I'm Back!

Wow, I did not expect so many comments on my bloggers quilt festival post! Thanks to all who visited and also thanks for the wonderful and lovely comments!

After a couple of weeks of illness and being away without internet connection, I'm finally back on the scene.

I was in Montreal and Kingston for a week, and of course had a peek at local quilt stores. Montreal was surprisingly disappointing. I walked the Rue St. Hubert textile shop section, but less than half the stores carried quilting cottons (i.e. 100%). They catered more towards seamstresses. I found one store with "Quilting" in the name that was within public transit reach, and after a little walk through a sketchy area of town, I found this:


Turns out it's a matress store that will do the quilting part of making a quilt on a large machine, but they neither sell quilt fabrics nor quilts. Oh well, it was an adventure.

In Kingston, I found a lovely but very very expensive fabric store. Fabrics started at 15.99$/m, phew. I bought .5 m of an absolutely gorgeous fabrics and a couple of fat quarters. They'll be used for something special, for sure.

When I got home, I had a great surprise waiting: all three fabric orders from the US had arrived and were peaking out of my stuffed mailbox - I was so happy no one had taken them, because they sat there for a few days according to my neighbour (he'd left me a note that the mail man was very worried about my parcels getting wet...).


These are the treasures that were the reason for the fabric orders: all fabrics for the character quilt. I'm calling the search off now, as I have enough fabrics together to start designing. I'm very excited about this one, and the best thing is: even if I screw up the quilt top, I had to buy so much of every fabric that I can make more than one quilt ;)


Here are the rest of my treasures, including the purchases from Montreal and Kingston.

These are all flanelettes, the one on the bottom was a bargain for 2.99$/m, so I bought a couple of meters for babyquilt backings.

These are all from Montreal:
The two on the right are the expensive ones from Kingston, but I just love the colours (especially the Moda fabric on the far right), and I could really tell the difference in quality when I ironed the fabrics. Incidentally though, this quilt store sold one of the fabrics I bought at a bargain shop here in town for 3.99$/m, except there it cost 16.99$/m. So high price is not always high quality or vice versa. Lesson learned.

And now, online treasures. This is a bit of a repeat of my enthusiastic post after I ordered these fabrics, except now I took the photos and most of these fabrics are washed, ironed and sorted away on my shelves :)
Oh, I lied, the bugs are from Kingston (my friend picked the fabric), and the glow-bugs are from Montreal. I love love love the cranky owls!
Here, the crows are my favourites, so dorky looking...


I can't get over how cute these sheep are...
Quite a fabric haul again, but I think I've pretty much reached my breaking points, stash-wise. Now it's quilt quilt quilt to use up at least part of my stash! (So I can buy more, hehehe!)


And lots of new fabrics means lots of washing and ironing to do. In fact, I stopped ironing this afternoon when I got a blister.