stashing, a lot

bundles from penelope handmade - jennifer makes the cutest bundles

when i get sewing a lot, i also start to order fabric. it just goes hand-in-hand. if i spend a lot of time in my sewing room around my stash, i begin to notice things that are running low or that i don't have. 

or, when i'm working on a project, often i'll feel the need for some additional fabrics to round out what i'm making. like these bright liberty tana lawn pieces (below) that fit the vibe i wanted for the new "groovy liberty" quilt.

duckadilly fat quarters of liberty

i didn't realize when i ordered that yellow colorway of d'anjo that it was actually a larger-scale version of d'anjo, called d'anjo sky. i really like it! i'm going to use it in my "suny yellow crossroads" quilt, too.

while i was looking for these bright and groovy pieces, i found some others i like and a few that fit other current projects.

the pink capel is a backing for "lemonade at sixes."

joel dewberry classics

i recently discovered that hawthorne supply company has on-demand printing for many designers. i was thrilled to find some classic joel dewberry designs i've used a lot over the years in new colors. that green! the "quilting cotton" substrate these are printed on is thick and a little rough, not exactly what i was expecting. but i really like the colors of these great prints.

ruby and bee blenders by heather ross

i'm actually a little unsure about these. they're really bright! and the style is kinda different than heather's typical prints. but i'm going to trust heather knows her fabrics and will see where they work in my stash. i didn't get the whole set, just the ones i thought would fit my stash best.

 low volume blenders from lori holt's new americana collection

these are perfect low-volume blender prints. they are so useful. when i saw lori had a new collection, i looked it up specifically for these type prints. winners!

i got some other nice blender pieces from lori's "bee vintage" and "bee dot" collections. i like the ditsy little prints. i was a little surprised that most of her low-volumes i got have a soft, cool grey undertone to them. they're not white or cream, they are a barely-there grey. this affect how they read in a quilt and it's overall mood, which is something to keep in mind.

i got half yards of heather bailey's "pop sweet" blender set. yes, more blenders. i truly believe good blenders are what makes quilts work. they play the supporting role that allows feature fabrics room to shine. there is a range of soft and bright fabrics, classic basics and more modern, punchy prints in this set. it has a little of everything.

bundles for "bonny" and "pretty things"

 i've had my eye on denyse schmidt's newest collections for a while. i finally decided to get bundles of each collection. i've already broken in to them for the greens to use in "lemonade at sixes."

goodness, that's a lot of fabric! some of it i'm already using and the rest is going in the stash. 

funny honey bears

i've reordered these pink/purple honey bears from heather ross's far, far away 2 collection for windham fabrics twice now. this is entirely ironic since i didn't even like them when i first got them. in fact, i thought they were plain weird in this colorway.

how did i end up with them if that's how i felt? sometimes i order bundles, fat quarter or half yard sets, of collections that i mostly like but don't completely like every single piece. this is usually because either i'm lazy or late.

when i'm lazy it's because there's a collection where i like the vast majority of the prints and don't want to weed through the collection for pieces i do like to go individually in my cart (very tedious and time consuming), so i decide to take the few unappreciated pieces with the rest.

other times it's because i'm out of the loop on new fabrics or not in a buying period when the fabrics first come out. if i belatedly become aware of the fabrics or decide after deliberation i do want it after all, sometimes it's too late to get anything but a bundle. or there are fabrics i really want that are only available in the bundles.

so. this is how i came to first own the oddly colored honey bears that i thought i'd never use. i mean, honey is not purple! why are these bears purple? weird. not appealing. not my jam.

along came "fall paint lake" and i needed some low-volumes to supplement m original fabric picks for it. there was already some heather ross in the pull and this was a low-stakes quilt for me, so i decided to try the honey bears because i needed some more touches of purple in the quilt.

 this top was tucked away for quite a while before becoming a full quilt. it wasn't until recently that i spent any time with it and got to like it. and that's when i started loving the honey bears. yep. they grew on me!

between using the purple bears in the "fall paint lake" top and completing that quilt came "low-volume crossroads" and the bears made an appearance. i mean, they fit in with the palette of this crazy, scrappy quilt, so i used them here. they blended right in. 

