Irene has nominated me for the Kreativ Blogger Award! How lovely of you Irene, and thank you!

The rules of the award are:

1. The winner may put the logo on her blog.

2. Put a link to the person you got the award from in your blog.

3. Nominate 3 blogs - it was originally 5, but Irene changed it to 3, and I’ll do 4.

4. Put links to the blogs.

5. Leave a message for your nominees.

Here are my nominations for the award:

1. Kristin overflows with creativity, on blog and off. Her theme interpretations for the Twelve by Twelve projects are amazing, and I’m green with envy over her blog photos which always look as if they belong in a magazine.

2. I’ve recently discovered Jodie at Vintage Ric-Rac, and if this gal isn’t Kreativ, then no one is. She sooo needs to be writing a book featuring her selvedge art. And again, her photography skills leave me green!

3. Kimberly is always creative, and she’s always so busy I don’t know how she gets it all done. Check out her free Mystery Quilt on her site; it’s one of many that she designs for various shows, magazines and workshops, and it takes some talent to keep coming up with awesome quilts, again and again!

4. It wouldn’t matter whether Jane Ann was a quilter or not, I’d read her blog for her Kreativ way with words. Her writing is simply beautiful, and regularly brings a tear to my eye, even when she’s writing about happy things—she’s that good. Her textile creativity is right up there with the best of ‘em as well.

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I was shopping for charm packs today for a small quilt I’d like to make and since Moda markets all of these cool charm packs, jelly rolls, layer cakes and other whatnots, I took a trip to the Moda site to see what’s out there now, and what’s coming up. I discovered something totally cool, and I don’t know whether it’s new, or it’s been around a while and I’ve just missed it.

If you visit the Designers page on the Moda site, you’ll see a list of all (or most?) of their current fabric designers. Click on a name, like 3 Sisters, and another window will pop up and show you a bit about the designer, and their current lines for Moda. See those dots down below the fabric line logo pictures? You can click on those and see the fabrics.

Click on the light colored solid dot for an Adobe PDF file of swatches of all the fabrics in the line, or try the darker colored solid dot to download a .zip file of .jpeg graphic files of all the fabrics plus pictures of the FQ packs, jelly rolls, charm packs, layer cakes and sometimes a quilt image that go with the line. You can also click on the outlined dot to visit the Moda section at a site called Fabric Matcher. Fabric Matcher seems to be a site where you can “shop” for Moda fabrics and find patterns, and put them together and save them as a project, but I didn’t spend a bunch of time on that, since it doesn’t seem that you can actually buy patterns or fabric there, so I’m not sure what the point really is, and that’s not really the cool part anyway.

The cool part is that if you download the .zip file with the fabric pictures in it, you can import the fabrics into Electric Quilt and design quilts! The pictures seem to be actual scans of the fabrics, and are in scale with one another, so designing a quilt with the actual fabrics you want to use is really easy and looks great when done. See?

This is the Portobello Market line from 3 Sisters for Moda. I love these fabrics, so I stopped in at The Fat Quarter Shop and scooped up a charm pack and some other yardage to go with it, and I can make my quilt when it all arrives! Now if only all the other fabric manufacturers would catch on to this. What a great way to market and advertise the fabric lines especially in our current economy where every trip by car counts. If I hadn’t found this today, would I have bought $50 worth of fabric online? Probably not. I checked out RJR Fabrics and Michael Miller Fabrics, and if they have anything like Moda does, it wasn’t easy to find.

Do you know of any other fabric manufacturers that share such great images of their fabrics like this? If so, share so we can all go download the latest fabrics to play with!

P.S. I found another cool page on the Moda site, the What’s New page. If you go there, you get the same fabric line logo pics with the dots, only they’re arranged by release month instead of by designer. It’s a great way to see what’s on the horizon from Moda!

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Have you ever fallen in love with a quilt? I’m sure you have, but has that love affair with that quilt lasted for 14 years? Or has it been one of those flash in the pan type things, gone as soon as you’d seen something you liked better?

I’ve been hoarding the March 1994 issue of McCall’s Quilting since I bought it way back when, before we moved to Germany. On the cover was this absolutely beautiful quilt called I Didn’t Promise You a Rose Garden, designed by Donna Lake. I loved the quilt instantly. It had florals, baskets, and border prints that were fussy cut to make kaleidoscopic effects. All of my favorite things even now.

I wasn’t the “dedicated quilter” back then that I am now, and this was my “someday” quilt: someday I’d have the skills and the time to make this stunning piece for myself. I could see it on my bed, and I still can actually, just as it was designed for the magazine, no changes necessary. When my skills caught up with my desire, then it became “someday, I’d find just the right fabrics to make this quilt.” I’ve been hunting for the last ten years or so because “just right” is difficult to find for a quilt like this.

I’d need a floral of course, but one with just the right colors on a dark background. I’m not the matchy-matchy kind of gal, needing to make my quilts in exactly the fabrics that are shown in the magazine, far from it. But I tried designing this around a floral with a light background, and I just didn’t like it. It was going to look as if it had holes in the centers of the stars, and that just wasn’t going to make it in my book. I would also need just the perfect paisley-type print for the kaleidoscopic stars, another border print with just the right size stripes for the edges of the basket blocks and the baskets themselves.

I’ve had the paisley-ish print for a while, actually a border print itself from Jinny Beyer’s fabrics. I’d rather it wasn’t a border print, but it’s the best thing that’s come along so far. I found a floral that might do at the Heidelberg Arts & Crafts last week, and I went back yesterday to buy more, hoping that “someday” I can put it all together and make it work. I still need to find another border print in a slightly different but coordinating colorway for the baskets, so the hunt continues. Will I ever get to make this quilt? Maybe when I’m ninety-nine. Since I’ve loved it for so long, chances are I’ll still love it then.

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