Friday Fabric Finds #7

Welcome to Friday Fabric Finds, a weekly post where I share the latest and greatest from my sponsors shops, along with any sales and specials being run.

Pink Castle Fabrics have restocked a bunch of gorgeous lines this week, including Biology by Sarah Watson for Cloud 9, Flower Sugar 2014, and First of Infinity - including all the text prints shown below. I have a few of these prints, and the colours are just amazing, so vibrant they almost glow!

Sew Me a Song have a huge sale on all bundles, from now through to the end of Sunday 8th February. All bundles are 20% off (no code needed) and there are SO many to choose from! Becca even has the full collection of Flea Market Fancy listed if you need to restock an old favorite :o) I love these newspaper prints,

and these tape measure prints are just fabulous!

Fabricworm have a huge number of new collections in stock, including these fabulous blenders from Dear Stella. I'm a huge fan of Dear Stella prints, and they have a knack for producing fabrics that will work in almost any quilt. Their latest blenders, Net, are my favorite yet I think - they would add such gorgeous texture to your quilts!

Polka Dot Tea have a bunch of gorgeous new additions to the shop. It was hard to choose what to share, but these florals by Atelier Akiko really caught my eye,

along with the selection of First of Infinity they have in stock.

Fat Quarter Shop also have loads of new fabric in stock, including the gorgeous Etno from Art Gallery Fabrics. This collection is such a great combination of prints and colours!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Summer has finally hit here in Tassie, and it's a long weekend to boot, so I'm really excited to hit the beach with the family :o)

xx Jess

The Meh Quilt

Since writing my Perspective post a few weeks ago (in which I lamented among other things, a total lack of sewing energy/time) I have done very little sewing. It's taken time to want to sew again, more than I expected, but school went back today, and to distract myself from my youngest starting school, I decided to do a bit of sewing. And it felt GOOD. I'm so relieved to have my motivation and passion back at last, and I have a whole pile of things I want to make right now - so things are very much back to normal. I'm a happy little quilter :o)

Having said that, I'm not so delighted with what I put together today. I don't hate it, but I really don't love it - 'meh' is seriously the best description for how I'm feeling right now. I've been completely fascinated with Storm at Sea quilts and blocks since I started quilting, and a Storm at Sea quilt is the next project I want to embark on. This mini quilt doubled as a test run for my planned larger version (although this uses a totally different palette), and as a class sample for a Storm at Sea class I'll be teaching this year at Frangipani Fabrics. 

For this version, I was playing with a gradation in colour from yellow through to green to see how effective it would be in this block. I think it kind of works, but could be improved on (using fabric with little/no white for example - those blocks jump out too much to my eye, and also a smoother transition would work better I think). The other thing that makes me a bit ambivalent about it is that it screams 'Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oy Oy Oy' to me - as Jodi so rightly pointed out on Instagram today, green and gold together evoke certain feelings in Australians. For me, they're not always good feelings.  

I'm hoping that once it's quilted I'll like it more - but regardless it has been a valuable learning experience and hasn't put me off making a big version, which is a wee bit surprising. I swore I would never make another completely paper pieced quilt again after making Roundabout midway through 2013. But now I think making a completely paper pieced quilt is a bit like childbirth - you forget the pain after a while and want to do it all over again ;o). 

I'm off to start ripping paper out of the back of this so I can quilt it and see if that helps me love it more. I know I'm not alone in making things that are 'meh', but what do you do in this situation? Dump it and work on something you do love, or persist and see if you can grow to love it? I need advice peeps! 

xx Jess