and i kinda liked them after a while.

 now i find myself making a pinky-purple quilt using the exact color of the honey bears and i reeaaally want to include them. i only got about half the mice i needed when i fussy cut them out of the fat quarter i had, so i need something else to replace them in the rest of the 16 patch blocks in "edna."

which is why i just paid something like 5x as much as the original price for the out-of-print purple honey bears i once thought were weird. seriously, this is probably per-square-inch the most i've ever paid for fabric. more than liberty, even. imagine that.

i admit my mistake! this isn't the first, second, or even third time i have come to appreciate a heather ross print i was first unsure about or unattracted to. i give in. she knows what she's doing and if she colors honey bears a weird shade of pinky-purple, she is right. it's a good idea and i'm going to love it.

eventually.

edna fabric edit

choosing fabrics for a quilt is one of my favorite parts of the quilt-making process. it's really fun, but it can be super daunting and discouraging, too. if you add the quilts i've completed with the quilts i have in progess, i've picked fabrics for nearly a hundred quilts by now. i'm no expert, but i've learned by trial-and-error, failures and successes along the way, something about picking fabrics. this post is a detailed look into how i went about the process of choosing fabrics for one quilt.

above are my fabric picks for my pinky-purple "edna" quilt. (you can read about my inspiration for the quilt here.) when gathering fabrics for this quilt i went for cool-toned pinks that had a definite purple cast to them, which slid into light purples with a pink overtone. everyone defines colors on the margins differently. my kids and i argue over whether a certain mango color is yellow or orange all the time. so feel free to call these colors whatever you wish! (what would you call them, anyway? i'm curious.)

in this fabric pull, there are a range of pinks and purples in this color-tone family i described, whatever you call them individually. some are more pink and some are definitely light purples. some of the pinks also lean toward bubble gum pink but with that cool tone. i used the photo of amanda's "lyric" quilt as my guide for the range i chose. 

amanda's original pink "lyric"

knowing what to take out of a fabric pull is just as important as what to use in the quilt. these are the fabrics i edited out of the collection. 

• the top left one is too purple and strong.
• the adorable desnyse schmidt ditsy print with the pink background had too much of the other colors in it, including the strong blue. in person i don't feel like it reads pink enough. i was sad to leave this one out because i love it so much, but it's not right for the feel of this quilt.
• i think the two pink monotone prints on the right got cut because i had enough fabrics in that color already and didn't need these two.
• the two heather bailey prints on the bottom left got culled for their strong secondary color.
• there were also some low-volumes i culled for similar reasons, but i already put them away 

a square throw "edna" by jennifer jones

"edna" is composed of stars set in a grid of stripes with background squares between. i had to think about which fabrics to use for the stars, whether i wanted to feature them or let them blend in more. i knew the colored prints would be the stripes and the low-volumes would be the background, of course. so what to do about the stars - another color, a solid, what? i didn't have any solids in my stash that were a fit and i wanted to keep the look as close to amanda's quilt as possible.

i decided to use some of the low-volume fabrics that had very strong/large spots of color in them for the stars. there was a whole lot of color in them, so they felt like they'd be too strong for the low-volume sections even though they had white backgrounds. they seemed to be halfway between the other catagories so they would stand out from both sections but still blend with the quilt overall.

there were four fabrics that fell in this category. the rectangle throw has 20 stars, so i'll be using each of these five times.

i came up with 9 sets of the full-colored pinky-purples for the stripes. i'm doing the rectangle throw size (as opposed to the toddler, square throw, twin, full-queen, or king, all of which are included in the pattern), which has four columns and five rows of fabrics. somehow that said to me do 9 sets for the stripes. making them in controlled sets rather than just randomly matching up pairs from the fabrics as i went along seemed easier. and although i want this to look scrappy, i needed a little bit of control in there, too. so sets it is - four for the vertical, five for the horizontal stripes. 

i loosely divided the fabrics into nearly-solid, monotone prints (blenders) and the busier prints, many of which were novelty prints or florals. then i paired them up, trying to have contrast between them (one lighter, one darker - all of which is relative). 

