I Found It

So I really wanted to make last year's Figgy Pudding quilt, with the Christmas trees and the courthouse blocks. But since the Figgy Pudding line is tough to find now, I considered making it in this year's Basic Grey line, Fruitcake. But I dunno, Fruitcake just wasn't doing it for me. Which is strange because it's really not all that different from Figgy Pudding. But there's just something about Figgy Pudding that I love, so I decided I needed to track down enough of it for this quilt.

So yes, I always have to give myself that extra challenge. This could have been a perfectly fun, stress-free holiday project. Instead I've spent hundreds of man-hours scouring the entire Internet for the teensiest scrap of "Pepperberry Juniper," before I've even sewn a stitch.

As of two weeks ago, I only needed two more prints: The red tonal damask and the snowflakes on brown background. I couldn't find any trace of either online, and I had all but given up on finding the necessary 4 yards of the brown to use as the background and binding. Then, a bit of serendipity required me to go to my local quilt store to pick up something for another project. And there it was. Rolled up and literally tied with a bow: 3.25 yards of the brown with snowflakes (not quite enough, but I can do the binding in something else). I had looked for it at that store before of course, and it wasn't there at the time. Suddenly it just appeared. Obviously we were meant to be together.

Things like this make me realize that collecting out-of-print fabric is actually kind of fun. That could be a dangerous discovery.