Am I Blue?

Fall is here. The weather is cooler now during the day and the days have been beautiful. I love this time of year, even though it triggers fall allergies and worse, leads into my least favorite time of year. 

The last two days have brought more fabric to my front door. Day before yesterday, fourteen yards of solid and four yards of patterned fabrics. Yesterday, an additional thirty-four yards of solid fabrics. (There was a sale.) I mainly order from two large online fabric shops, Missouri Star Quilt Company and Hancock's of Paducah, but this week I should be getting another seven or so yards from a smaller place in Idaho. Why?

I've been trying to find a specific blue color. I have a tiny bit of it, crumbs basically, and I want it for the background of my next quilt, which means that I need about six yards of it. Of course I don't know the exact color but I do know that it comes from a line of solid fabrics called Bella solids by Moda. In pursuit of this specific blue shade I've ordered fabrics called royal blue, azure, lapis, cobalt, imperial blue, regatta, midnight, and night sky...and of course none of them are the right color (though lapis came close). I did find an old panel online that showed all the colors that were available from the line a couple of years ago, and next to azure and lapis there was a deep blue-purple called sapphire. It looked like it might be the right one, but it's since been discontinued. A google search turned up some small quilt shops that still had some of it in stock, so I ordered six yards from a place in Idaho. Fingers crossed it's the right color and that they have the full amount.

 

In case you're wondering how picky I am, the blue I want is the triangle on the upper right. The blue I used in my last fall leaf quilt is royal blue and it's the triangle under the first one.  You can see that it's too gray. The close-but-no-cigar blue is the field of fabric under both of them, lapis blue.You can see that it's not purple or dark enough. 

 

I'll use it, though, if I have too, since it's so close and in a hundred years none of this is going to matter one bit.

 

This next thing is a cat panel that came in from Hancock's. The cat is about two and a half feet tall. I didn't order it for this reason, but something about its face reminded me of my younger brother.

 

See? This is him when he was about three years old.

He's been gone a long time, almost twenty years. I try not to dwell on these things, especially in the fall. It will soon be time to set up our Dia De Los Muertos altar again. This year, we'll add Dave's mother and Chance and Buzzy to it. The losses snowball from here on out, I think. 

But for now, let's look at happier things.

Like this fabric that came to me by mistake.

I ordered a brown shade called "earth," and this is what came in its stead, packed by mistake in some warehouse in Missouri. Cute, right? I'm not the kind of quilter that uses cute baby prints, but maybe I'll find a use for it somewhere.

After all, I've been sewing a lot. After the leaf quilt and the tumbler quilt, I worked on sewing together solid color "crumbs" (that is, really small bits of fabric that really couldn't be used in other quilts). I like sewing together bits of fabric and many, many of my quilt tops have incorporated these types of crumb blocks. (You can see a couple here and here)  These fabric crumbs are generated as I cut up fabric for other projects. I save the scraps and if they are large enough, I cut them into squares (5"/4.5"/4"/3.5"/3.25"/3"/2"). If they can't be cut into one of these square sizes, I put them into a box. When the box gets full, I sew them together. It takes hours and hours and is the kind of mindless (or meditative?) sewing/ironing/trimming that I enjoy doing.

Since my sleep schedule has been crap, I'm up all night sewing. While I sew, I've continued to half-watch shows on my iPad and recently half-watched Ali Wong's latest stand-up special Single Lady, an old Robert Redford film The Great Waldo Pepper, Uglies, Lonely Planet (Laura Dern and the lesser Hemsworth, a.k.a. Liam), Big Eden, and two Tyler Perry movies (Mr. Deeds and Diary of a Mad Black Woman). I started to watch Penelope and gave up. I also tried to watch the 21 Jump Street movie and it was shockingly dumb, so I gave that up, too. I just started The Menendez Brother documentary. It's weird and sad. I don't watch a lot of true crime anymore, but Netflix is relentless about pushing it, so I finally gave in.

In other news, Dave went for his flu and Covid booster shots on Friday. I was supposed to go but cancelled my appointment since I was having some issues with blepharitis and a few other things that made me think my immune system was already stressed out. The blepharitis is resolving, so I made an appintment for my booster on Friday. Two weeks after that, I'll get my flu vaccine. I'm trying to be brave, but I hate needles and shots. I have to steel myself for it.