Finally!!

I have tried off and on for the last 10 years or so to either buy or start a quilt shop.  The first time I even went to the bank but because of the way the shop owner did her taxes she only showed a profit of $6500 for the whole year.  No bank is going to make a loan when the business doesn't show enough profit to even make the payments on the loan.

Since then three other shops have either sold or gone out of business at totally the wrong time for me to buy them.  Plus there were all those moves we made that would have made it impossible to have a shop.

When we bought this house my girlfriend and I both figured she'd end up living with us at some point in the future.  That's just not going to happen for several reasons so now I have an unused room in my house.  It's really too small for much more than storage space and too funky for a guest room, especially since there's a nice guest room upstairs.  So it's going to be the fabric room.

I have purchased book cases to store the fabrics and I've started buying fabric.

Because of the way blogger works instead of just adding another blog to my list of blogs here I started a wordpress blog for the shop until I can get a proper website built.  I'll get the website started after the first of the year.

It's http://cottonwoodcreekquilts.wordpress.com/

I hope you all will follow the store and make a purchase once in a while!  Let me know on the shop blog if you're looking for something specific and I'll see if I can find it for you!

a challenge win

The larger guild that I belong to has a challenge every year.  This year the challenge was "what can you do with a panel?".  We get the challenge on the last Saturday of January and it's due the last Saturday of October.  I always go to a small quilt show and one stop shop hop with my friends every year in February and I found a Valentine panel.  I apparently have a weakness for Valentine fabric because I have a lot of it already.  So other than the panel the whole project came from my stash.

Each panel had two of the big heart squares with some really dark red polka dot fabric between them.  I bought two panels and used three of the heart squares in the bed runner and then cut the smaller hearts out of the fourth heart square and appliqued them to a background and made the throw pillow.

I totally love the way this looks on the guest bed.

What can you do with a panel?

That is the challenge.  Pick a panel you like and do something with it.  The challenge was issued at the January guild meeting with your entry due at the October meeting.

So in February I go to a combined quilt show/shop hop and one of the vendors has a Valentine panel.  I know I already have a plenty of heart/Valentine fabric to go with it so I got two panels.  I got two because each panel has two different heart squares on it and I'm glad I did since I ended up using three of the squares from the panels.

I knew I didn't want to make a large quilt and I didn't want to do a wall hanging either.  I've seen lots of patterns and ideas for bed runners lately so I decided that's what I'd do.  I'll also make a pillow shams and a throw pillow to go with it later on.

The first pic is the bed runner after its been quilted but before the binding has been put on.  The second pic is one of the paper pieced hearts.  They were such a pain to do but oh so cool when they were done and they really make the quilt.  The last pic is a close up of some of the quilting.  I had it long arm quilted and told her to "fancy it up."

A new venture

I'm going to open a web fabric store!!  I have a room in my basement that I'm going to line with bookcases and fill with fabric.  I need to talk to the IRS on monday and make sure I can just use the same EIN number I already have and then I'll apply for my sales tax number from the state.  My mom is giving me seed money for my initial set up and inventory.  I should have the shop up and running in about a month and a half to two months. 

Tentative name is Cottonwood Creek Quilts.

I'm excited.

Those jelly roll quilts

I'm sure you've seen them.  You sew a whole jelly roll end to end and then grab the two ends and sew them lengthwise.  They're kinda boring.  Just a buncha strips sewn together.  The only variations are sewing the strips together with bias seams or straight seams and maybe adding a square between the strips when you use the straight seams.

But I had a black and white jelly roll.

So I jazzed it up.

I'll add a very narrow border of orange.  Then I'm going to have to hunt for border fabric.  The black and white I have is more off white and just doesn't work.

Sunflowers!

I'm really happy with the way the sunflower turned out.

The Meadowlark is pretty cool too.  The wheat has been fairly uncooperative so far though.  I was going to make it with beads and perle cotton but the beads were too big, the wrong shape and the wrong color.  They just flat wouldn't work.  I looked thru every bead website I could find and Hobby Lobby and I didn't find anything that would work.  So I'm fusing it too.  Talk about tedious!!

In other quilty news, I'm now the chairman of the quilt section at the county fair.  I knew that Baker Arts thing would just lead me into more trouble!!

I'm working on the Kansas, My Kansas challenge wall hanging.  It's not due until May so I have only been doing enough to show "participation."

Anyway, I have the main sections done for the background now.  I've figured out how I'm going to do the wheat so far.  I am still not sure about the sunflowers.