Nouveau Stitch

At the risk of anyone thinking I’m turning this into a strictly quilting blog, I’d like to preface this post by saying that that won’t happen! I love all forms of sewing — home dec, clothing, crafting, needlework and yes, I’ve definitely renewed my love of quilting. I mean really, one can only redo their home so many times before people start looking at you like you’ve lost your marbles and your husband isn’t sure when the next decorating tornado will pass through. When I sent a load to Goodwill last summer, there were six pairs of fully-lined, double width, extra long custom draperies included. And dozens of pillows. And yards of home decor fabric that I had bought on speculation only to keep past it’s prime. So quilting does several things for me. It gives instant gratification, I get to play with beautiful (much less expensive than home dec) fabrics, I still get to be creative and I don’t have to take out a second mortgage to fund my habit. So with that said, I present to you yet another quilt ~ my fourth of 2013!

I quickly wrapped it up this morning because I heard we were supposed to have sunshine and we do! A cold, but sunny, perfect picture taking day!

I added hand quilting with some beautiful pearl cotton.

And rick-rack to my machine sewn binding. I love it!

I used leftovers to piece the binding.

Isn’t the checkered backing fun?

There’s a bit of history that goes along with this quilt. One morning, maybe a month ago, I was cruising along on the interwebs, minding my own business, and I spotted the website, Connecting Threads. I had heard of the site but never visited before. I started looking at their fabrics and was immediately intrigued because the website was beautiful, easy to maneuver, had lots of great color and wasn’t too overwhelming. Nice. But wait! What’s this? The price PER YARD of quilting cotton was $5.96? And sale prices as low as $2.96? Really? “What’s the catch?” I thought. The fabrics were adorable and unique. I clicked on a collection that caught my eye, Hello Sunshine, and thought it was just about the cutest thing ever. The story behind this fabric collection is that it is the result of a contest Connecting Threads conducted for the designer of their next collection. I read the story about the winner, Virginia Odien, and was so excited for her! Even though the contest had taken place months ago, I fired off a quick email of congratulations and immediately ordered a few yards. Okay, who am I kidding? At those prices, I ordered several yards.

Virginia couldn’t have been nicer as I asked a lot of questions, mostly because she works in Adobe Illustrator (she’s self-taught!) to design her fabrics and that’s what I had been working in as well and hadn’t had much of a chance to “talk” to other fabric designers. We’ve had a great time getting to know each other and talk shop. She has an amazing body of work and does quite well on Spoonflower, where you can purchase the hundreds of fabrics she’s designed, many of which are Spoonflower contest winners.

So, as I assembled this quilt, I thought a lot about the fabric designer who created the drawings that culminated in a collection that resulted in a contest that made the fabric available for me to purchase and stitch together into a quilt. A couple of creative gals simply doing what they love.

Linking up to Finish it Fridays!