Wow.

One word sums up what I thought as I came across this glorious workspace today.

As many of you know, I'm a science geek as well as a crafty girl, and I routinely read Lifehacker. It's part of the gawker family (Gawker, Jezebel, etc) of blogs and they spend all day posting ways to make your life easier.

One of the features I always enjoy is the "Workspace Show and Tell" which routinely features gaming stations, HD theaters in home, etc. Think geeky paradise. They've got a group on flickr where you can post photos of a workspace or workspace makeover called appropriately Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell.

Back to the photos I've een drooling over. So Lifehacker posts their show and tell today, and My first thought was that google reader made an error! no way! They featured a garage turned quilting studio~!

So- you can see the original post and details behind the redo at Atwater Village Newbies by way of Lifehacker's Show and Tell. You can also head over to flickr to view the entire photo set!

Anyone want to help me rearrange?

So as many of you saw in the last post, I got the bug to start doing things again after being home for the holidays and seeing my mom back on the making kick. She and my father retired and built a "cabin" on a mountain in the woods. It's nice, but my dad's garage is bigger than my house. On that note, my mother has a beautiful space to work as well, with two big windows and great light!

So they don't live far from Keepsake Quilting, and they went one weekend and as my father wandered he apparently found the patten from Seams like Home called "Bringing home the Tree" and commented "Gee, this would look nice on the wall in the living room..." As you can imagine, the pattern went home with them. I'd also like to note that my mother's background is also not quilting, she made our clothes as kids, but in general she's WAY to anal to quilt.

So as you can see in the photo on the upper right, it's a nice winter scene applique that's done as a wall hanging. And it is nice, but she wasn't sure where to start but once I looked at the pattern I had some definite ideas. When I was home for thanksgiving, we went back to Keepsake, they had a kit available to make the wall hanging, but I really didn't like their fabric choices. We wandered and decided on a nice stack of pale and muted batiks. Most of them were pale blues, and tinted creams, but we also picked a frosted piece. I left for home without getting much farther than picking and buying them, I told mom to let me think about it before starting, as I really didn't like the snowball background. The more I looked at the pattern, the more I thought they took away from the pattern and the overall image. I ran across a book on watercolor quilts at one of the local quilt shops and had my idea... but did I want to sew all those little squares? She's got two nice Pfaff machines with the IDT (even feed) but come on....

I thought for a while and decided I'd really like to try a Quiltsmart background for this one. I admit, for those of you that really know me... I'm normally not a huge fan of the Quiltsmart interfacing. In particular, because I used to do machine quilting, and I absolutely hate the extra weight and bulk it adds to the quilt top. BUT we're not making a bed quilt, but a wallhanging. So, I went to the local shop and bought a couple of yards of what ends up being 1.5 inch finished squares. I brough it home with me for christmas, and my mother was horrified (being an anal retentive non quilting seam matcher) that we were going to sew that many little squares. (we also walked into Peggy Anne's while I was home and they were working on an awesome Quiltsmart Mariner's Compass/Star that should be on their website soone.

For those of you that haven't played with quiltsmart, it's admittedly pretty nifty. It's iron on interfacing that has the quilt pattern printed on it along with sewing and quilting lines. It's easy to do, and is pretty much no fail. AND it's got the directions printed on the interfacing..... can't beat that. It's impossibly to lose the instructions (not that I would ever lose instructions). The one that I bought is also used for Scrap Therapy projects.

So mom and I cleared the counter in the Kitchen and cut what seemed like a bazillion little two inch squares and then arranged/ironed them all onto the interfacing in some sort of random order that made me happy. And then came the sewing.... which was no where as bad as I expected! I sewed and ironed and sewed and ironed and ended up with a really cool looking piece of modern art from the back. (Go look at the flickr page! people were more interested in the sewn and folder words than the piece).

And when it was flipped over and done, I was really impressed. You're not going to notice the extra weight for two reasons. 1 is the fact that there is going to be tons of fused applique on top of it, and 2 it's a wall hanging! So the back is done and the border is chosen, but that's as far as we got over the holidays..... So more photos to come when the project gets farther!

I do have to admit that the quiltsmart went together really easily... the squares are 1.5 inches finished, and it's a fairly good sized piece. All total the whole thing from cutting to finished background went together in an evening, and overall I really like the effect of the small pieces better than large 5 inch snowballs.

