Quilty Pleasures Wednesday-Cottage Curtains, Stripes and Christmas is Coming

Sorry for the odd blog post title, but this week was a decidedly non-quilty one. Instead, I made curtains for MBB the MFA who has moved to a riverfront cottage on the Iowa River.  The pieced curtains for her bedroom have been mailed and received, but she still needed curtains for the living room and the kitchen. So I did some shopping in the fabric stash and found stuff that didn't exactly match but at least they came from the same color family.

On the right are the living room curtains,  peachy coral. One set wasn't long enough, so I added an Asian print to the bottom. On the left are the kitchen curtains. I absolutely love that yellow paisley print but hadn't found the right quilt idea, so yellow paisley has been languishing in the stash for about six years. It was time for that fabric to be put to use so I bit the bullet and made curtains. There's still some left, so someday a quilt will be made using that luscious paisley. Curtains are in the mail, winging their way to Iowa City. I hope her cottage doesn't look like Peewee's Playhouse after all the curtains are hung.

I went a little crazy and got these stripes at Thread Bear in Las Vegas, NM after seeing an awesome quilt (the top one) on Melody Johnson's blog, Fibermania. Actually I love all three of the quilts shown and find them truly inspiring. I hope to start playing around with all this stripey goodness in the next few weeks.

Yeah, I went a little nuts.

And yes, I know it's not Christmas yet and most of us don't want to be reminded right now, but I picked up some fabric for a tree skirt. It's for a class I will be teaching at Thread Bear and we needed a sample. The tree skirt needs to be done pretty soon, so hang on a bit and you'll see it here when it's ready. Take a look at the fabric I chose:

If all goes well, there should be some actual quilty stuff to look at next week. Stay tuned.

Patchwork Curtains

What to do when your daughter needs curtains and you don't have enough of any one fabric to make them?

You patchwork them, that's what! She wanted the aqua blue and green dots, so the first set of curtains I made were just those two. After that I realized she needed curtains for two more bedroom windows and I didn't have enough of either of those two colors. So I improvised, going shopping in my fabric stash for something that would harmonize.

I had leftovers from her spiderweb quilt, so that's what she got. At first I was having a fit about these curtains, but then I looked again and realized they look like something one might buy at Anthropologie, like this tablecloth.

So I figured what the hell. Keep on sewing.