Susan won the books

Susan from SewManyThingsToSay won the books from this past weeks giveaway. So Susan, send me your snail mail info and I will get those books out asap.

As a follow up on my previous post about misfortunes in shopping, I wanted to thank everyone who emailed and/or commented. I was a very loyal customer of that shop and to be honest my feelings were hurt.

July 1998, I moved from the Washington, DC metro area to San Francisco. I had to come back to DC one week out of every month for business. I made it a point to stop at that store to shop every time. I buy fabric whenever I travel but I really did make a special effort to visit that shop. Anyway, I did that until Jan 2000, when I moved back to the DC area.

I sent my Stitch and Bitch group an email about my experience and one of the members tsk tsk the whole thing and cc'd the store. One of the store owners sent me a very nice email and promised me a gift certificate as well as a new punch card. Well, imagine my surprise when I found a very generous gift certificate and a full punch card in today's mail.

So maybe I'll got back after all.

I have no pictures to post. I've been washing and ironing fabric. Boring!

I'm making those star blocks that are the BOM from the Quilt Show. There are a million half square triangles used to make those stinkin' stars. Now I love star blocks, but good grief, why use so many half square triangles when you can make flying geese blocks. There are so many **** seams, that cross each other that they were driving me nuts. When you have 8 seams crossing at the same point, they do not lie flat for anything. I steamed those blocks to death to get them to lie flat and they won't. Then to add insult to injury, when I measured the finished block, it was a quarter inch short in all directions.

Now, I sew a scant quarter inch. I know because I always check.

So, the next block, I decided that I wasn't going to do all those **** half square triangles. I re-worked the pattern so that they would be as few seams as possible. Smart! huh?!? Well, I still had a couple places where too many seams crossed but not nearly as bad as the first block. I used lots of steam to get this sucker to lie flat and I still was not happy. I measured this block and again, it's a quarter inch short.

I'm getting pretty pissed off and can't figure out what is going on. I make another half square triangle to test. Measure twice cut once. Finger press, measure, everything looks fine. Press again, with lots of steam and measure and it's a hair or 2 shorter. I am using the Kaufman Fusions for these blocks and it's shrinking due to all that steam. Can you believe it?

So, rather than continue on, I washed all that fabric. There are 11 yards of beige, plus another 22 yards of colors. The pattern said to use a half yard of this color and a quarter yard of this color, which is similar but not exact. Anyway, they had like 30 colors. I could only find 22 that I liked and I bought 1 yard pieces. I think this is an awful lot of fabric for a quilt that is supposed to finish 84 inches. Is this insane or what? Anyway, I'm thinking that someone goofed somewhere but I would hate to run out when I am halfway through. At the rate, I am going on BOM's, I won't know until sometime in 2014. Kaufman may not even be making Fusions anymore.

I kept some 2.5 inch strips aside to compare against the washed and pressed fabric and there really is a noticeable difference. But, I still love the way the Fusions look. Even after washing, the colors are still true. From a distance these fabrics seem to glow. I'd thoroughly recommend them.

So that is my rant for the day.

ttfn :) Yuki