So I know I haven't been posting much recently but the school year has started again and I've been in Dallas, Texas all week for the Pfaff convention. (More about that later though) We drove to Dallas on Tuesday night, and got here a day before the convention to make stops at the Moda/United Notions and P&B Textiles warehouses to shop for the quilt shop before we had to go to classes.

We started at Moda/UN at about 7:30 am. First of all, it's a beautiful building, and the lobby is nicely decorated with many of the Moda premade house things and many of the sample quilts are hung off the balcony upstairs.

We of course started in the clearance section, where it almost looks like a normal everyday fabric store. Bolts on racks, flat folds, notions, and fabric headers all for sale (other than you have to buy the whole bolt!). So we did a bit of shopping, picking up some more pieces of the Roman Holiday Collection, and picking a lot of more random fabrics to fill in some holes on the color wall. Everyone who works there seemed really happy, and they all wear thouse cute Moda aprons. Even better several of them were riding around the warehouse on tricycles with big baskets filling orders. We also bought a bunch of great jelly rolls for the shop since they've been so popular recently (Monkeys, repros, and great trendy prints)!

We also hit the United Notions side of the warehouse, picking up lots of odds and ends for the shop, including scissors, books, and Mary Ellen's Best Press (If you haven't tried it you have too- it's amazing and it smells nice. It also doesn't leave crap all over my iron).

Above the United Notions warehouse is their showroom. As one of the staff members explained it to us, it's their idea of a perfect shop, and it's even better because no one messes it up! I've included a couple of photos, but you can find more in my flickr account! They've got one of the coolest classroom spaces I've ever seen, and use it for business meetings and conferences. It seats 12 students, all at their own table and chair with lighting that's independent from the rest of the shop area. You can also see it's in the middle of the area, so everyone shopping can see how cool the class is.

Just off the showroom was possibly the coolest feature of the whole place. They have a Moda fabric library, where they've kept a half a yard of every fabric Moda's EVER PRINTED. It was awesome to look through and see fabrics that I have and love, or remember seeing in the stores or in great quilts. There are literally thousands of pieces, labeled by name and the year and month they came out!

The P&B warehouse was hot, way smaller than the other, and not quite so customer friendly (Though I do understand... it is a warehouse after all). Though the awesome part was that there were people working while we were there putting fabric on bolts from the hug commercial runs! They were working on these big awesome machines that I'm not sure what they're called (Folders?) that take the big commercial bolts, folt the fabric, and spin it on the cardboard ones we all know and love.

More tomorrow on sewing machines and convention!

Life has been a bit nuts recently, as evidenced by my lack of posting. I'm sitting here actively procrastinating my final exam for statistics this afternoon (whomever decided finals should be on a Saturday was EVIL)

This weekend is also the shop hop of quilting shops here in southern Louisiana! (which I'm missing most of because of said final). I did successfully complete the pattern I wrote to make this adorable children's book from the 5 Funky Monkeys fabric panel from Moda! I wrote up a pattern with lots of photographs and directions for fusible binding techniques.

For the book itself I used a coordinating fabric from the same line for the inside and back of the covers, and did a fusible binding for the edges. I 'bound' the book with eyelets and yarn and tied a cute bow on the back!

The patterns were a big hit the first day of the shop hop, we sold several which is always a happy event to know that people like your patterns. They're also available here at ShootingStar on etsy, my second shop for supplies and destashing. I'll slowly be making more of my patterns available online...

So I should really go to sleep so I can get up early in the morning. It's bound to be a busy crafty day. I need to try and get some quilting done, my bookcase is getting out of control with tops..... hopefully I can double up on some of the smaller ones.... we shall see :) Ameila is out of town in Berlin for a dealer trip- so Linda and I are going to try and get other stuff done around the shop as well. We need to try and assemble the shop-hop sampler quilt (it's going to be made out of the Benartex Metro fabric - you can see an example here)... and I'm hoping to get part of the needle felted table runner finished. There's no way that it will all get done, but you never know.

Oh- and I'm going to skip out and try to go to the departmental crawfish boil for a bit as well!

I'm also making strides to organize my crafting space. I've got cabinets along one wall now with plenty of room (but I haven't had time to fill them yet) and my desk set up with jewelry supplies. I need somewhere to set up my serger and sewing machine, and I need to find a new home for the cat box farther away from where I sit. I bought magazine organizers today at Target and put them up on top of everything, hopefully I don't need more than what I bought, since they were the last ones on the shelf!