Fabric-palooza!

Whimsical Animal Mailboxes

In the past couple of weeks I’ve gotten some squishy wonderfulness in my mailbox. Heaven!

I do have a goal to not buy anymore fabric…uhmmm…and I excuse myself by saying that I only buy fabric on sale and usually is older fabric. When I buy older fabric I can call it scraps. I’ve been writing my own dictionary and I looked up scraps. It says 1. “Old or extra fabric, whether leftover from a project or bought.  2. Old fabric, that when bought, does not count as buying fabric.”

Since I am a honest person, I must say that this delicious fabric does not count as scrap:

This lovely fabric is called “Wee Wander.” by Sarah Jane. You can see her blog about her fabric here. I rarely go nuts over a fabric line, but in this instance I had to buy both colorways! I bought mine from Hawthorne Threads, which is a lovely online shop. What I really like is that if you like a fabric and they’re out of stock, they will email you when it is back in their store again.

That being said, let me share my windfalls:

My hubby and I were on a rare trip to Napa, which is about an hour away from where we live. As we drove around I saw a Hancocks fabric store. We don’t have any around us, so my sweet hubby pulled in for me to pet fabric. First thing I saw was a big sale! Fabric for sale at 50%-75% off. I started looking and filling my cart with bolts.

Hubby was perusing the store and when he came back to where I was, he looked at my cart in dismay.

“Are you going to buy all that fabric?”

“Yes! It’s on sale!”

“But how much does each one cost? That’s going to be a lot of money!”

I realized where he was coming from, he thought I was buying the entire bolt. Poor guy, he doesn’t venture into quilt stores much. Once I assured him I was only buying a little off each bolt, he was much happier.

I bought fabrics to pump up weak areas in my stash. And plaid! You can never have too much plaid!

Next was a sweet treat from my bloggy friend, T. She writes the blog QuiltNCards. She is a paper-piecing maniac and makes wonderful quilts too. I had mentioned in a previous post that I had very little novelty fabric. A few days later I got this in the mail!

T made a gorgeous, fun quilt with squares of novelty fabric which you can see on her home page using the link above. T had given me a square of fabric left over from that project. What a sweetie! I had the most fun looking through each piece. I won’t have to worry about novelty fabric for a long time.

Here are just a few of my favorites:

There is also a local online quilt store in my area. It is a very sneaky place because I keep going back and buying more. Unfortunately for me, Cottage Quilts is closing in September. Waaahhhh! She has some terrific sales going on now and you should take advantage! She has layer cakes, charm squares, jelly rolls, yardage, kits, and patterns.

One of my favorite items in her shop was her scrap bags. You would choose a color or theme and would get a wonderful selection of scraps! She still has green, red and Christmas scrap bags.

Here’s what I got from Cottage Quilts. The green is from the scrap bag I ordered.

I’m doing the extra happy dance in my piles of fabric and planning what I can do with them. Lucky me!

I’m hooking up at Confessions of a Fabric Addict for Whoop Whoop Friday. Her badge is on the right bar.

Happy weekend!

Really Random Thursday

Random is my middle name! It's my major form of organization. I dropped in on a new blog I'm following, Live a Colorful Life. She has Really Random Thursday and I decided this would be a fun thing to blog. You can get to the blog by clicking on the badge in the right column.

My sisty ugler came down from Ashland, Oregon to visit me last Saturday. It was very short and I wish there was more time. It was fantastic to see her and my niece. My sisty ugler is looking marvelous. She retired last summer, lucky her, and she is so much more relaxed.


Before she came down she told me she was giving up on quilting. Can you believe it??? Willingly give up something so wonderful? She had found that quilting was something she could do in little amounts of time that were in between all the craziness of teaching. Now that she has left the madhouse behind, she feels like its time has passed. I guess I can't complain...I got her stash!

So here's what's sitting in front of my design wall today...

It's not an overwhelming stash, but who cares? It's fabric, lovely fabric and it's mine, all mine! (evil chuckle) My sister was more of a project quilter and I don't know how she managed to control herself and not buy pretty fabric just for the beauty of it!

 Isn't this fantastic? My sister obviously has a good eye for color and design. This is a partially finished quilt. I will be in flamingo heaven when I put it together.

Here's a bin of 30's repro fabrics complete with pattern. I hear them calling me right now from the other room....Terri, Terri! Come out and play!

Isn't this going to be yummy? Again another ready to make quilt with pattern! I'm a lucky girl.

Here's just some fabric that I get to pet. There's more...you saw all the bins. There's some fabric from Zimbabwe because my sister goes there so often. A nice bin full of blues and another of blacks.

Heaven! I'm in Heaven!

Stash Count Week 3

A Traditional Double Wedding Ring

I'm following Judy at Patchwork Times to do Stash Counts. Check over at her blog to see other's stash counts.

Well, well, well. I went and did some Serious Fabric Buying this week. I bought eight yards of this absolutely lovely butter colored yellow for the background of the Double Wedding Ring. The quilt is going to be king sized--arghhh! And DWR has a lot of backgouund.

 Serious Fabric Buying tends to happen when you've got to do borders or backgrounds on quilts. The exciting factoid is: everything I'm buying is going to be used in the next few weeks! Oh, mmmm, except for the five yards of cheddar that I bought for my somewhere-in-the-distant-future Cheddar Bow Ties. To my credit, I've already started saving fabric for it...and it was 50% off. And I love cheddar so I had to buy more than I need to keep some on hand. Then there's the 1 yard of orange halloween plaid (for my future Moth in the Window which I'm also collecting for...) and the orange crackle because I hardly have orange in my stash. But those two were 40% off. And it was a Holiday Weekend Sale and you know, you're not supposed to miss Holiday Sales. And I had been in the house quilting for 7 hours and needed to get out and get some fresh air. And I figured if I didn't support JoAnn's that they might go out of business...

AND...I'm blaming Bonnie Hunter for every last piece of fabric I bought. All the patterns mentioned above, except the DWR, are hers! If she didn't write a great blog about using scraps and have this friendly, fun personality, I wouldn't have been drawn in. And further more, how do you get scraps if you don't buy fabric in the first place? 

What's that you say? "Bad excuses are worse than none"? That's what Thomas Fuller said. I think I like that guy. Oh yes, I like him a lot!

Here's my report:

Used this Week:  4.25
Used year to Date: 7 yards
Added this Week: 15 yards
Added Year to Date: 15 yards
Net Used for 2013: -8.25 yards

The Good News and The Bad News

Are you a "let's get the bad news out of the way first" person or "give me the good stuff first" person. Hang in there a sec. I flipped a coin: it's Tails--bad news first. This isn't going to hurt you as much as it hurts me!

Remember all those "piano keys" I was doing for the border of my Spiderweb Quilt? I was selecting the inner and outer border, found the perfect combination and found that those keys make it look Awful. All that work. I spent almost a whole day last Saturday cutting and sewing these babies. I need to look on the bright side: there's a quilt in my future that is just waiting for those borders!

Good News: Speaking of Spiderwebs. I found eight completed blocks while looking for something else yesterday. Hurrah! I thought the quilt was squarish at 6x7 blocks but what can you do when you run out of the middle fabric? Now I will be able add an 8th row and get it more into a rectangle shape.

Bed is calling and when I wake up, it's a Holiday and I get to Quilt!

Psst...don't let anyone know I have an order coming in from Connecting Threads!