Quilting Adventures ~ The Friendly Store for Everyone Who Creates With Fabric!

This last week we’ve gotten tons of fabric in! We’ll start with my personal favorite, Sole. I love this group so much, and there’s this wonderful sunflower print in the group. The sunflowers are the size of dinner plates, but I’m not sure what to make with them. Any suggestions?

We also got Chocolate Lollipop by Anna Maria Horner, which I’ve also been eagerly awaiting.

The next group we got is Linden from P&B Textiles. I couldn’t get a wonderful picture of it, but here’s the one picture I got, and a link to their website.

http://www.pbtex.com/html/linden.html

And last, but not least, Sloane by Anna Griffin. This a great combination of black, brown, pink and green, and would make a wonderful purse.

Lila, one of our customers, just sent me pictures of her oldest daughter’s room. She made the bed quilt, pillows, and window treatments. She started on another bedspread to match the room, but got sidetracked by the arrival of a new baby a few weeks ago! She made the bed quilt in our Super Simple Strips class, and the pillows in our beginning sewing class. She bought all of the fabric for everything from us. The quilt behind the bed was made by Lila’s great grandmother. Here are pictures of Nancy Claire’s room!

In the last week or so we received a shipment of spool knitters. I’m sure that some of you had these when you were younger, I know I did. For those of you who don’t know, they are usually old thread spools with nails around the top. You use yarn and end up knitting a tube which can then be used to make rugs, hot mats, or placemats. The cool thing about the knitting spools we just got in is that they are designed to be used with fabric! You just cut 1/2″ wide strips of your fabric, join them together, and star knitting. If you aren’t sure you want to cut up all your fabric, you can by our handy-dandy bags of thrums, they are perfect! (That’s what I’m using) If you need suggestions on how to join your strips of fabric, how a reminder as to how to use one, please feel free to catch me when I’m working, and I’ll give you a quick little demo! Here are some pictures of what I’ve done so far.

~ Phoebe

This week’s product of the week is foil. It’s so easy to apply, and looks absolutely wonderful. It comes in a multitude of colors, so you can add it to almost anything. Here’s some pictures of foiling on fabric.

It looks even cooler in person! Please make sure and stop by the shop to see how easy it is to add foil to anything!

We’ve gotten tons of new fabric in this week! Tuesday we got eight boxes. We’re also in the process of unpacking one rigth now that I don’t even have pictures of. It’s called Aunt Grace Ties One On. Here’s a link so you can see pictures!

http://www.marcusfabrics.com/cgi-bin/fabricgallery/gallery.cgi?Category=385

Here are pictures of all the other new things:

Enjoy!

I just finished hanging five quilts by Jean Wells from her book Portraits from Nature.  If I’d know what these really looked like, I’d have been making quilts like these long ago!  I found them so inspiring, and you must see them in person, up close, so I’ve hung them in the classroom (where the Quilts for the Cure quilts are also on display).  They’ll be hanging through September 16, so please come check them out.  Even if there’s a class going on, please come in and take a look!

Here’s a customer/teacher show and tell, by Cathy Tyler – she made these adorable little dolls from Salley Manor’s book, :

I’ve decided on the demo schedule for the next few weeks:
Week of September 10 – Marti Michell’s Log Cabin Ruler
Week of September 17 – Embellishing with foil
Week of September 24 – Yo Yo Makers revisited! (since I know many of you missed this last time around).
Demos are on Tuesdays at 6; Wednesdays at 2; Saturdays at 11 & 2; and Sundays at 2. And the week of the demo, the product(s) being show is 10% off!

Have you ever made a bunch of blocks for a quilt, laid them out, and then decided that you wanted to put them on point?  Oh, wait, but that means you have to calculate the sizes for the setting triangles – both the sides and the corners – and you’ve got to be careful about which edge is on the straight of grain.  If you’re like me, you’ll do all the math and then add an extra two inches to be safe, and then one of them will *still* be wrong, so you re-cut it while you invent new curse words….

Well, of course it’s Marti Michell to the rescue.  From the first time I attended a workshop with Marti and saw her demonstrate her tools in person, I was hooked.  In a nutshell, she does the math for you and makes it easy so you don’t have to think or deal with wacky fractions.  This ruler is no exception.

All you need to know is how big your finished blocks are going to be, and this tool works you through cutting all the setting triangles you need – with no wasted fabric, either!  Come to one of our demos this week and see how easy it is.  Demos are Tuesday at 6PM, Wednesday at 2PM, Saturday at 11 and 2, and Sunday at 2.  As always, the product being demo’ed is 10% off this week!

We’ve gotten some new and exciting fabrics in this week! I feel like I’ve been waiting forever for this stuff, and it’s finally here!
From Michael Miller, their new line of home dec weight fabric. I’ve already bought some of the fabric on the far right (closeup further down) to make myself a pair of pants.

We’ve also gotten some of their new “Beatnik Daisy” group. They’re all quilting weight cottons in a nice turquoise/avacado palette.

Also included in that shipment were some fun and funky prints. I can’t wait to make some bags out of these!