Tag: Fabric

New Fabrics from Denver and Seattle

I am in Denver for a conference related to my work work. I took a day off to hang out and relax a little bit. St. JCN came to join me and brought me these nice fabrics. The cups are, dare I say, cheerful! And the bonus is there is NO brown. See, fabric manufacturers, brown is not mandatory in coffee fabric.

The other thing about these fabrics is that they are not very good for my quiltmaking, except for the dots, of course. I just don’t use conversationals, but they are fantastic for napkins. Periodically, in the past, I have made napkins out of two fat quarters of fabric sewn together with a decorative stitch. Often, the napkin project became a big drag, because of the corners, usually. You can read a little about my last napkin foray here. With my recent Teacher Pillow experience, I am beginning to think I am just a quiltmaker and not much of a crafter. That is, however, a whole different subject and I am not getting into it now.

What I am getting around to is yet another reason for St. JCN’s nickname. She said she would make me napkins out this fabric. HOORAY! New napkins. What a saint!

The first shop we visited was after our gallery tour was the Golden Quilt Company. The Golden Quilt Company is across the street from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum (very convenient, because I was ready to touch some fabric after seeing the exhibit). What a friendly crowd! Not only did I find great fabrics, but we were allowed to take photos of whatever we wanted in the shop. Nice!

GQC had lots of brights and clear colors. The space was open and airy and on a quaint main drag in a nice looking small town.

As you can see, I branched out and bought non-dot fabrics.

Another shop that we visited was called Harriet’s Treadle Arts.


This is the shop of Harriet Hargrave, the machine quilting queen. The shop has been open for nearly 26 years, which seems like a long time in quilt world to me. Kim and Kari helped us in the shop and were extremely friendly. We heard all about their projects and the samples they made and they heard about our projects. The shop is medium sized and in a stand-alone building on W. 44th Ave in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I didn’t find it on Google or on Yahoo Local. It also was not mentioned on any of the web lists that I found before my trip. We were directed there by Jessica at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum. The store is decorated with lots of medium – dark wood and carries lots and lots of reproductions. However, the store does not exclusively have reproductions. As you can see, there were plenty of dots and brights and batiks to satisfy me. They carried lots and lots of tools, had a medium sized classroom, lots of great samples and a huge selection of books. I was pleased to see that they carried solids and Perl cotton as well.


I pretty much cleaned out their dots selection. 😉

I have done a lot in the past few days and will continue the travelogue another day.

Another Quick Bite (or Byte!)


This was a weird shadow I saw on my wall. Don’t you think it looks like a bear sitting in a chair with one leg crossed over the other?


New fabric.


More new fabric


Pineapples 13 & 14

Kristen, over at Ardent Peace saw the Pineaple blocks in person recently and said she hadn’t realize how large they were. The size, apparently, does not come through very well in the blog format. She asked me to give my dear readers some perspective. This block has a spool of red Aurifil thread on it. As you can see the blocks are quite large.


These are the Pineapple ‘scrap babies’. As I work through the strips, I find that I have litle bits of the strips leftover. I began setting them aside for who knows what. Finally, I decided I should use them up, so I used them on the beginning parts of Pineapples 15 & 16. The above two Pineapples are made from scraps to the point you see above. After this point, the sides get too large for scraps. Notice how much green is in them. I seem to have a lot of green strip ends.


Scrap babies grow up. These are Pineapple blocks 15 & 16.

Kaffe Fassett Spots

Be*mused turned me on to Kaffe Fassett’s new dots. She says has been trying to cut back on buying dots. I haven’t and keep buying more in case they stop making them. Follow her directions below to see Kaffe Fassett’s dot collection. Even though he forgets to put the fabric lines in his books, the man know how to design fabric!

clipped from bemused.typepad.com
  • And when are the Kaffe Fassett spots being released? The Westminster site won’t allow a link to the *spots page* (and I’ve just spent too much time trying to get around it, to no avail) but if you click on the KF page, then click on printed fabrics, then scroll down to the spots thumbnail, you will be richly rewarded. Darn…I’ve been trying to cut back on the polka dots, but I’ll be in line for some of these.

