Weekend Finishes and Missing Fabric

It's every quilter's greatest fear: running out of a fabric at a critical moment and being unable to find more of it.  I basically had that situation today.

My Stairway to Cat Heaven quilt (below) is pretty much entirely based around this completely gorgeous star fabric.

I found the star fabric first and built the other colors around it.  I am making a second copy of this quilt by special request, and when I went to the quilt store today they had no more of the starry fabric. I went ahead and bought the other fabrics, but knew I had to find that starry blue, or the whole quilt's color scheme would be thrown off!

Because it's a batik, I have no selvedge with the name of the fabric and line on it.  I had no idea where to start.  Recently I was approached by findmyfabric.com and this was the perfect chance to test it out.  They have a pretty nifty idea, you can upload a photo of your fabric and they will find that fabric or find similar looking items.  You can also enter search terms.  Unfortunately, I think they need to build up their fabric library more before they will become a really awesome resource.  They didn't find my fabric but when I searched "blue batik stars" they did provide a good alternative fabric.

What ensued next was about an hour of desperately searching every batik fabric site in an attempt to find my starry fabric or an acceptable substitute. I did eventually find it; it's out-of-print and the website only had 1 5/8 yards of it left - and I need 1 3/8 yards.  Phew. Very lucky break there.  So what worked?  Google image searching "batik blue star metallic"and clicking this very tiny and blurry thumbnail.

So...I really hope it's the right fabric when it comes lol.  I'm pretty sure it is. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is; perhaps never give up, because I visited a lot of sites before I finally found my fabric. Anything is possible on the internet!

Anyways, I've been getting a lot done this weekend. On Wednesday I pieced together this charity quilt top for my guild:

It's so big I can't actually hold it all the way open; over 80x80! And it's too big for my floor. I've never made a top that big. For this charity project you don't have to quilt it; thank goodness! Each month our guild does fun challenges for their charity quilts to encourage people to participate.  This was a "race to the finish"where someone in the guild created all those HSTs and then donated them because they abandoned their project.  So I was given the sashing fabric and the HSTs and told to finish the quilt however I wanted.  This was fun and easy and definitely made me feel accomplished.  Also then I feel less guilty about the charity quilt I took back in June or July and still haven't finished...

I also knocked out the January block for my guild's BOM.  I'm trying to do these further in advance.

I also did a little cleaning and organizing of my quilt space this morning.  I had a giant pile of papers from various shows I had been to just taking up space.  So this morning I went through it all.

Good thing too; turns out there were a bunch of patterns from my visit to PIQF tucked in there, including this cute Christmas pattern! There were also a lot of ads for quilt shows that happened back in August and September...oops.

At least now I have a new project to add to my to-do list :)

Tonight I'm going to finish my owl wallhanging, so look out for an upcoming post on that project!