then i paired 16 low-volume fabrics into four sets for my 16 patch background squares. i chose fabrics that had the same range of pinky-purples, but allowed them to be a lot lighter than the colored fabrics and more loosely interpreted. i carefully considered any other secondary colors in the fabrics, too. the country mouse print from heather ross (top left corner) is going to be the loudest block and i'll need to fussy cut for the colors so it's primarily pink showing. i don't have enough of one or two of these fabrics to meet the needs, so i might have to replace them with another fabric entirely or use some of these twice when the need arises. i actually like this so that the quilt won't feel completely matchy-matchy from block-to-block. it's quite common in traditional quilts for the maker to replace a fabric when it runs out, often with something entirely different that was on hand.

i decided to make sets of fabrics for the 16 patches, too, for simplicity. i'm still not sure if i'll assemble all of them exactly the same or not, but putting rows together will be easier than randomly choosing how to place them. i can rotate the rows some if i want to. have some level of pattern when making a scrappy block or quilt really helps production.

to create the row sets, i divided the fabrics into those that had just the one color and those that had other colors, too. that worked out to be about half-and-half. then i put two of each kind in each set, trying to balance the simplest, more graphic prints with the novelty prints. i've already got the bottom set all cut and in assembly. using 42 - 2.5" squares of each fabric is taking up nearly a whole fat quarter per print. that's all i had of the two heather ross novelty prints (butterflies and moons) i'm using for the bottom set, which is why there wasn't any more of them left to photograph with the others. 

there are 42 background squares in the rectangle throw version of "edna." i made a lot more work for myself by choosing to make 42 - 16 patch blocks out of 2.5" squares. that's a whole lot of fabric cutting and patchwork chain piecing coming up!

shop stop - so cal edition

i got invited to lunch by a new friend from church and took the opportunity of going inland to meet up with her to make a stop at a few more of the so cal quilt shops relatively close to me. i found some really pretty and fun stash-building pieces at the two shops i made it to.

the first place was called "the fabric shoppe" in callibsas. it is a small, stripmall store that had a whole lot fit in to it's little space. there was a classroom/workshop in the very back and a longarm machine someone was quilting on. the fabric collections were nice but not super modern. it's a riley blake, andover, bernartex, batiks, mottled/grunge monochromes type of store, if that makes sense. 

one of the things i really appreciated about it was they had fat quarters and half yards (usually my preference) cuts of many of their fabrics set with them on the shelves. this made shopping so much faster and easier! i didn't have to carry many bolts to the counter because they already had the cuts done.

i selected several low-volumes for stash and a cute green stripe for a binding (top photo).

they gave me a reusable shopping bag that will earn me 10% off future purchases if i bring it back with me on future shopping trips. if i lived here/begin coming back often, this is a shop i know i would use periodically.

my second stop, which was a whole lot further away from the first one than i originally anticipated, was at "quilty pleasures" in simi valley. it was easy to get to right off the freeway. the store and classroom/workshop next door are located inside a large, nice outdoor shopping mall. the center was hit hard during covid and is half empty these days, which was sad because it looks like a fun place. but the quilt shop is alive and kicking, and they have online ordering if you're interested. 

this store had a few more modern fabrics, like tula pink, amh, and a few ruby star society picks mixed in with their batiks and reproduction prints. there was a lot of riley blake again, as well as some tilda and a holiday picks. i'd say it was a pretty wide selection. if i was local, this would be a shop i went to first even though it's farther away from me.

i'm really happy about all the low-volumes i picked up here. i especially love those little golden bees! the red ditsy floral spray is really pretty, too. i had a couple of my current projects in mind when i selected most of these half yards. the greens are for the green irish chain quilt like amanda's limerick quilt i've been collecting fabric for. the yellows, neutrals, and that gold print are for my "sunny crossroads" quilt. i'm going to cut into them as soon i get home!

