Two More Retro Sampler Blocks Completed, and Fabric Crises Averted

 Hello and happy Tuesday!  This post needs to be a "quickie" because I have a dentist appointment to get ready for.  I like making these Tuesday To-Do lists, even if I don't always cross everything off before the next Tuesday rolls around.

Last week, I managed to eke out two more 5" sampler blocks for my '80s Retro Building Blocks sampler quilt:

5 Inch Puss In the Corner Block

Neither of these blocks is in the original Moda Modern Building Blocks quilt, by the way.  I always try to mention that in case anyone out there is working on that quilt, so as not to confuse anyone. Like most of the blocks in my quilt, these were both foundation paper pieced due to the non-ruler-friendly patch sizes that happen when you take a 6" block and force it down to 5".

5 Inch Card Trick Block

Meanwhile, my order of Kona Solids from Missouri Star Quilt Company DID arrive this past week, including the Ocean blue that I was needing so desperately, and I washed, dried and folded all of it.  I HATE prewashing fabric, but the only thing I hate more than prewashing fabric yardage is frantically trying to remove dye bleed from a finished quilt.  

In that same order of Kona solids, I had 6 yards of color Midnight that I'd intended to use for the background of Anders' kaleidoscope high school graduation quilt.  I ordered it from my iPad based on the color name and the little fabric image on my screen, because I was too lazy to go all the way upstairs to get my Kona Solids swatch card.  And now I am punished, because color Midnight is actually NOT the darkest color of blue as I'd hoped -- it's a deep, dark PURPLE!!!  Y'all, it would have looked just fine with my other fabrics, but I used a deep, dark purple solid background fabric for my older son's graduation quilt two years ago and I am neither Donny Osmand nor The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.  I have had enough purple; I wanted blue!  I wasted some time scouring my favorite fabric web sites but was leery of buying online again when I knew I needed something exact, so I masked up and headed to the not-quite-local quilt shop yesterday afternoon, bringing some of my hand dyed stripes and marbled fabrics with me for auditioning purposes.  I swear I looked at every single bolt of fabric in the store, and this Provisions 2 digital print in Indigo from Free Spirit Fabrics was the ONLY one that I could get excited about:

Provisions 2 in Indigo, Digital Print from Free Spirit Fabrics

Remember that these are the other fabrics I'm planning to use for my kaleidoscope blocks:

Hand Marbled Fabric from Marjorie Lee Bevis

Hand Dyed Stripes and Batiks from eQuilter

My Ultimate Plan for All of This Fabric

I like the way the inky streaks and splotches in the background fabric play with the watercolor and paint vibe I get from my hand dyed and hand marbled fabrics.  The only glitch was that my "local" quilt shop had just over 4 yards left on the bolt, and I will need at least 5 yards for all of these isosceles triangles.  I asked them if they could order more for me, but they're not taking any special orders right now due to lengthy backorders from the fabric manufacturers.  So I bought everything they had and then found three more yards from an Etsy seller to ensure that, even if I have made math errors in my yardage calculations, and even if I make a horrendous cutting mistake, I should still have plenty of fabric.  Crisis averted!  Best of all, despite the deep, saturated blue-black of my Provisions Indigo fabric, it passed my colorfast test with flying colors. Woo-hoo!

But all of that new fabric has been put away for now so I can turn my focus to a couple of clients' projects:

Tuesday's To-Do List:

1. Finish vintage quilt repair & schedule client pickup
2. Load & quilt small outreach top with new E2E design (I want to preview the design and how it stitches before committing to using it on the client quilt top that is up next in my que
3. Load & quilt my client's quilt

I know, all work and no play...  I do have a few more sampler blocks that I might sneak in here or there, but really, now that I have my fabric for the graduation quilt, I need to make a decision.  My design wall is being held hostage by the sampler quilt, but I'm going to want to be able to use it to lay out the kaleidoscope blocks.  I could just take the sampler blocks down to free up the wall, but it was SUCH a pain to get the blocks lined up properly with all the different block sizes.  Also, there's the "Out of sight is out of mind" phenomenon to consider.

What do you all think?  I have 30 more blocks to make for the sampler quilt, plus the four corner blocks and the borders.  I've made 6 blocks so far in January, and I'm finding that the smaller blocks that remain are much more manageable than the biggest blocks that are already completed.  Should I try to finish the sampler quilt top first, at least the main body of the quilt, before I take it off the wall and start the graduation quilt?  Or should I just take the sampler blocks down and put that project away until after the kaleidoscope top is ready to be loaded on my frame?  Let me know in the comments.

And now, I need to brush the coffee off my teeth and get ready for the dentist!  I'm linking up today's post with the following linky parties:

TUESDAY

To-Do Tuesday at Home Sewn By Us

WEDNESDAY

Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter