Friday, October 2, 2015

Things in Motion

I went a little crazy at Fabric.com this week.  I was thinking about making a quilt I'd bucket-listed a couple years ago.  There are only three colors in the quilt: green, red, and a neutral background.  So I went online fabric shopping, looking for something that grabbed my fancy, and came upon "Essentials Cosmos."  Hello, gorgeous.

Now, when you only need three fabrics in a quilt, you need quite a bit of each one, as you might imagine.  I've been sewing scrappy for so long, I'd almost forgotten how much yardage actually goes into a quilt.  But I went ahead and ordered what I needed, had a moment of excitement followed by what did I just do? but then recovered my equilibrium.  Until I got the emails.

Email #1:  "Your Fabric.com order has shipped!"  

Yay!

Email #2 (90 minutes later):  "Fabric.com has issued you a refund of $8.42."  

Um, why?  No explanation.

Email #3 (three hours later):  "Fabric.com has issued you a refund of $16.84."  

Now I'm really confused.

So what, I wonder, will come in the box from Fabric.com?  Will I get all of my order?  Sure hope so, but right now it's a mystery.  Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I made a sample of the block that will be in the new quilt, except the background I'd cut for the sample didn't seem quite right.  Enter Plan B:  I made a strata of neutral strips/strings and cut my template from that.  Much better! 
If this block looks a bit familiar, it may be because it's a variation of the block Sandi had drawn it up in EQ around the time we were finalizing the TML pattern, and it was love at first sight.  I'm excited to be able to start making this quilt soon—hopefully.

I decided my sample block needed to become a holiday wall hanging, so I made some corner triangles of "made fabric" to set it on point.  It was an afterthought to add the narrow stop border, but I really liked it with vs. without.  Of course, then I had to make all of my "made fabric" triangles a little bigger.  

It is now basted and ready to quilt, but I have things ahead of it in the quilting queue, so it'll have to wait a bit.

In other endeavors, I made a quilt backing for the 16-patch and X blocks (aka "Goodnight Irene") quilt from earlier this year.  Here is the back, draped over the ironing board (and other things).

I needed to make the backing it just a bit larger, so I inserted a strip using many of the remaining hand-dyed fabrics from Vicki at Field Trips in Fiber.  I'd used the brighter hand-dyed fabrics in the quilt top, but the fabric for the backing lent itself to the more muted tones.  Every bit as gorgeous, and very autumnal, too.

Now that top and backing can go on vacation to the long-arm quilter, along with the Scrappy Mountains Majesties quilt top.  Things are moving, and that feels good!