Vintage fabric and a quilt show

Yard sale season has begun and it's been a lot of fun so far. My husband and I frequent yard sales for the primary purpose of buying books, CD's, and DVD's to sell online. It's a tiny little "business" that managed to pay all of our utilities or 3 months of rent last year. So while it's kind of a pain to surrender Saturday mornings, cherished space in our apartment, and a fair amount of time dealing with and sending the inventory - it's really been very worth it for our family especially as we've had only one income for the last few years.

Anyway, of course I often buy items besides half.com stuff, but I rarely see sewing stuff. But when I do, it's often pretty great. For example, last weekend, I was able to buy all of this vintage fabric for less than $5. It was in great condition, with most of it still having sales tags on it. One piece was labeled 1 and 5/8 yards for 80 cents. Can you imagine? I belong to two quilt guilds, New England Modern Quilt Guild and Chelmsford Quilt Guild. The latter had their quilt show on Saturday and our family went together. Most quilts on display were very traditional, but there were several that caught my eye.

Here's one of my faves, this woman actually dyed a lot of these fabrics herself.

Now I know it's not very "modern" to like commercial character fabrics/quilts- but who can argue with Muppetts? I actually have the book that has this pattern but I don't know if I will ever get to it.... but the applique on this is impressive and the artist did a great job.

This photo is a little blurry, but you can still get ths effect of the gorgeous colors and scrappy effect.

And what's this? Here's one of the quilts I had entered into the show. It's my son's quilt - but he didn't miss it for the two days it was gone. No, of course, he has become mightily attached to a store-bought blanket a friend gave him.

Yep, there's my hubby holding our son. He is such a good sport about all of our visits to quilt shows and fabric shops. He actually insisted that he attend this show because I had quilts on display there- I really was fine with him skipping it.

Readers of this blog have already seen these two quilts. I tried to make life easy for myself by entering quilts that were finished rather than attempting to finish a quilt in time for the submission deadline.