Half Marathon and Quilt Store Visit

As many of you know, Ben and I have been running half marathons for a little while now. This past weekend was the fourth time we've run the half associated with the Fox Cities Festival of Races (the sponsor for the half has changed a number of times). It's a great race: well organized, a pretty flat course (that last bridge incline always kills me, however), with some nice scenery. We had a beautiful day for the race, although the 7 a.m. start time wasn't my idea of fun (5 a.m. shuttle pick up at the hotel). My finish time wasn't a new PR (bummer), but it wasn't my worst time either, and overall, my positioning within my division and amongst women was similar to or slightly improved from last year because the size of the field was quite a bit larger. The first 7 miles were fabulous; miles 9 and 10 were bad. But even though parts of it were painful, in the end, we always seem to be thinking about the next race and are eager to do another. Right now we're considering the possibility of the Rock 'n Roll Half in Phoenix in January (MLK weekend). Long training runs outdoors in Wisconsin in December could be problematic, however, and I cannot fathom motivating to do a 12 mile run on a treadmill!

An added benefit of driving up to the Fox Cities is an annual visit to Primitive Gatherings quilt shop in Menasha. This year I had a completed "punch card" to spend, which gave me $20 of free merchandise (which of course I exceeded in no time). I focused on pulling fabrics to make a quilt based on Sharyn Craig's book, Half Log Cabin Quilts. Here's a photo of the fabric I pulled - I love these colors and think they'll look great in our living room. Can't wait to make this quilt and am hoping that I can incorporate sewing a few blocks here and there into the flow of sewing for my other projects.

Fabric Diet - Blown

I honestly have done pretty well with my fabric diet this year. A few minor purchases, largely using accumulated points or gift certificates and the like and the rest of my sewing coming from stash (baby quilts and Thistlepod aside). But when I saw David Walker's Oh Boy! line for Free Spirit and kept returning to look at it at various online shops, I knew I had to pick some up.


I must say that most of the fabrics out there for kids do very little for me, especially those that are created with boys in mind. But these fabrics were just too cute to pass up, and with all of the little boys popping up of late, I figure there will be plenty of sewing for them in the not-do-distant future. I don't know what destiny these might have - and I might have gone a bit overboard, buying 10 different 2-yard cuts - but it won't go bad and I'm envisioning pillowcases, quilts, and other fun projects.

Christmas in May

That's definitely what it felt like at my sewing bee last Thursday night! After much cajoling, one of our bee members convinced us to get up from our sewing stations and go to her car in the parking lot to check out all of the home decorating fabric samples that she had stashed in the back of her car and was giving away for free. And while we were all somewhat reluctant to go out to the car with excuses such as not really using home decorator fabrics, not needing more fabric in our stash, etc., we pretty much all walked away with some GORGEOUS treasures, and some of us with huge armloads full.

Check out some of these wonderful pieces I came home with, and these are just a few from many:


I'm still trying to imagine what anyone driving by must have thought about seven or eight women standing in a parking lot around an overflowing suitcase, holding up fabric samples, loading them in their arms, creating little piles of them, etc. It must have been quite a sight (did they think some kind of deal was going down?), but I don't think any of us minded. Thanks to Judy and her daughter (who works in the industry) for providing us with some future fun (I'm not promising when I will finish anything with these beauties)!

Ideas for what I should do with this? None of the pieces are terribly large, but I'm envisioning some pillows and bags. I would love additional ideas!

Christmas Fabric Giveaway!

It's not often that I pass on fabric, but my monthly Fat Quarter Club installment from the Fat Quarter Shop arrived early and is one that I cannot fathom EVER using. The line is Isn't Christmas Jolly by Mary Engelbreit. I do like Engelbreit's drawings and her magazine, but I must say that I just find this fabric to be completely outside my holiday tastes. With so many yummy holiday fabric lines out there, why did they have to choose this one?

At any rate, my disinterest in this line can be your gain. Rather than have this take up precious stash storage space, I'm going to give it away: 12 fat quarters, a whole 3 yards of fabric! Leave me a comment; I'll draw a winner from those received on July 8 (if drawing is even necessary, given the low number of comments I receive).

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.