Since I Can't Buy Yarn...

I've told you all about the yarn diet (rav link)right? I haven't bought yarn since January 1st, 2011. Even before that I was being ultra-good. Usually I only bought yarn while under the influence of this one here.

Now I was worried that I would just start buying up fabric like stinky cheese but thankfully this hasn't been the case. I'm actually very good at maintaining a two project workload with my quilting. A big project and a quick project. And while I do have some fabric without a home, my fabric stash isn't even close to being an issue. I'm glad for that, since quilting makes knitting look like something you could do with nary a dime to your name. Frak it's expensive.

I haven't been to Fabricana since my Aunt came to see me in... November? October maybe. Anyhoo, me bestest drove all the way from Vernon to come see me, six and a half months pregnant at that, so another visit was in order.

The first set of fabric I bought was in response to me nearly finishing my nephews 2nd birthday quilt (he turns 3 in May). This quilt has been put away for a long time because I formally messed up the border. I didn't have enough fabric to tuck into the edging and my hidden stitches were not hidden. It was awful.
oh, and I had to rip out a lot of sandwich stitching because the machine went berserk.
But after a month of glaring I finally took it out of the closet and reassessed it. I was ruthless and took my rotary cutter to the edging to achieve two things: Get rid of it and even out the edge. Afterwards I took some beautiful orange fabric (a gift from Mal's Mom at that!) and realized how perfect it was.
I totally cheated and zigzagged the edging on but I don't care. I was about reading to lose my mind and it looks great.
I have a few finishing touches but it's about 98% done. So I bought fabric for another lovely flannel quilt.
I really liked the pale yellow fabric and basically pulled the other colours from the selvedge dots. It's a pretty safe quilt but I think the recipient is going to love it. The colours are not showing up well in the photo but it's a green, blue, purple, and red to go with the yellow.
Now, I'm still working away on the shark quilt. The kitties approve thankfully.
And while a lot of the edges are not lining up, I have my moments.
I was really excited to get to the point where I finished off the sunlight fabric. I don't know now if the fabric was the best choice but it's kinda too late now. I feel it is too white and the blue that is on it is too dark. Blarg. Will I paint it? I don't know. I would have to do some research and it would be a lot of work on top of a project that is already taking me a freakish amount of time but we'll see. I'm not ruling it out.

Anyhoo, today I did some more work on it and finished row 29. When I put it together I finally felt like I could see the sharks emerging. I know it's very abstract and, well, weird, but I was pretty thrilled when I laid it out and saw the individual sharks. It's also cool that I only have SEVEN more rows to do.
Well, seven more rows, than the rest of the front, the back, and then sandwiching it, and somehow sewing that up, and then the border. Yeah. Looking forward to that a lot.

However, I'm doubly excited to finish because of my next big quilt that I bought fabric for with Jodi. It's the Moda line of fabric called Central Park(pdf). I loved it the moment I saw it.

The dark gray is going to be the whole quilt, no border, gray back, nothing on it, but the front is going have circles cut out, using Ric Rac's tutorial, in three sizes. The largest circle will have the animal print, the medium ones will have the three prints on the right, and the small circles will have the brick patterns. SO EXCITING!!! I have already washed, ironed, and folded the fabric, and started planning the project on paint. I love it already. I could puke a little from happiness when I think about having this quilt on my bed. LOOK AT THAT ELEPHANT!!!
And I made skull sugar cookies for my fellow teachers on parent-teacher interview day. They were eaten in record time.
(I made more than six, this was just a good picture)