Category: Textiles & Fabric

Textiles & Fabric

Summer To-Do List

Elizabeth E.1 Comment

Make Quilts–check

My parents, Dave and I, our children and our grandchildren

My parents and most of their posterity

Family Reunion–check

Yellowstone National Park–check

More family days–check

Quilt Show–check

Now I need to work on getting my syllabus ready for the first day of school, but here’s some interesting things I found at Yellowstone:

Yep.  They’ve figured out us quilters.  A whole display of little fabric patches to use in quilting and projects.  At the top of this, they had a quilted tote for display. So, of course, I figured out which patch set I wanted and bought that.

I also bought a tea towel in the Grand Teton National Park, which has an embroidered flower; I figure I’ll use it for the inside of my tote.  The name of this park has some controversy about its origins–hilarious.

And on the second shift of visiting family (the OTHER side of the family from the blue shirts), I slipped over to the next door neighbor’s estate sale, where I scored on some vintage fabrics . . .

. . . and charming handkerchiefs.
Now to go climb Mt. Laundry and do some schoolwork!

Textiles & Fabric

Going Coastal Fabric Collection

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Emily Herrick of Little Old Ladies fame, has designed a new collection of fabric.  Usually I’m a scrappy, find a piece-here-and-there sort of quilter, but I am quite taken with this line.  She has a giveaway going on now (leave a comment, have a chance to win the collection) that I thought you’d like to know about, but really–this is quite a cool line of fabric.  And I don’t say that just because I live in Southern California.

When we lived on the East Coast, I wanted to make a memory quilt with all things beachy.  We stopped in a quilt shop on our way home from the shore and I found a little lonely fat quarter in the bottom of the bin, bound with a rubber band–but nothing else.  There are lots of fabrics of flowers, cars, baby things (is it just me, or does there seem to be an explosion of baby-themed fabrics lately?), holiday lines–but no beach line.  Until now.

Here’s the orange-y colorways, with that fantastic Bermuda shorts plaid we all associate with the beach. (Click to enlarge.)

While I love it all–the dots (of course), the stars and the kelp (so Northern California!) and those fabulous bottle caps–the grays remind me of our days at the shore.  It’s the color of the beach just after the sun sets and we’re waiting for the traffic to clear so we can go home.  We’re picking up our beach chairs, shaking out the towels, fighting the gulls for our trash so we can throw it away.  We sit on our coolers, soaking up the last of our day at the beach.

She also has quite the story about how she came to create this line.  She writes: “Last year while I was going through my Radioactive-Iodine treatment for Thyroid cancer I had to be in complete isolation for 10 days. I set up camp in my bedroom with my laptop, a few DVDs, a stack of mags, and some drawing paper. I was flipping through magazines and I saw a picture of a throw pillow with a huge crab on it. I was in love with that crab. I thought, I wonder if there’s a quilting fabric with a crab on it and so I started searching.”

Sometimes I find the stories behind the lines as intriguing as the fabrics themselves.

Textiles & Fabric

Spoonflower Fabrics

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I just voted over at Spoonflower for my favorite fabrics in this week’s contest: rain.  I also had fun looking at their Project Selvage contestants.  For those of you who haven’t known about Spoonflower, it’s a print-on-demand studio, with weekly contests usually arranged around a theme.  Sometimes I have time to vote, sometimes I don’t, but it’s always fun to look and see what new designers are coming up with.  Next week’s contest is Alphabet.  Given my craze for all things text on textiles, I’ll be looking, and voting, on that one too.

Textiles & Fabric

Recent Acquisitions to the Elizabeth Stash

Elizabeth E.1 Comment

I’ve made some recent acquisitions from Fabricworm.

This caught my eye, and I bought it not really understanding that it was printed on a heavier cotton–almost a twill.  But I think the theme of the fabric and the weight will lend itself to some grocery bags to keep in the car.  Now if I will only remember to carry them into the store. . .

I’m a sucker for text in textiles.  “Sweet Fruit” is why this jumped into my shopping cart.

This photo cracked me up because even the camera can’t tell where to focus.  But I include it because it shows the full array of dottiness.  You think I’d be over this type of print by now.

Here’s a close-up of the blues.  No clue where this fabric will land, but it’s inventive and interesting.


Here’s the fabric with my grading pens on top, so you can see the scale.  This is a light-weight cotton, really lovely and smooth and interestingly enough–no selvage printing.

This is why the shopping bug bit: grading papers.
Here’s a fine paper, heavily plagiarized.
Is it any wonder why I need a little fabric now and again?