Fabric

This is how it happens…

Fabric store sends Emily spam advertising a sale or a new line or this or that…

Emily shops.

Fabric store ships.

Emily gets a big ol’ box containing *42* yards of fabric.  42!

And I’m addicted to fabric.

The project over the past two days has been de-toying the bonus room, cleaning it up and just making it a more pleasant room to be in.  Before I had fabric stashed here and there and everywhere.  Now it’s all in one place and, um, I apparently have a small fabric shopping problem.  Sean saw this last night (before everything was in there) and asked if seeing it all was going to make me stop shopping for a while.  I laughed at him.  Silly man.

The top is organized by line while the bottom has some lines, some genres, and some by color.  There is nothing to show scale in this picture but the dimensions of the bookcase are 73″ x 33″.

I need to make some more quilts pronto before I go shopping again.

Pretty packages have pretty contents.

See the fabric on the bottom?  That one I needed for a pillowcase order.  The rest just happened to jump into my cart.  Oops!  Everyone needs a little bit more Freshcut in their lives.

Look for a new quilt tonight.  Fun stuff!

You have a hard time falling asleep at night because you just thought of a really cool pattern for your large stack of Amy Butler Belle fabrics.

I finished up the Maypole and Cowboy Rodeo quilt tops.

Normally I would work on pinning these tonight but I fell this morning while mowing (ok, so that sounds ridiculous but if you saw our yard, you’d fall too) and my back is bothering me so perhaps pinning is not the best thing to do tonight. Instead I’ll start working on this quilt:

Yup, just three colors. Any guesses? Or have I already said what it is?

And I bought some of this fabric the other day. Isn’t it just the coolest print?

No quilting tomorrow. We’re headed to the zoo!

As soon as I found out Liam was going to be a boy I started looking for fabric. Girl fabric is easy. Boy fabric is not so easy.

We finally found nursery fabric. I love it still. But it isn’t right for a little boy. Perfect for a baby boy.

And his quilt.

So at some point he has to leave his pretty little baby room and become a big boy.   Keep in mind that this isn’t going to happen for at least another year.  I’ve been trying to find fabric for it since the ultrasound.

This is kinda neat.  Rabbits and Racecars by Heather Ross.  But I think this is home dec weight.  Not really what I want for his quilt and there aren’t a ton of coordinating fabrics.

There is plaid.  But that sounds kind of boring.

There is always Pottery Barn Kids or Land of Nod.  But no way could I buy a quilt.  That would be just wrong.  Sean votes for this quilt from LON.

I think that would work great for a 5 year old.  Not a 2 year old.

So no fabric and nothing from a store.

Enter Spoonflower.  Custom fabric printing (and they’re local!).  Holy smokes.  I could design my own fabric, have it printed and then make Liam’s quilt, drapes and pillows from that.  Holy smokes.  Beta testing is supposed to start in May according to their blog.  Hopefully that  means things will be up and running in time for me to do Liam’s room.

So would it be way over the top to actually go through with this?  <blush>  Off to go design something in Illustrator.  Have I ever mentioned what I did in my former life here?  Eek!  I’m happy.

… for Liam’s birthday quilt and I accidentally came home with 24.5 yards of sock monkeys on the beach.  D’oh!

First one to guess the right games gets… well, nothing!

Maeve is going to FLIP out when she sees these new fabrics from Moda.  I mean FLIP out.

Now to wait very impatiently until next month when the collection is released.

I got an email from my local quilt shop saying that Moda’s Simplicity had shipped and it will be here in a couple days! I’ve been waiting impatiently for this line since Maeve’s room is getting a makeover with it.

Her quilt is going to be a Kaffe Fassett pattern. It’s amazing. I can’t wait. I get warm fuzzies just thinking about it.

It’s just really the most magical thing in the world.  When I look at it I hear a little elf singing off in the distance!

Every sew-er has one right? Surely I can’t be the only person out there who has a hard time throwing away fabric. Something eventually can be made with it, right? Right?

One of the great things about patchwork is that you don’t need large pieces of fabric to make something. You just need lots of little pieces and a couple spools of thread.

I have a tendency(mm, k, like always) make a second project out of the scraps left over from the first project. If it’s a quilt, I’ll usually have enough scraps to piece the top together, but I’ll have to run over to the store to get more for the backing and binding.

While I’m at the store, I can never just get the backing and binding that I went in there for. I’ll have to check out the new fabrics that came in. Check out some more that I’ve had my eye one. Thirty minutes later, I’ve stacked 25 bolts of fabric on the cutting table and hope that the nice ladies will not come after me with their rotary cutters. The problem with patchwork? I’ll want every pattern in a line, but only a quarter yard. So the poor ladies stand there and cut. And cut. And cut. And hope that I don’t come back again tomorrow. Sometimes I do though. I just hope someone different is working.

So, undoubtedly I’ll overbuy for the binding and backing. I’ll have scraps leftover. I must do *something* with them. I can’t just toss it. So they go in my room. Where eventually something will be done with it. I swear.

This is my guest room. Isn’t it lovely? I’m sure I overbought. There is a lot of fabric in that little cubby. Let’s not discuss how many yards there is or tell Sean how much I spent because, well, he reads my blog too. Hi Sean! Now go back to working dear.

These aren’t really scraps as much as just fabric that I haven’t gotten to. The patchwork on top? That was going to be a dress for Maeve. I never finished it because I couldn’t get the top right and it bugged me. So I cut the top of the dress off and saved the bottom. I couldn’t throw away perfectly pieced patchwork.

Ah, some scrumptious baby knits. I love these things. And see the selvedges in the background? I can’t throw those away either. I’m going to make a quilt out of them. I saw it on someone else’s blog and well, now I just have to make one too.

Ah, yes, the beautiful bin of ribbons. And leftover fabrics underneath. They are everywhere.

See, if you use a really narrow depth of field when taking photos, you can’t *really* see how much fabric is up there. Excellent.

The pile under the window. There are actually a couple quilts that need to be quilted in that stack. I’ll get right on that.

Crikey. More quilt tops that need quilting.

I got this silly idea to organize scraps into big Ziplocs, dividing them up by lines. Great idea. I doubt it will last that long. Why you ask?

Need I say more?

This is how small a piece of fabric has to be in order to get thrown away.

Yes, I just posted a picture of my trash can. I actually at one point had an Etsy packaging idea using the long, skinny strips. Go ahead and roll your eyes now.

You think that’s all?

And there are more. I’m sure. Buried under other scraps.

I thought about destashing on Etsy. It seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, I was going to have to go into the Supplies section. They sell fabric there. I don’t need more. I don’t need more. I don’t need more. Go ahead and laugh.

All cut up. Laid out. Stacked up. Now I just have to sew it, quilt it and bind it.