Saturday, April 30, 2011

fabric!

I love to buy fabric! 

The best part about buying fabric is that it is beautiful, it is creative and you can pretend that by buying the fabric and promising to make something, you are a champion of economy and resourcefulness.  The sad truth is that buying fabric is like an addiction.

Let's say that you purchase the materials that you need to make a baby blanket.  Sweet right?

Well inevitably in the course of the project you have to go to the fabric store three times to pick up one more spool of thread or one more yard of fabric which means that you have enough to finish the project, but now instead of having enough for the project, you have more than enough but not enough for anything else.  Sooooo, you have to buy more fabric in order to use the old fabric.....  Plus, by the time you've finished your project you have sworn off ever looking at baby blue ANYTHING ever again because you just about went cross eyed trying to create your masterpiece in the first place. 

Let's not even mention the fact that if you are going to make something as a gift, you have to actually obtain the skill to make a gift worthy of giving.   Some of the work we produce when we try something new is just not any good.....YET!

Have you ever worked on a baby blanket for 4 months and then realized when it was time to assemble the thing that it was all wrong?  I have!  At this point you are left with a dilemma.  You can either go ahead and give the cattywhompus gift that you spent hours on and worked on with all of your love and prayers and good intentions, rip out all the seams and start over completely, OR you can go out and spend all that money again buying a gift.....  It's just no good, but it is however, a well known fact that before you can be good at something you have to be less than good at it first. 

I'm currently shopping for fabric.  I'm trying to match some fabric that I purchased to make curtains for my classroom.  My classroom shelves are ALL open and it's been my experience that the old "out of sight, out of mind" policy is the best course of action if I want my students to leave things alone.  So I have already made one set of curtains, but I didn't have enough fabric for all of my shelves.  Also, I found to my disappointment that not all fabric I purchased looks as good as curtains as it did on the bolt.    A few of the curtains I made as just WAY too busy.....

So - I have given myself permission to shop for fabric :) :) :)    which leads me to the inspiration for today's blog.  As I was searching for a fabric that will look nice with what I already have, I found something that just begged to be shared on my blog.... but first......

In order for you to understand the coolness of what I found you have to have a tiny bit of background information.  For those who don't know it, traditional quilt patterns have developed names over time.  One of the most recognizable, distinctive and challenging quilts to make is the "Double Wedding Ring" which wasn't seen in it's current form until the 1920s. 

I found a picture of a double wedding ring on the http://www.alwaysquilting.com.au website.  To quote their website.

"Double Wedding Ring quilt owned by Sylvia Johnson of Blackburn Nth, Vic. The arcs have been ditch stitched. A custom design was created to fit the centre of the "rings" and the "melons" have been stipple meandered."



The Double Wedding Ring quilt pattern has always been a personal favorite of mine.  I especially like the fact that when this pattern became so popular it was made primarily out of flour sacks.  I wonder how much bread you had to bake to get enough flower sacks to make a quilt?  Since most of the Double Wedding Ring quilts that I have seen were given as wedding gifts and intended for a double, queen, or king size bed.... that is A LOT! of flour!

....anyway.... I digress.....

Imagine my delight as I was perusing the fabric websites and I came across a quilt pattern that you could purchase for a "Single Girl" quilt...... before I saw the picture I was immediately  interested because of course, I'm single, so I thought.... I've got to see this........



This is a patten by Denyse Schmidt http://www.dsquilts.com/, a couture quilt designer.  Did you know there were such people???  I didn't either.  Here are my thoughts about this quilt.  I think it's a beautiful quilt and I like the single ring pattern and I find the name fitting  because with the "ring" quilting on top of the pieced single ring, it suggests that there is no ring.....:) 

Although I might make this for myself (when I'm an old maid of 80 years of age) , I hope that if I ever decided to give this quilt to anyone as a gift, I would have to figure out a way to include "color by number" Velcro ring overlays or something.  Then the Single Girl quilt could become a Double Wedding Ring quilt.... as the opportunity presented itself.  I mean, I don't know any single girls who would refuse to marry if the right person came along.  I'm also glad that by the time this pattern was developed we buy most of our fabric at the store because as a single girl I don't believe it would be humanly possible for me to use enough flour to make a quilt of any size.    Either way - I had fun writing this blog!

1 comment:

Jagette said...

Sounds so familiar. I still have a bunch of fabric that I've never used and keep saying I'm going to make something out of it.
Right now my problem has been yarn. I see it on sale and think of something I can make by either crocheting or knitting and the bring it home and don't remember why I just had to have that skein of yarn.
Hope you had a wonderful birthday!