A Vacation, Some Scraps, and a Quilt Top

A few weeks ago, I tagged along with my husband when he had a conference in Southern California.  It was my first time travelling without my kids in years and though I was sad at first, we had a fantastic time.  One of the highlights of my trip that I got to meet and spend time with one of my best blog friends - Heidi from Fabric Mutt.  (Here is her post about the visit.)  We've been emailing and even video chatting for almost a year now and I can't tell you how amazing it was to actually meet her in person!  And being the generous person she is, Heidi gave me the adorable bag above filled with a fantastic variety of scraps (there were even more than shown in the photo.)

And speaking of scraps, the day before we left for California an unexpected box arrived on our doorstep from another of my best blog friends - Nicole from Bold Goods.  I've met Nicole twice and she knows how much my daughters love to sew so she had sent them a huge box of fun fabrics!

These photos show just a small sampling of what she sent - and yes, she sent Nano Iro and HTF Heather Ross to my 8 and 10 year old!!!

As I recently mentioned, my sewing space (which I share with my daughters) is quite small so I decided a day (or two or three) of organizing was needed to fit my daughters' growing stash and my new acquisitions.  Somewhere between ironing, trimming, folding, and refolding, I thought about how I'd like to make another scrap quilt.  Thus, I started trimming a 3" x WOF strip from many of my "non-novelty print" fabrics and putting them in a pile.  And a few days later, I finished the quilt top.

I used some of the fabrics from Heidi and snipped a little rectangle from one (or two) of the fabrics Nicole sent (I worked out a trade with my 8 year old!)  Also, last week at a quilt guild sewing day, one of the lovely members - Amy from The Calico Cat - brought a bag full of scraps that she shared with the group!   There were so many fun treasures and I used many of them in this quilt.

For the quilt, I just cut the 3" strips into various size rectangles and (mostly) randomly stitched them together.  After I finished about 5 rows, I decided to add in some Kona Oyster which I also cut into strips so that I could combine it with a few low volume fabrics.  I'm excited to get this quilted (I still need to decide on quilting) and I plan on backing it in flannel - however, I have no batting at the moment so I likely won't be quilting it until next week.  Oh, well - guess that will give me time to make some more FW blocks!

Linking to WIP Wednesday, Crazy Mom Quilts, and Lily's Quilts.