Fabric Diet: October 2017

October was a big - an epic - sewing month for me. It was like the stars aligned: the kids' school schedules finally settled down (not as many random days off), I had a sewing retreat with my Quiltn' Sisters, and I was preparing to attend the fall Sewtopia sewing retreat in New Orleans (more on that in my November blog post).

I plan to write complete separate posts for each quilt top that I finished this month, but WOW, I pretty much started and completed 4 quilt tops this month. Let's celebrate that for a moment!

In addition to those four quilt tops, I also had fun making some mini-quilts and pillows. All three of these applique cloud projects were done for Sewtopia in some way. I plan to do another blog post this week with more pics and details on these cloud mini-quilts and pillows.

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Another fun project I tackled this month was ordering a custom stamp to use to label my quilts. (See the top picture.) I got the idea from my Quiltn' Sisters retreat swap - the item I got had been stamped with the maker's information.
I searched on Etsy and found Tailor Made Stamps, and then I searched Font Space for a font that looked the part. I sent my font selection to the folks at Tailor Made and less than a week later I had my new stamp in hand. I'm so excited to have a completed quilt to use it on. ** Edited to add: when you're looking for font for business-use, you have to be careful because lots of the free fonts state that they are NOT for commercial use.  A very nice read sent along a website with a link to lots of fonts that are good for commercial use. Click here to see that link.**

In addition to all this sewing, this month I think I bought more fabric than any other month this year. I took a trip to Madison Wisconsin, and stopped by Blue Bar Quilts while we were in town. The kids, my mother, and I all had a ton of fun pulling fabric.  It has been ages since I've taken any of them to a quilt shop and all of them had fun pulling fabric for projects (for me to make).  It was fun to see their enthusiasm, but I ended up with WAY more fabric that I would have, had I gone by myself.

In an attempt to illustrate where all the fabric came from, I came up with the image below.

The fabric in the center is what I actually picked out for myself.  My mother also added a pile of fabrics for me to make bags for her, the kids threw in some random (yet oddly fun) novelty prints, then each of them picked fabric for a quilt for themselves (to be made by me). That all made for a whole lot of fabric.

The last thing that I want to mention, that factors in to my fabric totals for this month, is the "Get Your Quilty Wishes" phenomena that has happened each fall for the past three years.  It was started by Christiane of @Raven2006 and is an Instagram hashtag. How does it work? People post wishes for fabrics or sewing related items. At the same time, they scroll through the hashtag and see if there are any wishes that they can grant for other people.  If you find a wish that you can grant, then you reach out to that person and send them what they wished for.  Then you cross your fingers and hope that someone can grant your own quilty wish. This year I went with a long-shot wish: I wished for fat quarters of the tone-on-tone Lizzy House Pearl Bracelet prints.  You know what? One of my good quilty friends spoke up, said she had some, and sent them to me! How amazing is that? She sent me an entire bundle of fat quarters. What a treat! I've already happily put them to use.

Here is how this big sewing month worked out:

Fabric Diet Standings
Fabric Purchases: 68.5
Fabric Used in Projects: 19.75
Net for the Month: 48.75
Net for the Year: -78.5

Ouch. The vacation fabric shopping this month definitely hurt. But you know what, the memory of shopping with my kids and mother are something I won't soon forget. So I'm OK with being up - way up - for the month. I have two more months to try to get back over 100 yards used, and I have plans for lots of the fabric that we bought all together in Madison.