Quilting Again

I had quite the fabric buying binge this week. Oops, and I've been so good at using up my stash so far this year. But when I needed to buy fabric for the kitchen curtains I just slipped back into fabric-buying mode. Uh oh. I hesitate to show the pile of fabric, since Jeff reads this blog.... =) I got a 17 pound bag from Fabric.com yesterday. It included 6 yards of home decorator fabric to make a shower curtain and a curtain for the guest bath, 16 yards of purple fabric for borders and backing for the lightning quilt and 11 total yards of fabric for the kitchen curtains plus some extra to make 6 matching placemats. In addition to these, I bought about 14 yards from fabric.com from their $4 batiks and clearance section, since I was ordering... And there is a quilt store a few miles away that sent out an email which made it sound like they were closing and were liquidating their inventory. I had to go to that sale....didn't I? =) (Though, it turns out that they aren't closing, just drastically reducing their fabric offerings and stressing their machine-quilting services. I thought they were kind of slimy to word the email like they did.) Anyway, I found this really heraldically-cool fabric that I couldn't resist. Unfortunately, there was only a yard. But they had a coordinating fabric and I bought that. I've tried to find more online, but I think it is too old. The only shop I found that had any is located in UK and I'm trying to decide if I really need more. Of course, once I found the fabric, I had to dig through my stash to match it up. I don't know yet what exactly I'm going to make...that plan is yet to be discovered.

Since I am finally done with the Roman shades, I decided I could let myself play with an old project. I pulled out Jeff's lightning quilt to work on that. I've worked on it all afternoon and I'm just starting to do some sewing. I've mostly been ironing and sorting and figuring out where I was at. I need a total of 49 squares and I have 15 complete and quite a few more in various stages of assembly. There are some really interesting fabrics in this one. I might not use some of these fabrics if I were to start today. We pulled the technique for this quilt from "Spectacular Scraps: A Simple Approach to Stunning Quilts" by Judy Hooworth and Margaret Rolfe. The authors stress you should use color families. "As we are talking families, it is important to remember that all families have their funny members. So this is your chance to include your funnies-- the odd fabrics, the uglies, the strange ones." Well, I sure did what they suggested... =) Now I'm going to start mixing in some of the plum batik that I bought for the backing. I have many hours of cutting ahead of me still.