All kinds of goodies

Spent the morning in the car, to and from the airport to collect my mother, who has come for a 3 week visit. She brought with her loads of lovely things for me, which I shall show below, but first, a couple of recent arrivals for Alex (birthday last week) - first, this cute little (about 12x14") panda quilt (he being obsessed with pandas), which came to him from Cathi - the panda is from a colouring book, aparently - he adores it, but not QUITE as much as this great shirt, which came from "Toby and Jack" - though we all know it was more likely their mummy who was responsible - he said, on opening it "this is like the best present ever". I think he was happy with it - thanks so much, Karol Ann. And thanks, too, for the photo, which I nicked from your blog - I had hoped to get a photo of said child wearing the shirt, but it hasn't happened yet - though I'm sure it will be the shirt of choice on the weekend, once school uniform is no longer required!





In addition to all the stuff that my mother brings without any prompting on my part, I do also sometimes use her as a courier for things from the US - for instance for swaps, or to save postage costs. This little quilt on the left above is from the Twisted Mystery 4 on the quiltshoppe forum and I had it sent to my mom's house because the first time I played in the TM, my quilt went astray (the one to me, not from me). I've had lots of things safely sent and received since then, but I hate to take the chance. Anyway, this quilt came to me this time (my fabrics, at least mostly) - you may remember the Hallowe'en quilt I made for my partner in this swap - who turned out to be Colene, who I "know" - which was fun. Actually, I might never have shown this quilt, as I wasn't allowed to do so at the time, and who knows if I ever remembered to do so - I don't see a photo of it on the blog, in a quick look - anyway, Colene blogged it here, so if you are interested, you can have a peep. Genny & Mary (who are mother and daughter and worked on their Twisted Mysteries together) did a great job on this quilt for me, which used a particularly challenging feature fabric - which is why I'd never managed to do anything with it yet! It also features log cabin blocks, which are a firm favourite, though they couldn't have known that as they didn't know who they were making for!


On the right, is a great piece of oriental fabric from LisaJo, who sent it as a thank you for the string square blocks I sent her. Not sure what I will do with it yet, but I do love it.




And here is some more fabric - for this, I have my mother and her local JoAnn's to thank - actually, it's not her local anymore, as it shut, and it was never a great branch - there's a much better one a bit further away - but when it was going out of business it had fabric and notions for some stupid prices, so she went and bought some for me. My mother is every quilter's dream mother - she loves fabric, loves to buy it, but doesn't sew. So guess who gets the fabric?! The pieces on the left are quite large as they were really cheap ($2/yd or something like that) but you had to buy 2 yards, minimum. On the right, fat quarters.

And below, on the left, some notions from the JoAnn's closing sale, along with a bag of buttons from a yard sale/flea market, some handkerchiefs from the same, and a gorgeous piece of heavier red fabric with dragonflies on it - not sure what I will do with that, but something, for sure.


And finally, on the right, some fabric I ordered from eQuilter with a voucher Cathi gave me for my birthday. I waited until they had their big sale and made my money really go a long way - all this fabric was something like $4/yard. Aah, fabric. Always nice to perk up the stash a little. Now if only there were somewhere you could go to order more time for sewing in!




Won't have any work to show for another day or two, though I do hope to get some done this weekend. I have been adding beads to the little blue and white winter quilt, which is now bound, so might have that to show in the next few days. But that's about all for now...