After Christmas Sale & Other Pits of Peril

This post is totally about fabric as none of the local yarn shops are having after Christmas sales.

Today, all my local quilt stores are having sales. My favorite store is having 30% off yardage and a major Fat Quarter sale between now and Sunday. Nothing I need but backgrounds, so I'm trying to plan what I will be doing over the next couple of months to decide what I really need. My fabric fund has taken quite the beating in the last couple of months. None of it went to thread, however. I haven't bought any thread in more than a year and can finally fit all my thread into the thread box. Ok.. I can't close the thread box, but that is progress.

Brother's Quilt: Not much of a stashbusting quilt. It's only twin sized. The background is from mistakenly purchased white TOT for a swap, while the border fabric came from Mill End Textiles ($2 a yard due to sale coupon). We have decided that his quilt will feature 4 patch stars using brights from fat quarters already in my stash. The backing is a flannel, also specifically purchased for this project. I'm going to also try my hand at a rainbow binding, which is so appropriate for this quilt and which will use 4 fat quarters.

Halloween Quilts: Current plans include a double wedding ring quilt, a spider web quilt, a Lucky Star quilt (Atkinson designs) and a windmill-type quilt. Anything left over will go into some blocks to make a random block quilt and/or wallhanging. If I still have leftovers, I will try to trade it for background fabric for another quilt. Right now, I have about 90 yards of Halloween fabric (includes flannel backs for 3) and not all of it fits into a 20 gallon Roughneck.

Swaps: I need more pastels for the Garden Swap which will be done over the next couple of months. Have to decide on what blocks I'm going to make so that I can get appropriate yardage or FQs.

I'm debating between doing My Blue Heaven (QATW Design) or going straight to doing a log cabin or Mountain Majesties using blues that didn't work for the Winter Fun swap. Some blues looked true blue at the store, but in the light-of-day had green or purple tinges so were rejected. The log cabin is already halfway cut (strips miscut at a quiltshop). Since I won't be swapping, I don't have the same restriction for My Blue Heaven and I certainly have more than enough blue and light blue for it now.

Christmas Quilts: I have tons of Christmas fabric. I use some of it to make practice blocks before using the intended fabric for a swap or new pattern. I also have plans for 3 quilts. One is an alternating snowball-9 patch quilt to use up some landscape winter fabric, one pattern is featured on the cover of Merry Christmas Quilts (That Patchwork Place) and one is for the 2007 BOM at QATW (which I had stopped working on). Mountain Majesties is another option for using up christmas fabric. I'm sure I could make a couple of small wallhangings as well. I do want to try to use up all the christmas fabric in 2009. At this point, except for cream or white TOT, I need NO more fabric for these quilts.

Mountain Majesties pattern
4 patch star pattern
A 9 patch star done by another quilter in the same vein as what I plan for bro's quilt
Link to Amazon page for Merry Christmas Quilts
Bonnie's Snowball/9-Patch Quilt pattern