She studied interior design in Paris. Danhui Nai now lives and works in California. She paints in gouache, watercolor, oil, acrylic, and tempera–often layering colors. Flowers–especially roses–are her favorite subjects, but she also enjoys painting the wildlife she sees on her daily hikes.

If you look at the fabrics Danhui Nai designs for Wilmington Prints, you will see that all of her education and previous experiences come into play. A current collection of Danhui Nai prints features romantic florals, butterflies, and dragonflies. Another collection of Danhui Nai Wilmington fabric evokes the spirit of California along the Pacific Ocean. It features sailboats, anchors, ships’ wheels, whales, lobsters, and crabs. The fabrics in these collections are available as Danhui Nai fabric by the yard and precuts.

The area where Danhui Nai really shines are her unique fabric blenders. Blenders are non-directional fabrics with small patterns or prints. A sewist might treat them like a solid. From a distance they look like a solid but with a little something extra–depth, texture, or dimension that a solid doesn’t have. Fabrics that act as blenders create visual contrast with the larger prints in a quilt.

At Missouri Star, the best loved of the Danhui Nai fabric blenders are Danhui Nai Dry Brush fabric by Wilmington. This fabric was no doubt born from Nai’s love of layering colors. If you can’t see a picture of Dry Brush fabric, imagine this… Your living room wall is painted pale blue but you want it to be a brighter shade of blue. You begin repainting the wall. You finish a bit of work, but need to stop for a while. You paint out your brush. In other words, you paint all of that darker blue paint over the lighter blue wall until your paintbrush is dry. The effect on the wall is that lots of the light blue wall shows through the darker blue brushstrokes. Not what you ultimately want for a wall, but it’s a very cool effect on fabric! This is the concept of Danhui Nai Dry Brush fabric.

Danhui Nai Dry Brush is a specialty quilt fabric that Missouri Star carries in a profusion of colors. We also offer Dry Brush as Danhui Nai precut fabric in a variety of sizes–including Danhui Nai wide quilt backing. If you have not used Dry Brush or another Danhui Nai fabric in a previous project, you might enjoy using it in an upcoming project. We think you will like the results!