Harvest Festival Pattern Ideas

The Northern Hemisphere harvest begins with grapes in late summer and ends with roots going into the cellar, and Thanksgiving covers only the last stretch of it. If you design for the whole season, you get a wider set of motifs and a much longer selling window than a turkey and a cornucopia can offer. For the holiday-specific version, the Thanksgiving pattern design ideas post covers it; this one follows the farm calendar instead.

Late August and September belong to fruit.

• Grapes and vines: bunches in deep plum and green, with curling tendrils and broad leaves. A vineyard print can run as a trellis stripe or a loose tossed repeat. Grape harvest in Europe is called the vendange in France and the vendemmia in Italy, which give you shop-name ideas as well as motifs.
• Apples and pears: halved fruit, blossom and leaf sprigs, and small seed-and-core details. Draw them slightly lopsided for a hand-picked look.
• Hops and barley: pale green cones and golden grain, fitting for brewery and cider-house products.
• Honeycomb and bees: late-summer honey collection, with hexagon cells that make an easy repeat.

October brings the heavier crops.

• Squash and gourds: not just orange pumpkins but long, striped, warty and green varieties
• Hazelnuts, walnuts, chestnuts: nuts in shells, split open, with their leaves
• Mushrooms: foraged chanterelles and porcini in a basket-and-leaf layout
• Late flowers: sunflowers, asters and chrysanthemums, which keep blooming in the field edge; see sunflower patterns

The harvest moon, the full moon closest to the autumn equinox, deserves a motif of its own: a large cream disc above rolling stripes of field.

By November the work moves indoors.

• Root vegetables: carrots, beets, turnips and parsnips with their leafy tops
• Hedgerow berries: blackberries, rosehips and sloes in dusky colors
• Preserving: jam jars, pickling crocks, bundled herbs, hanging onions and garlic braids
• Hearth details: cast iron, baskets, woolen blankets

This is where harvest turns cozy, and it works particularly well on kitchen textiles. The kitchen textile pattern design guide covers tea towel and apron layouts.

Harvest is marked in many ways. Canadian Thanksgiving is on the second Monday of October. Harvest Festival services are a long-standing tradition in the UK, and Michaelmas on September 29 was historically a major point in the farming year. Other cultures have their own harvest-moon celebrations, such as the Mid-Autumn Festival, which has its own visual language and is covered in the Mid-Autumn Festival pattern ideas post. Avoid mixing such motifs together under a generic "harvest" heading.

Each palette fits within earth tone patterns, which gives you a consistent foundation for a mixed collection.

• Crate-label style: a bordered block with a motif and room for a farm name
• Seed-packet stripes: repeating narrow panels with a plant illustration in each
• Market-stall awning: wide stripes in two harvest colors for tablecloths and bunting
• Basket weave grounds: a woven texture behind the motifs for a handmade feel

Farm-market tote bags, jam-jar labels and gift wrap, kitchen towels, harvest supper tablecloths, school or community harvest festival bunting, and fall wreaths all work. Shops can list the collection from August and keep it through November without changing a thing.

To start, try Browse Styles in the Thanksgiving and earth-tone categories, or use Describe It to write "tossed hedgerow blackberries and rosehips, dusky palette, linocut style". New accounts begin with 5 free credits, and each tile arrives in about 20 seconds. Link the idea to your wider Thanksgiving patterns offering if you sell both.