Fabric Diet - NOT!

Well, I've tried to work toward cutting down my new purchases at the quilt shop until I finish some of the projects that I already have and also so that I can save up towards making some purchases at the April International Quilt Festival in Chicago, where I always see tons of stuff that I would just love to have come home with me.

I haven't been doing too terribly. I have made good progress on some projects (and will share photos soon!) and resisted making purchases when I was in Patched Works for Moda U. last month. However, this month, I did make a few purchases beyond the necessary. Here's what I came home with:

1. Three charm packs of the new Sentimental Studios line Kashmir II (one swatch shown above). This was actually the fabric featured at Moda U. last month, which I managed to resist the urge to purchase then. (Random aside: I really disliked this month's fabric, which was Swell, by Urban Chicks and makes me think of 1950s kitchens. Um... no thanks!)

2.The Schnibbles (by Miss Rosie's Quilt Co.) pattern called Four Corners, which I may use the aforementioned Kashmir charms to make. (Yes, I probably could have figured out this pattern on my own, but I was feeling lazy.)

3. A new quilting book by Laura Lee Fritz called Mindful Meandering: 132 Original Continuous-Line Quilting Designs. Seeing as I am building up quite a stack of small tops that need to be quilted, I am looking for some meandering patterns like this that I can perhaps execute a bit more quickly than some other recent quilting I have completed on my own. This book will give me lots of things to practice and I think I really will benefit from having this in my library. And, as I was Googling around on the author's name to try to give you a link in this post, I discovered that C&T Publishing has created an instructor's lesson plan for teaching from this book. Now I have a way to make myself work through this on my own. Yay!

4. Three and a half yards of one of the brown fabrics from the Chocolat line. This actually has a use in helping me to finish a project. I'm going to use this as the backing for the Sonnet collection charm quilt I showed you a few weeks ago. I've decided that I am going to put on a brown border; it would have been close to do that and back it with the brown from the Sonnet line that I had on hand. And the shop was out of significant amounts of brown in the Sonnet line. I figured this would work.

5. This is where I really got into trouble. Or maybe not too much trouble, depending on how you define it. See, we were finally able to turn in our receipts from shopping at Patched Works for over a year to earn our points on those purchases. I ended up with a nice sum of "Monopoly money," based on those purchases, to spend at the shop before the end of March. Understandably, I wanted to spend it on something special, and the Four Patch Shuffle pattern here, done up in Chez Moi's Fresh Air line really called my name (unfortunately the United Notions website is having issues, so I've given you the link to kit made with the line on a commercial site). I already know that Ben hates this line (it's too busy for him... I'll tell you how I know he dislikes it soon, when I show you a small quilt I already made out of this line), but I simply love it. I know it is busy and retro, but the colors are so rich and speak to me. Seeing as this was essentially "free" (in a relative sense), I didn't feel so guilty about buying something that I knew he would dislike.

Not a bad shopping haul! Hopefully I can avoid temptation in the coming weeks better than I did on Saturday.