stitches, sun, surf

days here are dreamlike, as if we've stepped into some alternate reality. sometimes it's hard to remember we came here for medical help and healing. life floats along in a way that seems out of time, out of real life. it was really cold and windy the first few days, but now it's gentle sunshine and a range of temperatures; cold in the morning and evenings, warm in the afternoons. sometimes cold inside, warm out, or the opposite. when i'm stitching, i have to move around to find the most comfortable spot.

i was heading outside to stitch on the sunny upper deck for some warmth when i caught sight of myself in the window reflection and inside mirror. it captures a lot of what's going on here, the layered, multi-faceted, dream-like quality of our days. sometimes dreams are pleasant, sometimes weird, sometimes take a strange or dark turn. it's been all of that.

our unit is in a row of about 12 houses on a quiet stretch of beach. when we're on the upper deck, you can see farther, but you can also see more of the houses around us. lower deck sits right on the water, but you can't see as far. they are both nice at different times of day and for different reasons.

i'm usually sitting in this chair downstairs when i stitch. it's comfy and has the views. too bad that fireplace isn't operational because it would be even cozier with a fire going.

i'm getting hours of stitching done at a time, and sometimes not for a day or two in a row.

we do a lot of beach walking and tidepool exploration.

these two are crazy enough to get actually get in the water.

southern california has a surprising number of quilt shops. i plan to make the rounds and visit a couple of them. seeing fabric in person is always such a treat. gina, an old blog friend, recommended i try superbuzzy. turns out it wasn't too far away, so d5 and i made a day trip out of it. she got some crochet supplies and i bought a little fabric. not too much, but there were some irresistible pieces. 
 

these japanese fabrics of roasting mochi on a stick (dango) reminded me of our d2, who is currently at language school in tokyo, and it also happens to be one of our favorite treats when we've visited. i couldn't pass them up.

i was overjoyed to find what looks like an exact match to the woven green fabric i used as sashing in my christmas log cabin quilt! the shop lady told me it's a peppered cotton, colorway "jungle." so good to know! now i can make those other two liberty christmas quilts i had in mind. they had just under four yards and i took them all.

you can see i really restrained myself. 

there was a nice charcoal grey herringbone brushed cotton that will make a good binding for a liberty + chambray quilt at some point, so i got some.

i also picked up some heather ross "malibu" fabric. every since we got here i've been dreaming of making a malibu quilt with her fabrics. i have a few pieces at home and i found a few more on etsy. but my favorite print from the whole collection was the floral woodblock in the "ocean" colorway. it has the gold of the california poppies in it and the colors of the waves, too. lucky me they had a remnant and i took it all. as much as i like the other colorways, this one says "malibu" to me the most.

heart-shaped shell i found,
with sort of an arrow through it

is it weird to be happy in a place you came to because your son is sick?

i think not. we chose this spot because it would be a good place to be in while he's sick. and we're making the best of it. gratitude and focusing on the good is appropriate, i think.

i need an update

liberty, liberty, liberty! from sewing room birmingham

those of you who come here to read but don't comment, that's totally fine by me! you're welcome in this space. i'm past the point of needing feedback here, although i still really enjoy it when it happens. those that do comment, i'm having some difficulties with replies these days. read on. i'll throw in some gratuitous photos of what i stashed in 2024 as eye candy, but mostly i have some questions for you today.

blog friends, i am sorely out of date when it comes to blogging tech. gone are the days when i knew what was what and kept up on the latest happenings in the blogger world. it's not my platform anymore and my know-how has disappeared. i just pop in here to make my posts like i always have, but i am completely out of touch with other bloggers. i do all my (limited) quilt socializing on instagram and know a bit about the ebbs and flows there. true confessions - jolene at blue elephant stitches and rachel at stitched in color are the only blogs i occasionally read anymore. but i am having a renewed interest in blogs lately and it seems hard to find them or connect.

heather ross and low-volumes from nova quilts

there are still about 100 people subscribed to this blog (whatever that means or how it works anymore, i don't know). my posts' stats tell me posts get anywhere from 60-100 visits, on average. i have one regular commenter (hi, julierose!) and a few other random ones. this is a big change from my early blogging days, pre-instagram. i'm saying all this because although my purposes for blogging have changed, i do recognize there is a very small audience here and that is meaningful to me. if you do me the honor of a comment, i sincerely appreciate it and want to reply. 

