Sisters part 2 - I made a quilt top!

I forgot to mention that 5 of us brought our sewing machines with us on our recent trip.  I almost finished a whole quilt top while I was there. I finished it yesterday, here it is:

I'm pretty excited about this one.  See, I was super excited about the re-release of Flea Market Fancy because I only had a few of the original prints, and I have been in love with the collection since seeing some quilts made by guild members. I usually don't like to take a fabric collection and use only those prints in a quilt, I generally like to mix 'n match between collections and colors. There's just something about FMF that looks so complete on it's own without interference.

So I couldn't go and order a whole FQ set or anything because I just didn't have any extra in the "fabric spending" account at that time, but I was totally excited to find a shop that was selling 10" square (layer cake sized) sets of the whole collection. I quickly decided it was a worthwhile (small) expense that would get me a piece of the whole set. I laid them all out and drooled over them, and petted them a bit.

At the time I was working on the Portland Peel template set with Rachel, and was soooooo excited to see that the tester template set (hot off the laser cutter) fit all 3 pieces perfectly on the 10" squares. So I cut. Yes, the whole stack! It actually took no time at all. Look at the seriously minor waste from cutting up in that top left corner of the pic - barely a 1"x1.5" rectangle was the biggest piece of waste. I was so determined to use every bit.

Flash forward several busy months, and I was looking around my sewing space for a quick project to sew up while I was in Sisters for the quilt show. I found the lovely cut stack of FMF, grabbed a big piece of some white(ish) fabric to go with it, and some templates, and off I went.

Even through all the chatting and margaritas I was able to piece most of this quilt while I was there, and I just put the blocks together yesterday. It's a bit of a wrinkly mess, but I just love how it turned out. There's 2 squares for each FMF print, I feel like I got alot of mileage out of that 'layer cake'.

Oh, and here's my quilt hanging at the Sisters show.... can't believe I forgot to post this pic yesterday.

Oh, and here's my artichoke plant in full bloom! Artichokes are pretty crazy aren't they? I'm always amazed. We ate 7 HUGE artichokes from this plant and I left the 2 biggest ones to bloom because they're so gorgeous.

Cheers all!