Fabric Enhancement, As Charlene Says......

I didn't work on anything quilty yesterday, but I thought I would show you what I got in the mail yesterday.  It is very, very quilty.......FABRIC!

I ordered the Daily Deal Fat Quarters from Hancock's of Paducah.  This is Michelle Di Amore XOXO. Well, I must admit, I did order two of them since it was such  a great deal......like I need more fabric, right?


I think it is the same person who designed those Bracelets fabrics that have been so popular.   It just looks like them.



I love words and letters and greys and taupes.  So this was perfect; it has all of that.

I have an idea of how to use them.

I keep telling myself I need to finish several other things before I start anything else.
Finish, woman, Finish!


 Doesn't this look like birch trees?  Oh heck yeah!  Now I need to make birch trees......

And in the same mail day, I received my surprise package from Becky's Treasure Trove.  This month is amazing!

And the buttons are so cool. I LOVE the color of the tissue paper with the fabric. 

This is one of the best packages I have ever received from Becky!  Somewhere I have a group of fat quarters I saved from a win years ago that will pair with these perfectly.

Let's see if I can find them now........

Doing It the Hard Way

I purchased a fat corner stack of Chillingsworth a while back and I wanted to use them up. So I found a really nice pattern that I thought would look good.  It was called All Inked Up by Tony Jacobson.   I revamped it to work with fat quarters. It worked out that I could cut four 9 inch blocks from each fat quarter and that I would need 12 fat quarters.  I had that.  This could work out!

When I opened the stack of Fat Quarters, what I thought was bicycles was indeed bicycles WITH SKELETONS on it!  Not what I thought it was going to be.  But then the significance of the name Chillingsworth hit me.

Honestly, I had wondered how Chillingsworth equated to bicycles when I pulled the Fat Quarter Bundle from my stash.  But I figured I just didn't know enough about bicycle history. 

 It worked out that I could cut four 9 inch blocks from each fat quarter and that I would need 12 fat quarters.  I spent some time yesterday rechecking my figures and it looked pretty good. I was ready to cut everything out.

There was an easy way I could cut them out and put them together or there was a hard way. Of course I blindly stumbled into the hard way.  Why read the instructions?  Who is this Tony guy anyway? 

It would have been so simple had I just  sewed the fat quarters together and then cut up for the black strip. I also way over estimated the number of black strips I needed so I have a lot of them left over.

A LOT.

 Luckily I have a lot of extra black on a bolt.  And I now have a lot of extra black 1 inch strips, too.

And my 9 inch blocks, turned into 8 1/2 inch blocks when I had an unfortunate trimming accident.  But I can adjust.  Yes I can!  I have to. 

Sometimes I wonder how people in traditional quilting do it.  But I am pretty sure this is how Modern Quilting got started............