i'm having problems with the reply these days and since i'm so out of touch, i no longer know how to fix it. here's the deal - all the comments i've received lately (which still get delivered to me via email) have come listed as no-reply blogger comments, meaning i can't send them an email reply. once apon a time, i knew how to fix this for them, but i'm starting to think it's now a problem on my end and i have no clue what to do! the fixes i know are outdated by more than a decade.

find me cosmo japanese fabrics from cottage couture fabrics

then earlier today i went to the profile of a commenter (kathy s) and connected to her blog, but when i left a comment, it published me as anonymous even though i logged in to my google account. i'm so confused! and i don't know how to fix any of this so that i can reconnect to readers or other bloggers.

heather bailey's new collection "wild abandon"

i'm also really curious how people are getting here. i know bloglovin' isn't a thing anymore, so how are people subscribed here? i put the widget up myself, but i no longer remember what that's all about! so how are the rest of you that are still active in the blog world still finding and staying updated with blogs? 

you other bloggers, what's your experience like - are your readers your same old circles or are new people getting involved? do you interact much with readers? i'm so curious. once apon a time, when blogging was the main format for connecting, things were so interactive and different for me. now that i have a renewed interest in blogging as my instagram experience is loosing favor, i wonder what's going on here anymore. please share!

moving up upgrades

i've been rearranging and organizing in my sewing room. it's still a complete hodge podge of a space, with a lot of mismatched furnishings, but it's getting cleaner and more functional.

by the look of the two shelves nearly full and the stack on the floor i still have to refold and shelve, i'd say heather bailey wins around here. soooo many good prints in these collections! it just makes me happy to sit with them, admire the colors and patterns, and dream.

in the in-process photo above you can see that i also made a place for a full design wall behind my machine. of course it's already full with wips, but i'm really happy it's there and not falling off of something else anymore.

what brought on the big rearrange and resulting cleanse (because i actually have been culling!), was a few more bookcases becoming available from other rooms in the house. there used to be 6 assorted white bookcases in my master bedroom, which we recently remodeled. we put a few in here a while ago, and after installing more built-ins in other parts of the house, there were 2 more available for the sewing room. only i didn't have the wall or floorspace for them.

i decided to look up instead! after measuring, i found out the shelves were exactly tall enough to stack to the ceiling as long as we gave them a few inches away from the wall to clear the moldings. i got my sons and an almost-son to help me out - they heaved and i directed.

it was a bit scary, but it worked! and i'm pretty chuffed about having fabric to the ceiling. i've been able to get almost everything out of boxes and on a shelf. yes, i have to climb a ladder to access what's at the top, but i don't mind that a bit. it's much better to have everything out and visible.

i've come across all sorts of things since i began shuffling the room around. for instance, this stack of fabric and some already cut pieces that i clearly had a plan for. but i can't remember what it was going to be! darn it.

i should always, always make notes for myself!

i was just going to throw everything up on a shelf, but that wasn't working too well, so i began folding things so they fit nicely. it's taking time, but i like this much better. i'm also sorting and culling as i go, and rediscovering lost items. i've come to the conclusion that a large fabric hoard is a lot of work and was a bad idea. but i'm doing my best to work with it and find a new home or a plan for everything. i've already given a suitcase full to a pair of little girls who were thrilled to get their own stash, and i have several more boxes of items i'm donating to the local guild.

i just remind myself that all this purchasing at least taught me some things. it was an expensive lesson but no use beating myself up about that now. i love mari kondo's thought that everything we've acquired has a purpose, and sometimes that purpose was to fulfill a need at the time or to teach us something. we don't necessarily have to use it as it was intended for it to have been useful to us, and now we can let it go.

moving forward from here.
and up.
up to the ceiling!

learning curve and evolving

basic grey collection (left) with coordinates from stash (right)

curse me and my impulse buying in my early quilting days.

there was so much i didn't know about fabrics and quilting and myself yet.

