Heavy Starch

Do you starch your fabric before cutting?  I usually press my fabric with a light spritz of starch before cutting but after reading this blog post by Carrie Nelson on the Moda blog, I decided to try her method.  I gave the strips a pretty heavy blast from the can and hung them to dry on my portable lingerie drying rack in the bathtub in Miss Main Street's bathroom (she's away at college so won't need to use her tub for a few more weeks).

Warning - this method uses a lot of starch, about a bottle-and-a-half for the packaged strips and the background yardage.  And where do you buy your spray starch?  Our local supermarket discontinued it long ago so I was buying it at Target but they stopped carrying it too.  I made a trip to Walmart but they didn't have it either.  I stocked up at Amazon.com but the prices there seem very high.   Now I see from the Target website that I can order Faultless spray starch for pickup in the store but they won't ship aerosol products to homes.  I really prefer the trigger spray bottles but they sell for more than Best Press on Amazon.com.  If I end up liking this heavy starch method, I'll order several cans at a time for pickup at Target.

Color Inspiration

I began a pin board to hold color inspiration on Pinterest.  I use it to pin photos that have combinations of color that call to me, not necessarily because I like the photo itself.  My next quilt project is based on several of the photos I pinned, particularly Beach Blues.

I'm using a set of 2.5" batik strips from Wilmington Jewels, appropriately called "Ocean View,"  I've got a sand colored batik for the background.  And the pattern is Simply Woven Quilt from Moda Bakeshop.  I've had this pattern on "my list" ever since I saw Thelma's version on her blog.

This project will be a sort of fast fix after working on La Passacaglia for so long.  La Passacaglia is slow sewing at its finest but sometimes a quilter craves a strip pieced top from pre-cuts that can be finished in no time!

Fourth and Final

The photo below shows the start of the fourth and final large rosette for my La Passacaglia quilt.  This one includes some more fussy cutting.

I'm in the process of making all the rosettes for the upper right quadrant of the quilt then I'll attach them.  My mental deadline for this quilt top has been Christmas 2016 but it now looks like I could be done earlier!