Finally Sewing

It has been wonderful this week to finally get back to my sewing machine following weeks of dyeing fabric (which I also love). Below are some lovely blocks that my friend Judith gave me years ago. I decided to make them into potholders and I quilted them this afternoon...

Simple quilting for these 6" blocks which will be bound--yes, I actually sew on a real binding.

When we were preparing for the East Cobb Quilt Show I needed to have some quilts quilted for the wall samples, so I bartered with my friend Frances for quilting services. Here's part of one of the pieces she quilted...

Lovely! The flowers match some of the Kaffe Fasset fabric in the 9-patches. This 25" square quilt got a binding this week, too.

One last new item...Bill's latest rust dyes. They just keep getting better all the time...

We call these the mummies. I'll get some better photos later because there are wonderful details that look like arrowheads and lizards.

Wonderful Show

As mentioned earlier, we had a vendor booth this weekend at the wonderful East Cobb Quilt Show in Marrietta, GA (just north of Atlanta) and had a ball! The show is held in the Cobb County Civic Center which is open and spacious, with vendors overlooking the quilt show from the second floor.

This was the view from our booth. There are wonderful skylights in the roof for natural light.

Here's our booth...

Bill made or altered every one of our stands. The free-standing white display to the right is made with the two sides of a crib (I have an incredibly talented husband!), and the "night stand" to the left was altered to hold a hanging rack of fabric. The standing racks on the tables were the sides of a vintage wooden playpen. Cool!

Notice the hand-dyed tablecloths and the rust-dyed town (Bill made it) on the front of our check-out table. Our favorite quilt in the show was one I've shown before by our friend, Frances Arnold...

..and this was my second favorite quilt, which was a whole-cloth quilt made by Judy Alexander. This would look lovely in our home...

Can you see the sinister eyes in the quilt?

There were 400 quilts in the show and too many to comment on, but the dragon quilt (no photo) won the Viewer's Choice Award, and it was well deserved.

Thank you East Cobb Quilt Guild! We had a wonderful time and hope to see you again in two years.

Goodies

It's been a long, long day of preparation for my upcoming vendor booth. Started at 8:00am and stopped a few minutes ago, around 10:00pm, minus some eating and resting breaks. Here are some of the spoils of the day...

Hand-dyed fabric yards

Half-yards

More half-yards & fat quarters

Hand-made wool pincushions

And the edge scraps, noodles, that I'll use in my new Fabric Beads class in 2010. Yummm.

Cotton is Cotton

While trying to decide which fabric to use for table covers for the upcoming vendor booth, my husband remembered a purchase we made a couple of months ago at the Habitat for Humanity store...6 or 7 queen size high quality cotton sheets for $2 each. Humm...right size, all cotton, but also stark white.

Well, I am dyer of fabric, so why not dye them? Here are the results...

Lovely! Without having to finish edges, I have three new, neutral colored tablecloths for the booth for a little work and $2 each. Nice.

September Booth

If you plan to visit the East Cobb Quilt Show in Marrietta, GA (north of Atlanta) this month, from Sept. 18 - 20, please stop by my booth to say hello. I will be on the second floor overlooking the quilt show, and the booth name is Anita Heady Fiber Arts.

I hope to see you there!

AJ's Quilt

Slowly but surely, AJ's quilt blocks are coming together. As I wrote earlier, AJ is my nephew who just arrived at RIT (Rochester Inst. of Tech. in NY) for his Freshman year of college. The RIT colors are orange and brown, but I'm also adding black to the quilt blocks as well as any color that will liven up the quilt and give it depth.

Did you know that purple, in small amounts, is a wonderful color to add to Autumn colors to liven them up? Find the piece below with the golden sunflowers and look at how much purple it has. Doesn't it enhance the brown? That's because brown us made up of red, blue and gold, a.k.a. purple and gold.

I've been collecting AJ's fabrics from all over: shirting, my scrap bag, my fabric stash, Goodwill, and friends' stashes. Look at this brown, black and tan cotton Indian robe I found at Goodwill last week...perfect!