Mother lode!

My garage-saleing friend came upon an amazing find. And thanks to her perseverance and patience with a slightly batty garage sale proprietress, a hugemongous amount (about 300 yards) of high quality quilting cotton was procured at a freakin' amazing price! My friend is a serious mistress of negotiation.

Here's part:

And the rest:


And, much to my joy, she was even willing to share. Here's my half:


There is probably about 150 yards or so in those containers. Most are smaller pieces—1/2 yards and fat quarters. There are a few larger pieces as big as 3 or 4 yards. Wow. And I'm telling you, the price was incredible. Less than $1/yard. There are, of course, a few in there that aren't really me. But for the most part there is a ton of beautiful, imminently usable fabric goodness.

No. I did not need this fabric. But I am happy to have it, and I really look forward to using it. Projects are dancing in my head. What I need to do now is quilt faster.

Bee in my bonnet

A friend invited me to go garage-saleing with her a few weeks ago. Having never done anything like that before, I joined her. It's a lot of fun! I've been out with her a few times now. Most of the time, I don't find much... mostly clothes for the boy. But last week I went to a fabric/craft garage sale and found some nifty stuff (I apologize for the horrible picture... I'm still learning):


Included are 5.5 yards of great vintage-looking cottons, a yard of lovely green woolen, a quilting hoop (now I just need to learn how to hand quilt!), five black zippers, and a package of 1.5" calico charm squares from Keepsake Fabrics. All of this loot for the bargain price of $15.25!

Since then, I've been obsessing about that little package of charm squares. I've just felt this need to do something with them. Now. So, with the blocks of my Star Quilt Along quilt sitting on the floor taunting waiting for me, I found myself cutting and sewing something completely different. I ended up with this:


Pink 'n' Blue! The pattern is from the book Bits and Pieces: 18 Small Quilts from Fat Quarters and Scraps by Karen Costello Soltys ("Americana Nine Patch," pages 29-31). I used some stash fabric for the background and border and nearly half of the little charm square package. It is 21.5" square. I was really excited at how quickly it came together (it definitely helped that all the little pink and blue squares were already cut).

This is my first attempt at a small quilt. It is so cute! I don't know what I will do with it once it's completed, but I'm sure something will come to me before it's done. It's tempting to try and do some hand quilting on it since it is a small project. But I don't really know how to do that, and I have no idea when I'd actually get around to doing it. So, I'm thinking machine quilting might be the way to go.