    		•

    Julie Finds the Fabric

    As you know, I used this Flea Market Fancy fabric by Denyse Schmidt for one of the Teacher Pillows. I used all that I had and decided I wanted more, so I could include some in the Chocolate Box quilt. Lazily I looked online. As I searched and didn’t find, I began to worry that I wouldn’t find any. I searched harder. I found a piece on eBay and bid, but someone else wanted the piece, too and bid at the last minute while I was at work, so I lost. St. JCN looked in Seattle, but no joy there either. I e-mailed various local shops to see if they had it, also to no avail. As I had less success, I became more desperate. Finally, after no success locally, I put out a call on a list of which I am a member and people around the country began looking for me, too.

    Success!!! Julie over at High Fiber Content and good friend found it! Hooray. Read about her fabulous adventure looking for this fabric. She doesn’t have a permalink, so scroll to May 10, 2007. Since the great search ended I have been casually looking and this particular fabric just seems to be gone. Weird.

    Handing Out Medals

    When a person needs a fabric fix, a person needs a fabric fix and here is no getting around it. I went on a small fabric buying binge this weekend in order to get my fix.

    Fast Threads should be given a medal for the quickest service. I ordered fabric from them on Friday and here it was on my doorstep today. I found them through the Quiltshops.com search engine. I was looking for some new dots to add interest to the Pineapple. That project makes me feel cheerful, but it certainly is a fabric hog. Not in amounts, but in variety.

    On Saturday, I stopped at Black Cat to get some rotary cutter blades and found 3 background fabrics for the Pineapple. The one on the right I already had, but think it will be useful in another dot quilt I have planned, so I bought some more.


    Seams Sew Right     quilt shop, also on Quiltshops.com search engine, is in medal contention as well. I only got two fabrics from them, but probably should have gotten more of the background dot. Nothing stopping me, I suppose. I love the purple with the white dots and will probably have enough to choke a horse eventually. I like their tag line: the Quilter’s Candy Store. The dots sure look like candy!

    I also bought some fabrics from eQuilter yesterday, but haven’t received them yet. One black on white I really liked is out of stock. Oh well. It sat too long on my wish list.

    Dots and Denyse Schmidt Join the Party. Fabric Leads to Sainthood


    In a effort to update the Catholic Church and make it more appealing to a younger audience, I think that requirements for sainthood should be eased. Sending virtually unsolicited fabric to people really should count towards the sainthood list of requirements.

    A nice box arrived on my doorstep on Thursday (accompanied by my taxes, which was not so nice) literally stuffed ot the gils with fabric and little prezzies. St. JCN had gathered together my post-Birthday box and it finally arrived. The fabrics above were in it.

    I needed a little infusion of new dots for the Pineapple and St. JCN supplied that for me. I am also ready to do the Chocolate Box with the addition of the Denyse Schmidt pinks.

    I washed them yesterday (along with some stragglers that had been laying around) This morning I am pressing them and cutting pieces for the Cross Block quilt. Since I am there, why not?

    Coffee Quilt

    Luana has some new coffee fabrics, which got me to thinking about the coffee fabrics I have been collecting.

    I have quite a lot of coffee fabrics, which I was collecting about 4 years ago for some unnamed/undesigned/unstarted project. At some point I realized that many of them were brown and I didn’t like brown. Now that turquoise and brown are popular and look good together, I think I can use turquoise with them to make the brown more cheerful.

    Still, I do like the fabrics and would like to think of something nice to do with them. St. JCN and I did “She Had to Have Her Latte.” The Tarts Come to Tea is supposed to be a coffee quilt. However, the name is much better than the Crabs Come to Coffee or something, so I guess it will secretly be about coffee.

