My Favorite Quilt Shops - Web Fabrics

My husband wanted to go to the Leesburg (VA) outlets on Saturday, so I jumped at the chance to re-route him to Purcellville for a visit to Web Fabrics. My sister had been a few weeks earlier (and neglected to invite me along...mistakenly thinking I wouldn't have wanted to 'call in sick' for a visit to a quilt shop...what was she thinking?) and she raved about this shop, so I had to go.

Web does online sales as well as having a very cute shop. Purcellville is about 15 minutes from Leesburg, which is a far out suburb of Washington DC...aka 'out in the country'. I was surprised to find the shop bustling late in the morning on a rainy Saturday.

Unfortunately, I did not take any photos, as once I walked in the door I was like a kid in a candy store and totally forgot to, but they have some photos on their site: http://www.webfabrics.net/about.html

The organization and layout of this store is the best I've seen. They carry an extensive line of Moda precuts. Most shops just have a couple different charm packs or jelly rolls or bundles, but Web seems to carry almost all of them. They also make up their own custom bundles and rolls.

Throughout the store you'll find drawers and baskets full of fat quarters, a well as 1/2 yard pieces (which is something I've never seen in a shop). There are many colorful quilts draped across chairs. The staff is super-helpful and very nice (the owner offered to draw out a pattern of a quilt I was admiring that she had made).

I found exactly what I wanted (backing and sashing for the black and white quilt...note the tags...sweet!):

and a couple more Timeless Treasures fat quarters for the blue strip quilt that's next up. Dwight found a fat quarter bundle of animal prints he would like me to use, but I didn't buy it yet...gives me an excuse to get back there. I was so 'on a mission' for the green fabric that I didn't really get to pay close attention to the rest of the fabrics on display this trip, but I did note there was an extensive selection.

It's probably for the best that this shop is a 52 mile drive from my house, or I'd need to find a 3rd job to support my new Web Fabrics habit.

Check back tomorrow when I review Homespun Hearth, which I discovered last Friday through their Friday Online Special.

Is it the Weekend Yet?

Here I sit, brokenhearted
in my office--no quilting started
Watching the clock, the hours tick by
Ever so s-l-o-w-l-y....heavy sigh

Okay, enough waxing poetic. I need to get out of here and run over to Capital Quilts to see if I can find some lime green fabric to use on Jen's guestroom quilt. I finished up some more black and white blocks last night and I'd like to finish this quilt top tomorrow (Sorry Margaret...afraid we might be bringing store-bought cookies to the Easter dinner on Sunday).

Let's see if I can get a decent photo of the block sets on my cell phone so I can post them...

Alrighty then. What I did was choose a predominantly black with white print and a predominantly white with black print and used them with solid black or white to make a traditional pieced block.

I took the two prints and made a same size block of alternating strips. I made another slightly larger strip block, cut the strips in the opposite direction and sewed them together to make a 'checkerboard' block of the two prints.

Each two 'opposite' prints yielded 4 different blocks, for a total of 16 at the moment.

I'm thinking that somehow I should also make a block that mixes the white print with the solid white and the black print with the solid black, and I was thinking diagonal strips. That would give me 2 more blocks for each 'set' of prints. I also have a few other prints I can use to add a couple more block patterns--depends on how this lays out size-wise.

I'm off to find some graph paper.

So Many Fabrics, So LittleTime

I'm telecommuting today, wishing I were a student on Spring Break so I could be up in my sewing room playing with my latest fabric (Okay, I know, if I were a student on Spring Break, I most certainly wouldn't be playing in my sewing room...I'd be baking in the sun on the beach, sucking down Coronas with Margarita chasers).

In order to make myself even more miserable, I've laid out the fat quarters I bought at the quilt shop last night. As I'm waiting for work files to download I shuffle them around to see which should lay out next to each other when I turn them into an arty strip quilt. If it's not Moda (any and all), I seem to gravitate toward anything blue. This is the Indigo line from Timeless Treasures with a couple of their Contemporary fats thrown in for good measure (not to mention they were excellent coordinating prints).

Of course, I need to finish Jenifer's black and white quilt, which is currently on hold until I can get her to the fabric store to select the backing and borders. I have red, but now she wants it to be lime green--she's 25....it's her quilt, she wants it more 'fresh' than 'classic'. Whatever. I like lime green, so I think she may be on to something.

Back to work (and fabic shuffling).