Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Instead of quilting

I admit that I have been doing more wallpaper removal than quilting lately. Chris is motivated to paint and you know it's important to take advantage of that!

Yesterday I got the last of the paper out of the master bathroom. My hand are a disaster but I am happy to see these walls white for a day. Chris went in right behind me and painted the trim so I had to get busy selecting a color. I've brought home so many color cards but just could not get the exact color I wanted.

Then I remembered my dye recipe swatches! I knew I wanted a dark paint color and was leaning toward dark brick red or dark plum. It was great to have so many color swatches to select from. I settled in those 2 dark purple swatches in the front of the photo and headed off to the Benjamin Moore store.

By tomorrow the bathroom will be Benjamin Moore AF-645, Chambourd. This room has 3 windows (south and west facing) and lots of white trim so it can easily handle a very dark color. The bedroom is a rusty orange color. It's probably too much for most people but I love rich colors if the room light can handle it and these 2 rooms have so much light that dark colors work great. 

Now I have moved on to the guest bathroom. This one will probably take me 2 weeks to get the paper removed. I'll do one hour in there today and the the rest of my day is in the dye studio.....a much happier place!

 

The Lancaster Adventure

Mom and I had a great trip to Lancaster to the AQS show. I've wanted to go to this show for a while and glad we finally made the trip. I wonder if they are going to have the show again because they do not have dates published for 2014. So we will see about future years.

We actually got to go to 2 shows. The Lancaster Spring Quilt Show happens at the same time. The LSQS is a smaller show with only about 20 vendors but it was still an excellent show. The had a large collection of antique signature quilts and a great exhibit of small quilts called Arts and Old Lace. I also got to see a dyeing friend, Lisa, from Dippy Dyes. Lisa does all kinds of dyeing and does some especially beautiful work on polyester fabrics, like this spectacular piece.

After spending 2 days at the quilt shows we had a day for shopping around town. Is there a town anywhere in America that has so many fabric shops? It is a quilter's paradise. Lots of shops and fantastic prices.

Here are some of my purchases.

Mom and I started out adventure in the Accuquilt booth. I bought these 4 dyes. I tend to gravitate to dyes that will work best for scrappy quilts. They had all of their dyes 20% off.

These 3 books were all from a vendor selling older books for $5. I got the stamping book primarily because it's by Jean Ray Laurie and I got the applique books to use for reference. The patterns are all from Plum Tree Quilts. I'll be testing these out for potential kits.

We picked up a few supplies from the Bernina booth. Check out the price on those rotary blades! Mom spied that deal. I didn't need any more right now but I couldn't pass up this great price.

Finally, we bought fabric! We went to about 6 different stores but our favorites were:

Sylvia Petersheim - This is a small store but they had a great sale for the weekend. Mom picked up a lot of fat quarters for less than $2 each.

The Old Country Store - This shop must be THE most popular store in the area because the crowds were crazy. They had a crazy batik sale but we didn't want to stand in the long line to get fabric cut. Seriously, we would have had to wait in line about an hour just to get fabric cut!

Log Cabin Quilt Shop - This is a great store. They had lots of sale fabrics in the back room, including $1.99 flat folds. The dotted fabric in the back of my photo came from there. I bought all 11+ yards of this print to use as backing on QOV quilts.

Zooks - This was my favorite store because they had a great selection of symmetry fabrics. The most expensive one was $8/yard! Mom got some beautiful batiks for a new quilt.

On top of everything else it's beautiful countryside and the people everywhere there are super nice. We will go back.

Google Reader

Yes, I'm as bummed as everyone else that Google Reader is going away and I'm starting to research options. One source that I will rely on for information is Lifehacker. Lifehacker is a great site and has information on just about every topic. They published this article on Reader alternatives last week.

I've decided to wait until late May. Technology changes fast and I believe that there are several companies jumping on this opportunity and I want to wait and see which ones rise to the challenge with the best products. When I start testing readers I will let you know how it goes and which one I ultimately choose. Maybe even Google will change their mind.

I can hope.

Meanwhile I have finally subscribed my blog to Feedburner so you can subscribe to receive my blog posts in your email. The link is on the left sidebar above the Google+ box.

If you have already made the switch from Google Reader (or never used Google Reader) I'd love to hear what you are using.

National Quilting Day

Mom left after breakfast. Maybe she was running away from me and 3 days is her max tolerance level! Maybe she was in a hurry to get home and play with her new fabric....she bought some beautiful batiks for a quilt from my brother and SIL. Regardless she left. I put away my purchases (which I will tell you about in another post), did a session of wallpaper removal and took a walk with Chris during the 2 hours of really warm weather today. Then I decided that I must do some quilting on National Quilting Day but I didn't really have anything specific that I wanted to work on.

So I pulled out a bag of little scraps, put on my audiobook and just started sewing bits together into chunks. Most of these are from my Back to Square One quilt and Grandmother's Choice blocks. I'm not sure exactly where they are heading but I'm starting to feel some placemats. I haven't made any of those for a while and I need some for the guest house. 

Yes, placemats and coasters would be great.

What did you do for National Quilting Day?

Let's wrap this crappy week up

To recap:

Almost exactly 1 week ago the week kicks off with Chris passed out in the bathroom floor in a pool of his lunch and dinner. After cleaning everything, including him, up he still couldn't leave the bathroom for 6 hours. 2 days of misery followed (for him). I jsut served up soda crackers and ginger ale.

Monday, right after lunch we learned that it wasn't food poisoning, it was the stomach flu and I got it. We saved a lot on groceries and both lost a few pounds.

By yesterday we were both much better and Chris went off to work. Everybody was happy, happy, happy. (Do you recognize my favorite TV show from this clue?)

Until Chris came home complaining of pain on his right side. We discussed it for a while then I gently poked him and I though he was going to fall in the floor. Off to the ER we went thinking he might have cracked a rib when he passed out.

Boy were we surprised to find out he has a pulmonary embolism.

Two luxury (ha, ha!) nights in the hospital for him followed by 6 months on blood thinners. It was the first time he has ever spent a night in the hospital and he hopes to avoid it in the future. Of course I like to be prepared so I had my applique blocks with me and did this one today. I'll call it the embolism flower.

Surely the stomach flu counts as 2 instances so we have had our 3 bad events for the week. Chris will be home tomorrow and we will, hopefully, get back to our normal schedule Sunday.