On Wonderful Creatures and Other Things

Looking up at the date on the top corner of my laptop today and finding myself already on 17th January makes me feel that the year has got off to a galloping start. I hope the first days of 2017 have been good ones for you!

Over the last few weeks I've been struggling to find quite the right background fabric for the central medallion of a quilt that I've been working on recently. My husband was stumped by it too so, following an SOS call (in which I dramatically doubted the rightness of every single thing about the entire quilt), my parents came over to help me. They both have a brilliant eye for colour and seem to have a natural understanding of how quilts come together - my father commenting at one point: 'the background fabric here is really a transitional area that needs to create a link between the medallion and the outer parts of the quilt'. At which point we stopped briefly to commend him on his brilliant likeness to a Quilt God. They then went on to assess each option I'd laid out, carefully rummaged through my fabric drawers looking for alternatives and together we narrowed things down to come up with an idea of the kinds of fabrics that could potentially work and even came up with some extra details that I could add in. And gradually I felt my equilibrium being restored. Even though I was frustrated by my own inability to initially see what was needed, it was a really lovely morning and one that left me feeling acutely aware of how incredibly lucky I am to have these two wonderful creatures in my life.

After they'd left, I quickly trawled some online quilt shops looking for things that met the criteria we'd laid out, before dashing out with my husband to walk Nell and buy a celebratory brownie from our local cafe. I so often only buy prints that I've either fallen in love with or which will work well for fussy-cutting, that I'm frequently lacking in essential blender prints, so this little stack that arrived today has left me feeling better-stocked with options. Most of the ones above are either from Sew Hot Fabrics or The Fabric Fox, both of which are quite regular haunts for me.

In other news, yesterday, Fiona (of The Sewing Directory), launched a new website and it's one that I've been silently wishing for, for a long time. Several years ago, there was an amazing site that used to share many of the latest fabric launches - I can't remember what it was called now, but I always loved it and found it a really useful resource whenever I was planning a quilt. Sadly, the woman who wrote it passed it on to someone else when she had a career change and I think the site's focus changed at that point and it eventually petered out - does anyone remember it? Anyway, Fiona's new site, Forever Fabric, is basically just like that original site, but with the added advantage of also telling you where each fabric range is being stocked in the UK and the US. There seem to be a lot more modern fabric collections than there were a decade ago, so it will be lovely to find them all in one place as I often find that if I'm late in discovering a line that I love, by that point many of the prints have already sold out (and by late, I mean about 18 months late, causing me to wonder if I've been wearing a blindfold).

Regular readers may find the brevity of this post alarming. I have to admit that at this point I am wondering if it is actually even possible to press 'Publish' without having written at least 3,000 words, so rarely have I done such a thing. I shall press it and we'll find out...

Wishing you a lovely week,
Florence x