Poppies, Bunnies & Wander

 

The very first new fabric purchase I made this year is this one yard of California Poppy fabric, which I bought at the lonely remaining Beverly's Fabrics, to make the name tags for the upcoming retreat for BAMQ. (which happens to be named "Quilting Among the Poppies")

And they had Scotch glue sticks, which I haven't seen in absolutely ages and they're my very favorite-ish. Also some waistband elastic to use for some clothing sewing I'm planning.

I also ordered some new MistyFuse and am trying their new product, BunnyPaper. It's supposed to work well for printing and transferring designs to fabric. And they also published the Yvonne Porcella Memoir, so I got one.

A free book from the Free Table at BAMQ Sew Day, a Kaffe Fassett book I was pretty sure I didn't have.

Also, my pre-order of four yards of the Kona Color of the Year arrived, Wander is a beautiful green. Not at all planned but rather serendipitous, as I think it looks rather fabulous with the poppy fabric. And then there are two cloth ribbons (soft! NOT scratchy!) for hanging the nametags around our necks. I have to chose just one to use.

Fabric Tracker for 2026 so far: - 8 yards

More Words for the Year, Books, Movies Tracked

Even though my intention word for the year is: Alignment, here's a fun one that came up on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary account on Bluesky to predict what's in store in 2026 for me. Of course I had to go look that one up even though I kind of knew what it meant, something to do with electricity...

gal·​van·​ic gal-ˈva-nik 

Synonyms of galvanic

1

a

: of, relating to, or producing a direct current of electricity

a galvanic cell

b

: caused by galvanism  

—used especially of the corrosion of metallic objects as a result of electrolytic action

2

a

: having an electric effect : intensely exciting

a galvanic performance

b

: produced as if by an electric shock

had a galvanic effect on the audience

Just a fun prediction for the year ahead. I don't know if I really want to have an intensely exciting year, or maybe just one where the electricity actually stays on! 

Okay moving on to books, as I talked about last year, I decided to switch over to The StoryGraph for tracking my book reading. I quite like it, much quieter and less ad focused than GoodReads. 

That's a pretty good number of books read for me in a year. Next is a long graphic of all of the covers of those books pretty much in order of how I read them through the year.

It's a visually fun scroll to see all those covers together in one image. I'm again reminded of the Granny Squares quilt idea I had last year.

Also on TheStoryGraph, they have an easy way for various challenges to be tracked, so I did the 52 Book Challenge. And yes, I got 100%, some of them were a little hard to figure out which book to read, or how to fit it into a prompt, but just a fun diversion, made me pick some books I might not have read which was a good thing to get me out of my reading ruts.

Then there's the movie tracking website, Letterboxd, where I keep track, sometimes review and enjoy reading what other viewers have to say about movies. That's an even longer list, 154 movies watched, so I'll spare you the year's graphics on that one and that's just the last part of the year.

Why is tracking so fun? 

Cupro and More

I tried my best to avoid any Black Friday buying, except for my LQS's sale. Harts Fabric is always 

 fun for getting clothing fabrics, and they had a new one called Sandwash Cupro (which auto correct just changed to Cupronickel!?) The description of the fabric was intriguing so I decided to try some and go pick it up in person. While there, I fell prey to the W.o.W. fabrics and other white prints to use in the Lupine Mystery quilt.

I love that they suggest buying a matching color of thread in their online ordering. This color is Cognac.

This is one of those fabrics because of the surface treatment of "handwashing" means it catches the light very differently. Look at that color change! Hopefully this isn't a "nap" fabric that you have to match up so that it's all going in the same direction of your garment. It's a flowy, beautiful feeling fabric, so I'm looking forward to wearing it.

From Folkwear, a pattern for a tunic, a Sashiko kit, and a Clover buttonhole cutter.  And from Amazon, two more Clover notions that were recommended on SewShare. A Hot Hemmer, and a pattern cutting guide. Both of those will get a tryout when I make the tunic. And then from a recent museum visit, the show catalog which is a big beautiful giant book: Routed West: Twentieth-Centruy African American Quilts in California.

Travel Shop

 

The fabric shopping on the way to, and in Portland with friend Jaye, was pretty great. The above picture is  what I found at Sewlarium. First is the new Ruby Star toweling, I'll be making napkins out of this beautiful stuff. I think it'll go well with my pride month table runner. FQs of the PDX airport fabric, a black on grey houndstooth, and odd yellow grid, a pink/caramel ribbon print. A mushroom print that I plan to make a pillowcase with, a really interesting print with odd yellow shapes (I thought it looked like a tile floor), a beautiful (instead of ugly) Frida Kahlo print, and an on-sale pearl bracelets in a dark grey almost black. 

