fabric

To cap off last night: the sinking sickening feeling of knowing one of my fabrics really and truly wasn't working in my quilt pattern. Jacob helpfully pointed out last night that this is the risk of doing everything myself: you get to take the credit for everything that goes right, but you have to take the blame for everything that goes wrong, too.

I took the painfully mismatched block to my local fabric shop at lunch today, hoping for a double pink to salvage the day. Nope. None. So I called the shop I'd ordered from, originally, and had a rockin' awesome customer service experience.

 Essentially:

So, knowing about the box of summer 2009, here’s the rest.  A little over a year ago, Jeff and I flew out to Hawaii to visit Brad and Alice, who were living outside of Hilo, Hawaii at the time.  While we were there, Alice took me to Dragon Mama, a futon shop in Hilo that also carried a gorgeous array of fabric for sewing and quilting. I’d known about the store ahead of time and had made a point to browse through the fabric shops in Huntsville and Atlanta to know what I had access to locally. I wanted to be able to recognize fabric I couldn’t get at home when I saw it.

The answer?  ‘Everything they carried.’

I’ve been good. Despite my friends handing me fabric, I’d managed to decimate my fabric stash this year.  Mind you, my stash wasn’t that big, especially in comparison to what I’ve seen mentioned by a few quilt bloggers I read.  Me, I’m cranky; if my stash starts building up, it means I’m not using what I’m purchasing, and that doesn’t seem like a good use of money.

However, i can give you a taste of what’s to come in 2010.  You can blame Jacob and Alice.  Well, and me.

Jacob, for one, doesn’t know how to do things by halves. In the summer of 2009, I mentioned to him that fat quarters made excellent and cheap gifts for quilters. He was seeking gift ideas, and I thought, What could be the harm in telling him this?  I expected a padded envelope with a few fat quarters tucked in.  Instead, over the course of the summer, I received these.