Quilting & Fabrics

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Saturday evening I got this nifty idea to scan in all my fabric, I have a huge bin of it. I had wanted to for a while, either get a dig photo or scan. It's the only way I'll use it. I need to have a snapshot of it forever or I'll never let it go. Today after work I am also going to snip a small scrap off each piece, that will be useful not only to keep a bit of each, but if I need to get more fabric to match it I've already got that snip without digging out the fabric, as well as finding ones that go together. For now they are going to just go in a small box, but someday I may put them in a photo album or binder of sorts (that is sooo marthastewartesque). There are also some quilt designing programs that I believe you can plug your own images into as well as use ones that come with it, they'd be really good for that if I ever wanted to use it.

Here is my fabric collection, the names are
descriptive. I just don't have the time to make pretty pages for everything on my site anymore so I'm dumping lots of images in folders these days.

I know it's an odd thing to collect but at least I have now met others online who love fabric prints the way I do. Not just any prints, my prints. I bought most of them off ebay a few years ago, some in fabric stores. None of it was expensive, I think the most I ever paid was $14 for a yard of Flower Fairies (Cicely Mary Barker's art), one of the harder to find prints, now those are all out of print, were for a few years, but recently a new company started printing new ones. Most of my fabrics were $3-$7 for a yard, I bought several fat quarter (FQ - to any non sewers, this is a quarter of a yard that is cut a certain way so it's closer to square) sets. You can just go look at the link but my collection includes fairies, spiderwebs, king arthur, alice in wonderland and whatever was pretty to my eye or came in a big lot of scraps cheap on ebay. I got 2 different big scrap lots, I'm talking 9 lbs of fabric, containing everything from 4" pre cut squares to a few fqs. (terms to search on ebay for these: scrap scraps lot fabric fq fqs)

Oh how I would love to have an every other week, give or take, northeast NJ gothic quilting bee... expect some barbie sized quilts from me soon for the practice, made out of my precious flower fairie fabrics. They will be gifts or for sale on ebay. Once I can do them really well I may just push harder on the northeast NJ gothy quilting bee. I think if I'm the one organizing it I should at least have the basics down, I would expect at least some will come wanting to learn how and I need to be sure someone is present who can teach a basic quilt technique. Wouldn't it kick ass if I actually started making these barbie quilts with matching pillows and they started selling a lot and I could quit my job and just make them and homemade soaps? It would.

I love these too: Serendipity Fabrics - has a gallery of a lot of the flower fairies
fabrics, king arthur, fairy tale, nursery rhyme fantasy related fabrics that are unique & collectible. They sell some and there is a really nice gallery of quilts people have made with these fabrics. (the gallery seems to be empty today but I think they recently re did the site, I have an entire version of it downloaded from about a year ago)

Wrap them in Love - I think this is mostly run by a lone woman. I'm on the Yahoo e-list and sometimes they get a little too into saying prayers for each other's problems, but sweet gals & guys nonetheless. Don't know what to do with those bits leftover from quilts you made? In the mood to make more for the fun of it? You can send them whole quilts, blocks, materials, or cash of course and it all goes to children who need love. This is a non profit organization. They have a gallery of some of the donated quilts on the site, and you can buy their recipe book "Cook it yourself, I'm quilting!" They also run ebay auctions.

Project Linus - A very similar non profit organization as Wrap them in love, they also take whole and partial quilts. They have some free pattern links for inspiration if you need it. They have chapters all over the US, so you can drop off or mail things, maybe even have quilting bees.

There is a yearly Quilt competition & display at Peddlers Village, it would be cool to do some off beat wicca & fairy tale ones, sometimes you just can't push things too far :-).

Poke around my gothcraft section of my site if you're bored or need ideas or places to get free patterns, ideas, & inspiration.