delicious fibers

I put together a group of kits to make scarves. Yummy yarns and a variety of colour combos. I did demos Thursday night and Friday morning at Quilter's Cupboard in Uxbridge. Its a wonderful quilt shop with fabric tucked everywhere and best of all a wonderful group of people working & shopping there. Lots of laughs and a few tears too.
The drive there brought back great memories of when I started my first real job after graduating from university. Now I feel like I'm ready to start my second career.

fast fix for quilters

Moda has come out with wonderful collections of precision cut squares or as Wendy at Quilter's Cupboard says 'fast food for quilters'. All ready to go & sew.Hey, that's kind of catchy!
I'm not a big kit person. I've never bought a kit for its designed purpose. I have picked up the odd kit on sale for the individual contents only. BUT....
this I couldn't resist ... a delicious collection designed by April Cornell of stripes, polka dots, large scale botanical, small vintage motifs all in a fresh colour pallette of coral, teal, olive green and chocolate brown.
So what to do with them? They would look wonderful just sewn together with narrow borders but that's not my style.
To me one of the pleasures of buying fabric is bringing it home & introducing its cousins already in the stash. I've pulled fabrics for many quilts that I have no intention of actually making. Just an exercise in playing with fabric. This is especially fun and easy to do now that my fabrics are organized in the closet. This also helps me evaluate the stash. I don't have any great browns to go with these squares. I'll pick a brown for the border and the dark stripe for the binding.

I did pick the pattern before these fabrics. A modern pallette needs a modern pattern and obviously something that starts with squares. I settled on The Spin from Karla Alexander's book New Cuts for New Quilts More ways to Stack the Deck.
These are just sample blocks to work out the measurements but you can see how the square is surrounded with the other pieces that are stacked & cut. The squares end up in alternating directions to make the spin.
Now go & sew!

finished in 1 day!!

A record has been set. I started and FINISHED this wallhanging TODAY. (insert roaring crowd here)

The turquoise and black are actually 3D tucks that stand out from the background fabric by Paula Nadelstern. The tucks are then folded to form the wave of black across the piece. This is a technique by Caryl Byer Fallert called High Tech Tucks. It was featured in Fons & Porter magazine Sept/Oct 06.

It is sewn onto the batting to prevent any linger UFO labels.

New Toy

I got a new toy. the Janome Xpression needle felting/embellishing machine. 5 barbed needle basically jab fabric together. Hubby got it for $100 less than the going price so we are both happy!
It appeals to me because I love texture and the gleaner in me saves every little bit of stuff so I can use it all now. can hardly wait to play

fabric collage part 2

The collage is stitched, there were a couple of sections that stand out more than I want but they were eliminated after slicing & dicing. I find, like printed fabric, you really don't know a fabric until you take scissors or a rotary cutter to it.It was easier than I thought to cut it up into 2" squares. Made me realize how small those 1" charms really are.
I like how the squares look on black. Now to figure out what to do with them.

fabric collage

While going through my stack of Quilting Arts magazine for the billionth time I put in post-its of all the techniques I want to try. Tried a few on Friday. I'm really pleased with the painting with pattern stitches by Carole Redlich (issue 19 fall 2005 pg72) I tried. I prefer to call it fabric collage with my fancy pants sewing machine!
I'm working on a piece about 11" square. may cut it into smaller pieces for a journal quilt or it would be perfect for the fabric charms that have everyones attention at the moment.