Note to my hexie swap partner

I have almost all of my swap hexies made and they will be ready to go into the mail on Monday.

I worked on them outside this afternoon:

And this was my view:

I carefully put them back in their cute little box:

And the next thing I knew, they had jumped out to pose next to this piece of driftwood.

I'm pretty sure the little owl was the ringleader. So if you find a grain of sand, just dust it off...

Dear Abby:

I have entered into a fairly new relationship and I'm starting to have second thoughts. Even though the individuals  come from a few different places, I thought everyone's personality traits would eventually blend together and we would all get along great.

Individually I love each and every one of them. But now that I have spent more time with them as a group, I'm just not sure this friendship is working for me. One particular person in the group seems to be competing for all the attention and it's kinda starting to bug me.

So, Dear Abby, do I continue on in this relationship and spend more time with them, hoping that eventually we will form a lasting friendship that makes us all happy? I've seen a new group hanging around my sewing room and they seem pretty friendly.

So do I just cut my losses and look for a new group of friends, stay with my old friends, or be friends with everyone?

Yours truly,

Frustrated in Fresno

Scraps of This and That

Blogging quilters are so generous. Maybe it's just quilters in general. When I first started designing items with selvages, Ashley was one of the first people to donate to the cause. In turn I made her a pincushion.

(picture from Film in the Fridge)

In turn she offered FMF scraps in exchange for another pincushion. Considering how FMF scraps are like gold, that was an unbeatable offer. And now she is sending me one of these amazing potholders. Thank you, thank you!

Picture from Film in the Fridge

When I mentioned I was hooked on hexies, but not really wanting to finish Civil War repro fabric hexies I had started several years ago, another quilter emailed and said, how about a trade? Your hexies for some selvages. Another win-win. And speaking of hexies, I had a little helper this morning. Sometimes it takes a different set of hands to show you a new way of organizing something. It also requires an extreme degree of concentration.

This doesn't have anything to do with quilting,  but the other night we went to Todd Beamer Park, a really great new park in town that has lots of fun water features. What a cool way to spend some time on a hot summer night. Pretty much Grandpa's idea of a perfect evening...

Things don't get much better than this...

Wordless Wednesday (the Selvage Blog edition)

(Click here for link)

Someone put a hex on me

I'm not sure who the exact culprit is because there are so many suspects! Highly suspicious: Joan:

and Jennifer:

Good grief: Both Joan and Jennifer have hexes in their header picture, constantly reminding me how fabulous hexes are.

It could be Crystal:

or Terri:

Melanie might have been the actual spell caster, because I signed up for her Hexagon Charm Quilt Piece-Along. Yep, I'm pretty sure it was Melanie. She even posted a helpful video.

Chris from Izzy Inspired posted an invaluable tutorial on sewing the hexes together when you get to that stage. I've already tried her method and it worked for me.

I am not new to hexagon piecing. A couple of years ago I started a Grandmother's Flower Garden using the plastic templates, which I thought would be helpful. Not.A.Fan. Also I cut the fabric in hexagon shapes because I always thought that was how you had to do it. The fabric would slip, even though I pinned it in the center, and by the time I got around to the last side of the hexagon there was hardly any fabric to work with. I put everything in a ziplock, in a drawer, and decided hexagons were not for me.

(Anyone interested in some hexagons out of Civil War reproduction fabric?)

Cardstock precut templates? Fabric cut in squares rather than hexagons? Sign me up!

And did I mention "cheater" cloth? I'm doing Melanie's "charm" hexagon quilt, which means each hexagon will be out of a different fabric. I found this as I was going through a fat quarter stack to use for a different quilt- along. Bingo.

I'm not sure exactly how I found this little etsy shop, but she was destashing some Lilly Putlizer prints. Hello? LP cheater cloth? Another score.

And this a brand-new line of fabric, "Party Dress" by Mo Bedell for Blue Hill Fabrics, has cheater cloth in each of the three colorways. It's even printed in hexagon shapes.

