Macro Monday - NaBloPoMo Day 15

Today's Macro Monday features the bits and pieces of my two in-progress Asian quilts. Both are ready to be plotted out on the design wall, waiting only for me to find a free afternoon.    Which will hopefully be tomorrow after I get off of work. :D

  

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Fabric Friday! - NaBloPoMo Day 12

Well I've been trying to find a picture of this fabric online so I could share my glee with you, but apparently it's been out in the world long enough to no longer anywhere to be found on the internet.

Anyway, glee! Our most local LQS added a discount on end of the bolt yardage, meaning I was finally able to let myself buy this gorgeous teal, purple, and gold Oriental floral that I've been eying probably about as long as I've even been going to that store. So for about three years. No doubt I will have pictures of it to show at some point in the future, but right now we just have my glee over its purchase.

Not to mention the fact that I found fantastic sashing and border fabrics for my Oriental Turning 20. Both of my Oriental quilts are ready to be laid out on the design wall! Yay!
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One Hundred and Twenty - NaBloPoMo Day 10

Different fabrics, that is. I've gotten everything cut, counted through them again, and as of right now, I'm pretty sure that's how many different Oriental fabrics are going into the quilt I'm starting for my cousin Katheryn.

It's this quilt here, Japanese Yen, from one of the books we picked up on our shop hopping over the summer.
It will be getting a better name, one that's not entirely redundant (no one else uses yen, silly book author), but the part about this particular quilt that currently amuses me is definitely the number of fabrics used in it.

The entire book is about making quilts from scraps of varying sizes, but in all honesty, I really don't have anywhere near that many scraps yet. So instead I went to my collection of Oriental fabrics, made mostly out of fat quarters, and cut a piece from almost every one.

Yep, almost. Hence my amusement. I cut from 120 different fabrics, and still have more that I didn't even touch for this project. Granted, a lot of them are quite close to being solids, and therefore wouldn't work as well in this quilt, but they're still gorgeous bits of cotton that I can't wait to use in other projects.

Time to get to half-square-triangle-ing so I can get things up on the design wall. ^_^

Fabric Love

Well, I'm cutting it a bit short for NaBloPoMo today, but it's been a very non-computer day up until about an hour ago, with some fabulous reading and a visit from a friend. But now that the busyness has wound down, I can get back to my love affair with Oriental fabrics.

I started cutting into some of my fat quarters the other day, distracting myself from book impatience by playing with things I love. But there was a problem for me. I love my Oriental fabrics so much that it's very difficult to start cutting into them. As in I'd almost rather just hoard them indefinitely (which would be a very bad idea, heh).

And then I found a solution - my fabulous little digital camera!

So here are some of my gorgeous Oriental fabrics, soon to be featured in a sashed Turning Twenty quilt, which I will start, just as soon as I find the right pale creamy gold to sash them all with.

What's the Japanese word for ladder? - Blogger's Quilt Festival

Welcome internet travelers! I hope you're enjoying this online quilt festival, organized by the fabulous Amy of Amy's Creative Side. I'm ridiculously new to the online quilting community, but I thought I'd introduce myself with a quilt I recently made for a friend of mine.

Blame it on my grandma. Not just this quilt, the whole thing really. The story of how she got me hooked on fabric is one for another time, but the story of this quilt starts with her, and with boredom.

We go up to Washington a lot for special occasions, but once my cousin's wedding festivities were over this past May, my mom and I decided to stay with my grandma for an extended visit and sent the boys home to get a bit of work done. Unfortunately, after a few days of staying at her home doing nothing, I got bored. Very bored.
  

My marker-ed plan

 So I started planning. I copied classic patterns out of my grandma's books, I confiscated her graph paper and some markers, and I planned. Mostly I thought about a very in-depth project for another time, but I also started thinking about a Jacob's Ladder for my former roommate Tiffany, who's getting ready to move to New York and pursue a theater career.

Oddly enough, without even trying to make it so, the (mostly Oriental) fabrics I ended up picking out for the quilt match my markered plan almost perfectly.  Weird.

I put the quilt together once I got back to Texas, first at home in between trips to Austin, and then in Austin, in between trips home. It's been sitting at the front of the house for a couple of months, waiting to have its picture taken, but it's just about time to send it off now.

I absolutely love these fabrics - a pale yellow ridiculously small check, a blue/green bamboo, a purple wood grain, and the fabulous red Oriental from which all the other colors were derived. Plus, I was able to find the same print in a different color wave for the back!

I hope y'all are enjoying the Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I hope you come back to visit some time in the future. Happy quilting!

PS> If any of you have helpful tips for getting color spots out of a quilt, I would dearly appreciate the advice. Despite the fact that I pre-washed all my fabrics, when I went to wash the completed quilt, hoping to get as much cat hair out of it as possible, I ended up with blue/green/purple spots on a fair portion of the quilt. Help please!

> NaBloPoMo Day 1 Complete :D