Summersville Swoon

SOOO excited!  The top photo shows the Moda Summersville line of fabric by the very talented Lucie Summers (blu-shed.blogspot.com).  It is probably one of my favorite collections to come out in a long time, and I haven't cut into it yet.  I just take it out and look at it quite often.  I have gone to Lucie's Etsy shop, summersville.etsy.com and saw that she had a mug in white with black printing.  I loved it, of course, and wanted to order it, but also wanted it in colors!  Through some Etsy conversations, I learned from Lucie that she, indeed, had colored mugs on order, made in a very special bone china in stoke-on-trent.  Who else but the English would take the trouble to produce such special tea or coffee mugs?  The bottom shot is taken from Lucie's blog, I hope she doesn't mind!  I decided that I needed to order one of each color, even though the shipping to the US isn't exactly a bargain. They will take a couple of weeks to arrive here in Northern Wisconsin, but that gives me time to plan what delightful projects I am going to make out of the fabric to go along with the mugs.  Some will be gifts, but it is going to be quite hard for me to decide which ones to give away.  Sophie's Choice.  Of course, the Red ones will probably end up living with me, but, look at that wonderful, delicate Blue!  And the Black!  So modern and clean!  Oh, dear.   Wouldn't these designs look amazing in machine embroidery?  Lucie, do you have extra time to get on that project right away?  Jerilynn

Bird Quilt (I mean, Bird Placemats!)

My friend, Shirley, and I each bought a bunch of the Bird Panels from the Tranquility Collection by Sandy Gervais for Moda.  We spent a bit of time blocking out a "random" piecing strategy, using the big bird panels and the small bird squares that were a part of the borders on the panel.  Of course, Shirley's bird quilt is all done!  Not only is my quilt NOT done, but the room I was making the quilt for, the Blue Room, is in our condo, which was sold last spring.  Oops.  I wanted to make make more placemats using Soft and Stable and the mitered border technique (see September 1, 2012 blog post), so when I spied these bird squares, I knew that they were, at last, going to be used.  Some will have this striped border, others will have an orange print border.  They will look great with my vintage Crazy Daisy Corelle dishes.  I plan on making 6, which only leaves 39 bird squares left.  Oh, my.  I could make 6 napkins to match.  Which leaves 33 bird squares left.  Oh, dear.  Jerilynn