So Melanie's piece-along calls for 1,173 hexagons. Remember I said it was a charm quilt? Each of those 1,173 hexagons will be in a different fabric. So Mark was wondering how I would possibly have enough fabric to make over a thousand hexes in different fabrics. Hello. He lives in the same house with me. He surely has noticed all the stacks of fabric everywhere...I kind of stammered something like, "Uh, honey, I have lots of scraps....." Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm under a hex of a spell.

Pssssst....I'm over here

I just completely stole that title from Amy, but it's really because of her  and Blogger's Quilt Festival that I'm over here. Heather and Megan have a great blog called Quilt Story where they feature the story behind the quilts, and today my One in Every Color quilt is being featured. I hope you will hop on over and take a look.

And every once in a while, it is possible to find yourself mentioned somewhere and you didn't even realize you were mentioned until you decided to take a break from being bored to tears working so hard, and catch up on your blog reading (about halfway through the post).

Customized

By now it's no secret about how much I love selvages. Besides my obsession with the clever names of fabric lines and the beautiful array of color registration dots, I have the most fun putting the different selvages together to create some kind of a theme.

Friends have been generous in donating selvages to help me out. In return, I like to make them something a little special as well, customized just for them.

Ashley credits Flea Market Fancy by Denyse Schmidt with sparking her entry into the quilting world. If you follow her blog, then you know how that has turned out for her. And if you are a FMF lover, you know how hard that fabric is to find these days. Ashley was one of the first to send me a huge bag of selvages, all neatly trimmed and tied together. I made her a pincushion as a thank you. She emailed me a few weeks ago and wondered if I could make another pincushion so she would have one on each side of her sewing room. She requested that I make it out of FMF selvages, and generously offered to throw in some scraps for me as well.

I wanted to use as many selvages and color registration dots as possible, so I made it a little larger than usual.

I think Elizabeth found me via Bloggers Quilt Festival and generously sent a bag of selvages. She had been working on a quilt using a collection of French fabrics. But she also included some selvages from fabric I had never seen in my fifteen years of quilting, and they were amazing! To thank her for inspiring some new ideas, I made her a pincushion from her French selvages.

If you take a lot of pictures (and what blogger doesn't?), then you really need to check out
Amy Priddy Creations. Amy was another generous donator to the cause and this pincushion will be on its way to her doorstep later today.

Of course I had to add her name by using an Amy Butler selvage. And the cute camera fabric by Enchino for the back:

My good friend, Katie, loves all things Amy Butler, Heather Bailey, FMF, etc. Well, you get the picture. She also has a darling son, Henry, who was born last year. So thanks to Alexander Henry, and to Heather Bailey for printing the year on her selvage, I made this pincushion for Katie:

I'm quite sure Henry will grow up to be a Free Spirit, so I couldn't go wrong with that selvage.

How about you? Do you have a favorite color, a favorite designer, special hobby? I'd love to customize something special just for you.

Color inspiration

The articles and recipes were interesting, but what I really gleaned from these magazines were some fun color combinations for future quilts.

Turquoise, lime green and yellow (with a touch of tomato red):

Lime green, hot pink and yellow:

Turquoise, orange and hot pink.

What color combinations are inspiring you this summer?

Here's the story...

Did you watch the Brady Bunch? I'm sure I've seen every episode at one time or another.

I guess Michael Miller likes the Brady Bunch too because, they just came out with a line of fabric called the Brady Bunch. I placed my order today for this:

Cute fabric, huh? Wanna know the real reason for the order? (1) Because it's named after Cindy Brady (and they assured me that "Cindy" is printed on the selvages twice in every yard) and (2)  I realized I don't have one of my own pincushions! When that fabric arrives, you can bet I'll be cutting that selvage off and making a  pincushion for my very own sewing table. Probably while humming

Here's the story of a lovely lady

Who was bringing up three very lovely girls

Sorry. Now you probably won't be able to get that song out of your head...