May Blog Giveaway

I LOVE hand dyed fabrics and batiks! They comprise a sizable percentage of my stash. I am drawn to the batiks in every quilt shop I visit. I am a Hoffman Fabrics magnet. Most of the time when a fabric calls my name it is usually a Hoffman Fabric. My friends Bruce and Diane Magdison from Sew Batik have gorgeous batiks. It is really hard to contain myself when their booth is by ours at a show because I want to buy them all. They have gorgeous flannels and rayons which are hard to find. I used their fabrics in my Chevron Charm Table Runner.

Chevron Charm Table Runner - Kits are available

I have been buying Rainbow Fabrics Hand Dyed Fabrics for about 10 years. The owner, Diana Lacy dyes all of the fabric in her home. She does an amazing job putting colors together into Rainbow Packs. These packs contain 12 fat quarters. I used Touch the Rainbow in my Confetti Quilt.

Confetti Quilt

She also has the best skin tone fabrics I have seen anywhere. If you do portrait quilts or doll making, you will love these. There is a wide range of colors so shading is very easy.

Skin Tone Deluxe

I have chosen six beautiful Rainbow Fabrics fat quarters as this month's Blog Giveaway. Enter to win on the top right hand side of this page.

May Blog Giveaway Prize

Happy Quilting,

Carol

Completed Quilt Top

Just finished putting the rows together. I can't wait to quilt it with some beautiful variegated thread. That will have to wait for awhile though. There is another project to do right after the show.


The quilt top will hang in our booth at the Rocky Mountain Sew Expo this weekend. The show is July 12 - 14 at the Denver Merchandise Mart. We are in Booth 217 - 219 at the show. 

I can totally see this as a great baby or toddler quilt too. It goes together easily. I did the whole top in a weekend and didn't spend all day every day on it. These are 6" blocks so my version measures roughly 30" x 42" without quilting and binding. That is an ideal size for a baby quilt.

Carol

Tessellating Windmills under Construction

I have all of the rows sewn for my Tessellating Windmills quilt. I can't believe how easily it went together. Every piece fit and the blocks all matched perfectly. I love when that happens! Here's the template that made it all possible.

From Marti Michell Tessellating Windmill Tool 

I chose the Tropical Rainbow  color way and black. I wanted a dramatic look and I think I have achieved that. Here's a picture of what it looks like so far.

I hope to get the rows sewn together tonight. If I manage to get it done, I'll hang the top in our booth this weekend at the Rocky Mountain Sew Expo in Denver, CO. We are in Booth 217 - 219 at the show. Stop by and see it in person.

Getting Fabric Ready

We are so fortunate to carry Rainbow Fabrics hand dyed fabric. We carry all of their three yard Rainbow Packs as well has hard to find skin tones and gorgeous individual fat quarters. However, I choose to display most of them differently than her other shops. So there is folding and bundling and labeling to do before we put them out at a show.

I received my order for the upcoming Tucson and Phoenix shows about a week ago and have been playing in 250 yards of hand dyed fabric since then. Here are some before and after examples.

This is 150 individual fat quarters. They actually come rolled up. So I unroll each one. Open them up and refold them so we can display them in shallow boxes.

These are the same 150 fat quarters (minus a couple that were just too gorgeous and they jumped into my personal stash) all folded and banded. Now those are ready to go.

Diana ( the gal who dyes the fabric) sends me each color way of the Rainbow Packs in piles of pressed fat quarters. I then go through and compile them into their sets of 12. Those are then rolled into the packs that you see on our website and in our booth at shows.

These pictures are of 10 sets of Tropical Rainbow, which happens to be one of my favorites.

This is what they look like straight out of the box.

Now they are in groups of 12 and are ready to be rolled and banded.

Here are 10 bundles of Tropical Rainbow fat quarters all rolled up and ready to set out at the show next week.

Now you have an idea of another part of what's involved in the before part of doing shows.