i didn't know what kind of fabric i liked to use in quilts vs. what just generally appealed to me.

i didn't know what kind of quilts i liked yet, even.

i didn't know that fabric makers were going to make an endless number of new and exciting fabrics every few months, that i'd never be able to keep up.

i didn't know how slowly i would quilt and use up the fabrics i was buying, or that i'd get tired of some of them before i ever got around to using them.

i didn't know what blenders or feature fabrics were, what boring looking fabrics actutally could be the making of a quilt.

i didn't know i would eventually not prefer to make my quilts from one fabric collection only.

i didn't know fabric on sale didn't make it more attractive than when it wasn't on sale.

i didn't know i was the type of quilter who couldn't overlook a fabric i didn't like in a project no matter how i worked it in, that i see the fabric as much as the color effect it has and that if i don't like it, i will continue to see it there years later and it will bug me.

i didn't know that i wouldn't like working with precuts very much, even though they do look really cute stacked on a shelf. or that a layer cake is the only size of precut that you can actually make a full size project out of.

i didn't know that although there are unlimited numbers of wonderful patterns out there, i would mostly prefer to make up my own quilt patterns.

i didn't know how much of what fabrics to buy.

i didn't know that there was such a thing as too much fabric.
(yes, i just said that.)

coordinating solids from stash

i was just really excited about the whole new world that had opened up to me and i wanted to make everything and buy it all.

i wanted a stash and i wanted scraps, for scrap quilts, of course.

i made A LOT of rash and bad choices.
a lot.
enough to fill shelves and boxes.

for example, in the first few months of my quilt hysteria adventure, when i saw this basic grey range for moda fabrics, it didn't really appeal to me. but then i saw another quilter make a simple bricks-style quilt out of it and thought it looked so homey and earthy, better than i expected. and i was looking for more fabric to add to my stash. sure, i could make that! why not? and i would need enough of each fabric, so i'd better get half a yard each. quarters, fat or skinny, would have been more than sufficient, but half yards were more economical (per sq inch) and who buys skinny quarters? there's not enough width to do anything with them (so i once thought). so i got half yards.

eight years later i'm digging this stack of fabrics out of a box and wondering if i should cut my loses, or if the coordinating prints and solids i pulled from stash can redeem these fabrics to create a quilt i'll actually like today. (and this is just one stack out of one box of several.)

because my style is changing.
my tastes are evolving.
(these weren't even me in the first place.)

part of this is because in the process of making 30+ quilts over the last 8 years i've learned a lot more about what i like and don't like. and part of it is just the nature of style progression in the quilt and design world.

these are the kinds of things that excite me, that i'd like to make these days:

1.  2.  3. 

4.  5.  6. 

7.  8.  9.

here's what i'm discovering i like:

• simple geometric shapes, repeating or scattered
• improv
• handquilting, or at least touches of it added
• low-volume
• a very specific type of liberty print, especially mixed with chambray and handquilting

1.  2.  3.

4.  5.  6.

7.  8.  9.

• soft, pretty pastels (low volume)
• diamonds and triangles
• log cabins (a low volume would be awesome)

1.  2.  3.

4.  5.  6.

7.  8.  9.

• still hsts forever!
• i want to make flying geese
• white space for the eye to rest, whether literally white or not

1.  2.  3.

4.  5.  6.

7.  8.  9.

• bold, funky color combinations or those that are unusual or have an unexpected punch/twist added
• large spaces of color
• more solids, less prints (although i will always splurge on those on a backing)
• more solids mixed in with prints
• i reeeaaally want to make the purl soho tiny tiles quilt with handquilting

i'd say i'm leaning towards a certain type of modern style, even though i enjoy certain vintage looks, too.

if you look back at the makes i've produced lately, they don't reflect these concepts much. the "stella grande" quilts were a move in the right direction, but i'm not there yet.

see, this year has been me playing catch up with lots of really old wips, so there's very little of the new inspiration being used. but maybe i can incorporate it into the projects that aren't that far along or established yet.

i'm ready for change, but i'm going to finish some things first.

hopefully i can unload a lot of my stash along the way!