Fabric, fabric and MORE fabric!

I rarely do things by halves. Sometimes this leads to great success and other times, not so much.  And often this leads me to procrastinate because I'm worried about how much time a particular task will take.  In June, this led to me not diving in to the actual project - and instead spend extra time reading, re-reading and surfing the web.

Floral for Winter Wonderland

I live with ADD (both mine and Gus's ADHD - makes for an interesting household), and tedious tasks can drive me to distraction. Or to walk away from a project.  To get myself motivated - I started to mentally design the various projects - for instance - as soon as I saw the Nature's Notebook line of fabrics, I knew that they would be perfect for the Rail Fence.  And the flying dragons lend themselves nicely to Cowboy Corral for Gus.  There is a line of Laural Burch fabric coming this fall - currently November - with a celestial theme/panel that would have been PERFECT for Winter Wonderland. But I didn't want to wait that long to get started. And I didn't want to skip any of the projects.

Of course, in my drive to do things "my" way - I spent a large part of the weekend with an iron in my hand - and I most of the pressing and ironing done for the next three projects.

This also involved two trips to Thimble Pleasures. On Friday afternoon, I pulled the dragon fabric out and headed in to select colors for the rails. The red/yellow/purple will be the rails/frames for the dragons and the blue will likely be the first border.  My next step is to fussy cut 32 dragons from the two yards of fabric.  Tentatively it will be 8 red, 8 blue, 8 purple, 4 green, 4 orange (I DETEST the color orange but the dragons are cute and the quilt is for Gus... but you will not see any orange in the accent fabrics...).  The lighting is not great on the bolt of fabric (may need to pull out my big camera) and it is looking washed out - the dragon at the base of the photo is a medium purple with blue spots - not grey...  We originally picked out a purple dotted tonal fabric, but Gus wasn't wild about it and I remembered that I had the Laurel Burch purple in my stash. Gus is much happier.

The second trip was on Sunday morning.  I decided that I wanted to use the bold paisley (Hoffman Gypsy Princess line) with the Natures notebook fabrics as the Nature's Notebook florals are more muted, for the repeated rail and the border.  So off we went, only to find that they last piece they had in stock was a 1/2 yard precut.  And per the instructions, we need 1/2 yard for the rails plus 5/8 for the border - which means no way did I have enough. And I don't want to start searching the net for it. So I decided to pull in a different fabric for emphasis.  After much searching and help at Thimble Pleasures, I settled on the blue/white delft.  For some reason, when I was cutting last night, I also cut one of the Nature's Notebook florals - so I have 6 strips to choose from. More on that in another post.

Tonight, I start sewing!