    I don’t want to do something like attic windows just to showcase the fabrics. I want to do something creative and original. Perhaps a “She Had to Have Her Second Latte”?

    I also have some great Dutch coffee fabrics that I bought at Black Cat Quilts. They are pretty special and I would like to do something special with them. Some kind of breakfast quilt? I am not sure. I suppose they have to go to the cogitation pile.

    The Pineapples Progress

    I have made some progress on the Pineapples. I am working on them in between everything else so I don’t feel guilty about starting a new project. Yeah, yeah, I know guilt is not productive. Above is the first bits of the second two blocks.

    I have made more progress on the second two blocks. I am about 3 rows away from finishing. One thing I did differently in the last few rows is add new backgrounds. the size and spacing are different from the background fabrics I have been using. We will see how they turn out and if you think they scream “INAPPROPRIATE.”

    I also added some fabrics with smaller dots. In these photos they look like tone-on-tones. We will see if I use them again.

    Update on Serendipity Puzzle


    Here is my last try at figuring out which fabrics to use for the sashing. I decided against the larger print background fabric. The background of that particular fabrics is not as bright as the background on the others. Also, the motifs are so big that they mostly got cut off.


    Once again, I am trying to sew it together in chunks (rather than rows) to keep the piece straighter and more manageable.


    Essentially, I have two more seams to sew to get this baby done. I can’t avoid them being long seams. Of course, there is the border. I, also, already started the back.

    Not Enough Dots?

    The Pineapple class, about which I have been talking on and off for the past week, is today. I began packing my supplies and materials and got into a panic that I don’t have enough dots in enough different scales and colors. I want to have a wide variety to provide interest. I rummaged through everything to find more and came up with two that I had washed last week, but needed to be ironed. I ironed them, but the stack still looks pathetic. One of them is a Michael Miller fabric similar to the one below, but with more of a sky blue background than the soldier blue depicted below.

    I hope I am just having the last minute jitters and really do have enough fabric.

    Make Visual Decisions Visually: Serendipity Puzzle

    That is a quote (without the Serendipity Puzzle part) from Lorraine Torrence. It is a great ‘rule’ to remember, at least for me. I find that the picture in my mind’s eye often looks better in my mind’s eye.

    To that end, I cut some sashing pieces to try and figure out if I was on the right track.


    This example was my original idea for the sashing. I am not fond of it, but it is also not terrible. It looks busy and is not restful. Not sure if this quilt can be considered restful in general, but I certainly don’t want to add to the excitement. I may have to sew some pieces together to make sure this is not the right sashing design before I decide.


    To me, this screams “look at the cross.” I think the contrast between the light background and dark sashing does not add to the overall design.


    Think, so far, this is the best, which surprised me. It gives some space to each block so you can see the design and alleviates some of the busy-ness. I would put pieces of the three different lights instead of just the blue on white.

    Pineapple Homework cont’d

    I worked, yesterday, on selecting fabrics for the Pineapple class, which takes place next Friday. These are the fabrics that I have selected so far. As I looked through my dot fabrics, I felt like some were missing, but couldn’t find any others, so I guess I just have the impression in my mind that there are never enough dots! I am pretty happy with the selection, but am still contemplating whether or not the dot sizes are too similar and whether the colors are too similar in value.

    In this selection, I didn’t include any of the Fusions fabrics by Robert Kaufman, but am considering adding some to add a little motif size interest. Some of the colorways are very light, however, so if I do add them I need to take care. I don’t want the background to bleed into the foreground creating visual confusion. I can certainly bring them with me, so if I need them I will have them, but if not, no harm done. Opinions are welcome.


    Ignore the checkerboard, as that is my ironing board cover!


    The two pictures above are the same group, so you will see some overlap (e.g. the red).



    Value too similar? I might have get rid of the red one in from the right as it seems to read as a solid.