Saturday, February 6, 2010

When buying fabric is annoying....


Bet you didn't think that was possible, eh? I'm doing a lot of cutting right now. If I have a quilt cut out I'm more apt to sit down and sew a few blocks when I get home from work. I'm working on the quilts on the cover of the book shown above. The one on the right is called Scotch Granny. I'm using the first Chez Moi line by Moda fabrics that came out about 5 years ago maybe. I bought a whole tower of fat quarters because I loved the line so much. I have all of those cut...144 6" squares. I also have all the squares cut that are the little red triangles in their version. 144 of those. The problem is that little tan stripe in all the blocks. I need 144 of those too. It takes 2 1/2 yards of fabric. I know, sounds like a lot, but you get two blocks out of it.
Anyway, I'm using a turquoise fabric. I pulled it out last night to iron it. Somehow I had the fabric stored with part of it exposed to direct sunlight. Normally a few faded spots wouldn't bother me. I had this stupid fabric folded so there is a line going from selvedge to selvedge every 12" or so along the entire 2+ yards. There's also a fade line running through the center intersecting all the other lines. /growl Of course, since this fabric (the first metro blue line by Michele D'Amore) is almost five years old too, it's out of print.

Now, I have two choices. Get in the car and drive about 45 minutes each way to the nearest quilt shop and find a substitute or hit the web and find a replacement. If I spent enough time, I could probably find the same fabric, but I opted to try something I could get more of if I needed it. The disadvantage to shopping on the web is that the colors are really hard to match. So I found the four best likely candidates and ordered enough of all of them. Sigh. Yes 10 yards of fabric, 7 1/2 yards or so won't get used for this project. Good thing I like turquoise. I suppose I could have ordered one, waited til it arrived, checked it for a color match, then ordered another one. Again, it's a time factor. Though I think one fabric is backordered anyway. This way I can pick the best and toss the other three into the stash. Of course, the really bad part is all the other stuff I ordered to make the shipping worthwhile. hee.

So what's the fate of the faded fabric? I'm going to cut it up and put the unfaded parts together and toss the faded bits in the scrap pile. They all look fine, just not right next to each other. I'm sure I'll have a charity project where a soft pale turquoise will look nice.

In unrelated news, I'm up to 22 minutes on the Behemoth. It doesn't sound like much, but the first few days after my back got better, I could only do about 2 minutes. No, it's not a hard machine to use. I'm just that out of shape. The fun part is it gives me an excuse to download what Mr. Belfry calls obnoxious dance music from iTunes.

ta
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