I didn't have time to share a quick little project I whipped up before Tuesday and I left on our trip, so I will now.
These little clean up rags were inspired by Amanda's. I bought two microfiber kitchen towels and cut them up into fours, then using Sciarrino's serger I went around the edges, and done!
It was the first time using a serger and was pretty easy. I had been afraid of cutting myself, but now that I've tried it I don't think you could easily do so. I have a bigger project almost done (yes the quilt!). But of course that didn't stop me from getting some more fabric while in Vermont:
I love Ashley's blog, and she lives in the same city as Ceara so I contacted her to see if she shopped in the area. She said sometimes she did and was kind enough to send me a coupon for a local shop and let me know that they were having a big sale that Saturday. That was all the prodding I needed, and Ceara and I went there on our way to Montpelier. I was fun to go with Ceara because I am going to make her little baby a quilt so I got to see what sort of things she liked. Plus she gave me a paint chip of the room color. It's going to be green and yellow (Oregon duck colors, where she went to school), but I might pop in a bit of some other things so I don't get too nauseous (I joke, but did go to the rival school – unfortunately our colors are orange and black). The bottom two pieces of fabric are repurposed from a duvet cover I got from the Company Store:
Looks like they are out of it now, I got this on sale with the thought that I could make a whole cloth quilt with it (or several, as this is a king size duvet cover). I got 13.8 yards out of it (figuring the yardage like this: 36" x 44" – the common width of quilting cotton), and it worked out to be about $4.70 a yard, including shipping. I'm excited to practice my free motion quilting around the "blocks". I said I would share with you the formula I used and what yardage I figured out for quilting with sheets and bed sets. Here is how I did it: I figure out the square inches of one yard, by the measurements I gave above to be 1584". Then I figure out the square inches of various combinations of sheets and pillowcases. This isn't exact for every sheet, but should be helpful if you are trying to figure out a price comparison:
Twin set (with 1 pillowcase): 6.6 yards
Full set: 9 yards
Queen set: 10.3 yards
King set: 12.3 yards
and if you are just looking at flat sheets:
Twin: 4 yards
Full: 4.9 yards
Queen: 5.8 yards
King: 6.9 yards
A standard pillow case yields about .65 of a yard, and a king about .9 of a yard.
I figured out that twin sets seem to give you the best value, but bigger ones are nicer if you don't want to piece a back. Also I read somewhere that anything over a 200 thread count can be hard to sew/quilt through, fyi. Oh also it takes less yardage than piecing a back because there is so little waste. For example, traditionally you would need 5.25 yards of quilting cotton for a twin back (quilt size 63 x 87).