At Pioneer Quilts, I found more of the Ruby Star toweling, because I hadn't bought enough at Sewlarium. An odd grellow star print, a pretty purple halloween print and then the ingredients to make the witch hat "pin keeper" (not a pincushion I guess?). They have a great selection of wools in this shop.

At Mill End, I think I was fabric shopped out/overwhelmed with the vast array of choices, so I only got a couple buckles and a Tombow textile glue that I'd never seen.

In Eugene, we stopped in at Paramount Sew-Vac, a really great store, especially for sewing machine selections as they had all the brands and tons of room displaying them, I found a great remnant of this white and grey print, and then was excited to see Marcia Derse print on a lovely cotton jersey, I got enough to make myself a top.

In Ashland, we checked out Sew Creative and I found that I was really drawn to the Australian Aboriginal prints, they have a huge selection, but I managed to narrow it down and chose three and then found another print that I thought would work well with them.

The last shop we stopped at was Purple Frog Quilt Shop, where I found these 4 FQs, a Peanuts print, blue Grunge, and two lights on a string one dark green and one charcoal. They had a great selection of the American Made solids, so I bought the last of the light grey, a little over a yard. And a new nail file, because my travel one is worn out now and needs replacing.

And finally, at Powell's Books, I found this book, Ahead of the Curve(which includes 5 patterns!) by one of my fave curvy pattern designers, Jenny Rushmore of Cashmerette.

That was plenty of shopping to last me for quite a while, and now I get to add the new fabric purchases into my fabric tracker. At the last update, I was previously at a net increase of 11.8 yards. After adding all this new stuff in,  and subtracting out what I've been sewing since the last update, I'm up to a net of: 18.3 yards. I better get to finishing some big things before year's end to get that number down!

Granny Squares?

 

I saw this great idea for making a crocheted granny square for each book that one reads during the year based on the colors in each book cover. This would take a whole lot more colors of yarn than I will ever have on hand (and I'm Not Buying Yarn) and a whole lot more crocheting skill than I currently have. But the idea of it got me thinking, wouldn't it be fun to do a quilt block for each book you read per year?  There's got to be a whole lot of crossover between quilters and readers, right? Or maybe it's just the quilters that I happen to know? Anyways—I am a quilter who really likes reading, so I'm going to work on this project and see if I can get it going for this year. I've already read 12 books so I'm already behind.

This got me thinking, are there any quilt blocks that look like granny squares? I found this one, and this free one. but they don't really come off visually as a granny square to me. They're lacking the laciness of the patterns I think, too block-y (hah!).  This one is much more of a crocheted look, but doesn't appeal to me at all as a block making experience. And certainly not for the number of blocks I'd be making.

This sort of variation of color placements and arrangements from block to block works a bit better when you have them all together in a quilt. After checking out that one version of a quilt block based on granny squares, I realized I had just one version of granny squares stuck in my mind. That meant looking into what exactly are crocheted granny squares? Turns out that they are not just several rounds of color around a central square, there are a whole lot of variations out there. (hey just like quilt blocks!) Interpreting that wide variation in quilt blocks would make for an even more interesting quilt imo.

I got a digital magazine out of the library and started sketching on my iPad inspired by the pictures. I didn't spend time trying to interpret the look of the crocheted squares into quilt blocks that would be able to be pieced (piece-able?). Just getting the idea of the blocks down. I think it could work as an overall project if you used the same fabric as the negative space or openings in the crochet.

Then I went into EQ8 to see if there were any blocks available that would substitute. As you can see I got just a little carried away with my choices. I was going for variety here. Most of these blocks are way beyond my piecing capabilities, this is just for fun. The one block at the bottom that I repeated and filled in with seemed like a really good crochet looking block, when several were put together. I think a combination of circular, diamond, and square/mosaic types of blocks could work out really well to get that Granny Square Sampler look. Or I could just do a bullseye block, and vary the number, size, and shape of the rounds. hmmmm so many options—more thinking on this is required.

Year of Books & Movies

 I love the year-end lists that the various apps that I use supply to sum up the media that I've consumed for the previous year. For movies, I've been using Letterboxd and apparently I watched 153 movies last year.

And according to GoodReads I read 53 books last year:

16,312

pages read

53

books read

Juliezs

• MY 2024 BOOKS

it was amazing

it was amazing

it was amazing

it was amazing

it was amazing