Monday Miscellaneous

Tweaking the House:

Like Shay, at Quilting in My Pyjamas before me, it seems that this blog has temporarily turned into a litany of renovations, albeit comparatively minor.

Our new house is not very old.  It was built just three years ago.  Oddly enough, there is not a single medicine cabinet in any of the bathrooms.

While my mother (my conspirator in home renovation) and I are up for learning new things, and have had some experience in making small repairs, neither of us wanted to tackle installing a classic medicine cabinet--one that is inset in the sheet rock.  Instead we bought one of the over-the-toilet cabinets that can be purchased at any Wal-mart.

Before

After

Fabric Sale:

So what would any quilter do when faced with a sale from Thousands of Bolts?  An end of the year sale in which the fabrics were running from $2.95/yd to $3.50/yd?  Why, buy 28 yards of course!

PhD Challenge:

I'm pleased to say I'm on the downhill side of one my Projects Half Done Challenge quilt.  I have finished the hand-quilting, and have begun FMQ the last two borders.  I attempted to take a picture of the quilting, but my thread blends so well, that none of the pictures show much.  It will be very nice to have this very old project completed.

Familiarizing Ourselves with Newton through Fabric

My mom and I took a well-earned break from the unpacking today. We had an excuse. The coolant system in the car needed to be flushed after its hissy fit in Flagstaff. The kind man who helped me added water to the system to get me through to Newton--which it did very successfully--but that wasn't satisfactory for getting us through the winter. We located our local Dodge dealer and got it done early this morning.

After that we decided to treat ourselves to a little exploration in downtown Newton. The weather was typical November weather for Kansas--cloudy and gray with a bit of a bite to the air and erratic wind gusts.  We didn't let that dampen our spirits though.

Goal number one was to find the local quilt store.  Oh yum!  The fabric array was just as beautiful as I'd hoped.  For quilters like me who love black and white prints her shop is a must see.  I bet she had 30 bolts of different black and white fabrics.  I managed to restrain myself since we're still digging out and organizing the fabric we do have.  But only for a moment.  There was a display quilt made up with these fairy panels:

I've been eying the fairy fabric that's being featured in Keepsake Quilting.  I'm not sure if this is exactly the same, but it's close if it's not.  My excuse is that I have a little cousin who might enjoy a fairy quilt, but the truth is, I just want to make one.  Guess there's still a little girl lurking in me.  :-)

We also located the Et Cetera shop.  It's the local Mennonite version of the Salvation Army.  They accept donations which are sold in the shop and the proceeds go back to help the community.  We needed to drop off some kitchen items.  Since we're combining two households, we've got a lot of duplicate items.

Naturally we had to look around.  The shop has a fabric remnant bin.  The sign said to get a sack from the cashier and fill it for fifty cents.  Yep, fifty cents.  Can you believe it?

For a scrappy quilter like myself, this was just too much fun.

We also located the local organic food shop and stopped in for coffee.  Being a quilter I enjoyed the handmade items featured there--honey, salsa, syrup.  Nice ambiance.  The store has a very high ceiling.  Hard for me to guess, but well over the twelve feet featured in many old buildings.  It has a tin pressed ceiling (at least I think that's the right term for it).  I plan to take my camera next time we go.  The tin ceiling would be a great item for Vintage Thingie Thursday.

Oh and by the way, after I whined on Monday about not even working on the New York Beauty blocks, I got them out.  I've now completed another one, and seem to be rolling along.  Hopefully, I'll be able to get back to FMQ soon too.

Favorite Things Friday: Quilters

Another Friday has rolled around (at least in Australia), and so that means it's time for Favorite Things Friday hosted by Mrs. Pyjamas at Quilting in My Pyjamas.  Come on and join in the fun!

So with no further ado~one of my very most favorite things are quilters.  As a group, quilters tend to be the friendliest, most generous, caring group of people I've ever had the pleasure and honor with which to be associated.  (I was going to say deal with, but I didn't want to end my sentence with a preposition.)

As most of you know, I've been going through a tough time, but I've had so much support both on the blog and through personal emails, that I never feel completely alone.  You can't imagine what a blessing that is. 

I'm surprised I didn't think of putting quilters as my favorite thing sooner, but it was a gift from Elizabeth at Such a Sew and Sew, which arrived today, that brought it home to me like a thwack upside the head.  Bless her.  She'd read my blog article about the Dark and Stormy Night quilt in which I'd stated that I was still collecting purples.  Look what she sent to me:

Eight glorious purple pieces of fabric.  (My camera made some look more blue than they are.)  How wonderful is that?  One of them even looks like a Dark and Stormy Night.  Elizabeth's gift is the perfect example of what I mean by friendly and generous.  Thank you so much Elizabeth!

And thank you so much quilty friends!

Delayed Luck

I won!  I won!  Woo-hoo!  It's my first giveaway win ever.

Some of you may remember Kristen's July giveway.  I entered, but at the time of the original drawing my number didn't come up.  Okay, so while I had been imagining fondling the fabrics and squeezing the pincushion, I knew some other quilter would enjoy them as much as I would have, so I wasn't totally disappointed when I didn't win.  Luck of the draw, right?

I guess my luck was merely delayed.  One of Kristen's winners failed to contact Kristen and give her her contact information.  Bad for her and good for me.  When Kristen ran the random generator doohicky again, my number came up!  Yippee!  (I certainly hope that for the quilter who missed out, it was because she was on a cruise or a trip to Hawaii, or something fun like that.)

Anyway, the giveaway stuff is so cool!  Included is a generous piece of fabric with kitchen motifs--cups, pears, toasters--and cute little sayings like, "Hey good lookin', what you got cookin?".  Kristen included one of the pincushions she made.  This one has strawberries in the center and is simply adorable.  Finally, there were 42 five inch squares from Moda's 12 Days of Christmas collection.  Wow!  I feel like I made out like a bandit.

Thanks Kristen!

The Accidental Quilt

My mom and I are making a quilt that we'd never planned, wished for, or much less imagined--but we're happy about it. How did this happen? It was due to a fabric mix-up. I'd ordered the fabric pictured on the left, but received the fabric pictured on the right. Oops!
A quick call to the online fabric shop, Fabric.com, immediately corrected the situation. They not only sent the correct fabric out to me ASAP, they also told me to keep the fabric they'd sent by mistake. It was 2 1/2 yards worth. Wow! Okay, time to make another quilt.

The fabric is part of Kaufman's Intergalactic line. Given the astronomical theme of the fabric, we decided to make a star sampler. Every block in the quilt will be a different star block, with the themed fabric serving as the background. We also decided to do something a little novel (at least for us) and use only the colors that are present in the Intergalactic fabric. This does limit us to a narrow range on colors and tones, but that's part of the fun. The blocks will be sashed, (we're thinking with some shade of teal), and the quilt will be tailored, like the quilt shown here.

Here is the block I made this week:This particular block pattern came from The Quilter's Cache.

Eventually, we'll need 47 blocks to complete the king-size quilt. However, at the moment, it is a low priority project. We make a block when we need a diversion from our primary project(s)--which are going along nicely and hopefully will soon be the subject of another Sew & Tell Friday. In the meantime, I'll be linking up this post over at Amylouwho's tomorrow.

New York Beauty update. Here are this week's blocks, which brings my total up to 56. Just 140 more to go.