Quilty Pleasures-Just a Few Purchases

When we moved from Corona to our place in Northern New Mexico,  I was surprised to see how much fabric I had stashed. It wasn't just fabric, but kits I had made and other kits I had purchased. When the sample quilt in the store was cute, I just couldn't resist a kit!  Lately I have been raiding the kits for quilt projects and it doesn't bother me one bit.

All that fabric and stuff filled up a zillion boxes, so I made a promise to dig into the stash before anything else. I've done a pretty good job and boxes packed to the brim a year and a half ago are now almost empty. I actually need to consolidate.

Of course I still bought fabric for special projects requiring certain colors, or for my small solid projects, or, let's face facts, just because I just loved it!

On my consulting trip to SoCal a couple weeks ago I stopped into a couple fabric stores, just to look, and you know how that usually turns out.

At Purl, the Tustin, CA warehouse component of Purl Soho in New York City, I picked up a few items. A pot growing operation next door was busted and gave them the opportunity to expand, so there is more to see and more to buy, too!

The fabric on the top left and the fat eighths across the bottom are Liberty of London prints, so ladylike and so vintage looking. The smaller pieces will find their way into a quilt and the larger yardage will be a blouse. The birds are from Cloud9 Fabrics, called Across the Pond-Heron. I like herons, the way they just stand in one place, still, just like this fabric.

Then Pattie took me to Sewing Party, a fairly new fabric store in Laguna Hills, Ca. Lots of happy choices here induced me to buy a couple more items:

The jelly roll across the bottom is called London and seems to fit with my earlier Liberty of London purchases. There seems to be a theme here. The layer cake at the top is the complete collection of Veranda by Amanda Murphy from Robert Kaufman.

All in all, a satisfying collection, don't you think?

BUT! That's it except for 1. Store credits  2. Gift cards  3. Free stuff

AND!! I realize I have to catch up with unfinished projects, so I am not starting anything new for a while.

YOU HEARD IT HERE AND I'M STICKING TO IT!

Little Quilt "Sketches"

Gwen Marston refers to her small quilts as "sketches" in the new book 37 Sketches. She says she likes to make small quilts because it allows her to experiment without spending excessive time and money, to explore different construction techniques, try new and different fabrics, and most important, to look at new design possibilities.

At Gwen's Beaver Island Quilt Retreat she showed us some full sized quilts she made based on her little fabric "sketches" and they were all beauties. The small quilts gave her new ideas for the larger ones.

I found while making my own small sketches that they can become deeply involving, choices coming out of my ears! Do I want to make some little log cabins here? Maybe a curve along this edge. What colors should I choose? It really made my brain cells proliferate,

Here are the three little sketches I made at the retreat. I like one really a lot, another is okay, and the third is one I didn't like at first, but I like it now.

Someone said this quilt reminded them of the beach, and it does, the sandy colors contrasting with the brighter blues, oceanic greens and multicolored stripes.
It's fun to study the many "parts" (Gwen's term) to this piece. My favorites were the strata on the left with the curves and the liberated log cabins.

 

This quilt doesn't have backing and binding yet,  but it looks like it should be on the wall in a child's room. The strips around the border remind me of party streamers. I cheated a little making the pieced center, strip piecing some .75 inch strips, cutting them into .75 inch rows of squares and then turning them and repiecing the rows to mix the colors up a bit.

This liberated log cabin piece has confounded me. As I sewed the center, keeping to a controlled color palette, I got bored and started adding unrelated fabric colors. I am still not sure if that was a good idea or not, but I am beginning to enjoy this quilt and its little details.

For traditional quilters this stuff is hard to understand.  To wrap your head around modern quilting after many years of looking at traditional block piecing is a giant leap. Nonetheless, it's a fun exercise, one that really makes the quiltmaker think, plan, and play around with design and color in ways they might not have ever imagined.