Road Trip!

City of Bridges began its road trip to Paducah today, en route to the AQS Modern Quilt Challenge in Des Moines, Iowa!  Sadly, I won't be able to make it to the show because I will be on a road trip of my own.  So if you are able to make it to the show, please snap a picture of my quilt for me :)

My road trip is a little more extensive.  I'll be helping my best friend move across the country at the end of the month - we'll basically be taking I-90 from Cleveland to Seattle over the course of a week.  Our current list of things to see includes Taliesin, Mount Rushmore, Devil's Tower, and Glacier National Park.  Anyone have any suggestions for other cool stops or good local places to eat along the way?  If there are any great modern fabric shops, relatively close to the highway, I'd love to know about them, too!  Thanks for the advice in advance :)

-Melissa

Swooning Over My New Fabric Storage

So last week, my grandma sent me a beautiful photo she found online of fabric stored on these nice shelves... since I had been storing all of mine in and on an old dresser that was falling apart.  The drawers were overloaded, the bottom was sagging, and none of the doors could open or close without interfering with the drawer below it.  Aggravating!  And not pretty.  And not a good way to actually see what's in your stash!  With that photo in mind, I headed to Ikea to get an Expedit shelf.  I took my brother along to do the heavy lifting and then a friend of mine helped me assemble it.  It was way more difficult and time-consuming than we thought it would be, but we got it together.  And it is awesome!!  I could just sit and stare at all the pretty fabrics.  It's like having a fabric shop in my apartment!

My stash is bigger than I realized...

I've also made some great progress on my Timber and Leaf Swoon Quilt.  The background is all quilted with paisley and I'm working on some fancy straight-line quilting on the stars.  As soon as the background was finished, I couldn't wait any longer and had to square it up.  What a difference!  It looks so nice and crisp!  And there's less bulk to shove through the machine while I'm doing the straight-line quilting.  After the photo shoot, I machined-stitched the binding.  There's still hours and hours of hand stitching ahead on that :) 

All trimmed up!

Ready for some more quilting and binding!

Thank goodness it's a long weekend coming up - more time to work on finishing this up!

-Melissa

More Bangles

I've been English paper piecing my hands off lately!  I'm up to 31 completed bangles!  My fingers are starting to hurt...  I haven't decided on a completed size but this is probably less than 1/4 of the ultimate total for the quilt.  This is supposed to be a project for when I can't use my machine...but I've been neglecting the machine in favor of working on this - it's addictive! 

Bangles!

-Melissa