Purchases and Plans

I just returned from Oklahoma after the birth of my first grandson on July 16th. My previous post was about a visit to Sooner Quilts in Guthrie, OK with him and my daughter.

I have returned home now and I'm a bit tired from travel. The trouble with a big push to finish something, immediately followed by travel, is the start-up again upon return home. I have two quilt tops waiting in the wings all layered and ready to be FMQ'd.

I am not quite up to that level of commitment just yet, though. I thought I would do some small projects first. This is an excellent excuse to buy fabric. I saw some sets of placemats made up in Sooner Quilts that I thought were attractive and would be quick projects to do at home to practice FMQ and different binding techniques.

I thought these chefs were cheery. They came four placemats to a panel. The store had backed them with a fleur-de-lis pattern, to recall French gourmet cooking I guess, but instead I chose the medallions at the right. I think I may bind it with a black and white stripe.

This rooster print was perky. The fabric was yardage printed with squares of roosters. The samples in the store had widened those squares with bands of another fabric to make rectangular placemats. I am a sucker for the polka dots so I picked them as the widening fabric. I chose the fabric at the right for a backing, enough for four placemats. Binding is undecided but I think I bought enough grey with black dots to use it.

I like the deep rich colors of the wine bottles in this next fabric and bought enough for six placemats of it, too. I will find backing and binding in my stash. I am thinking of doing a two tone "Susie's Magic Binding" in the rich green of the glass bottles and warm rust tone of the foil or wax tops like I did on my Fun Guys quilt this past June .

I bought this stripe just because I loved the color. I will set it aside for a binding of some quilt some day.

I told my self no more big projects until I finish off my backlog of kits but I have a weakness for fabric with printing on it, and more so when there are numbers as well. I also could not resist a sale, as well. These layers cakes were 30% off so I bought two in case I wanted to narrow down the colorways and so I would have more numbers squares. There are six feature number squares in each layer cake. Yes, I know I could have merely bought only the number fabric instead, but then I would have had to decide a color. I could not be that decisive! And in my defense, several of the fabrics in this collection read like solids and so can be repurposed in other projects. I do so love a coral and a turquoise that come in the stack. 

There are 42 10" squares and 8 were duplicates. Thirty five are shown in the following photo. I do not know which print is missing. But I did look into which were duplicates. The six fabrics with plusses were doubled up and the white background with yellow dots and white background with turquoise dots each had a duplicate. I pulled this image of the fabrics from the Missouri Star Quilting company to show the prints. Perhaps some day I will be lucky enough to visit this brick and mortar store as a quilting destination.

What will I make from this? I do not know yet but I have several layer cake patterns and a couple books for pre-cuts so there must be a candidate in my files somewhere that will be just the perfect partner for this and not slice up those numbers a lot. Fractions are great but I think I want this quilt to feature whole numbers.

I'd made this quilt, which I named Vintage Ornaments, from a layer cake pattern by Thimble Blossoms called Piece of Cake {2} but I think I'd be bored if I did the same pattern twice.

This pattern is a cute variation but I think it may slice up the number blocks to much. Hmmm... I could always throw in a wonky non-sliced number block here and there. This is a contender.

 While I mull this over I will link up to this week's WIP at Freshly Pieced.