Vintage sheets!

I started working on the sparkling cider vintage sheet quilt.  Jen made one of these just before Christmas and I thought it was a really lovely pattern and what's more, it looks beautiful when made from vintage sheets.  I ordered the pattern.  I ordered the flying geese template ruler.  I cut sheets into fat quarters yesterday and today cut fat quarters into all sorts of pieces to start making the blocks.  Phew!

Here is the thing when using vintage sheets.  Because they are often in similar colour families and often contain a lot of white, you have to be mindful when selecting the sheets to use with this quilt.  I think that the contrast needs to be there as much as possible to make the stars pop.  You wouldn't want to lose the impact of the stars by having the different sheets too similar.  This all made my cutting up the fat quarters that much more interesting.

The other thing you need to know when using vintage sheets is they are soft and usually thinner than quilting cottons.  This makes a difference when pressing and also taking pictures.  The block above looks a little floopy.  It is not modelling it's perfect points well enough!

Two new favourite notions.  A hera marker!  Fabulous!  Where has this been all my quilting life?  Perfect for marking stitching lines on fabric.  And this handy dandy little flying geese template is just too cool for words.  Must be tried to be believed and all those other info-mercial lines!

And one last picture.  I decided to de-fuzz my sewing machine before I started this project.  I haven't done it for a little while because I just had my machine serviced about 2 months ago.  Oops.  I need to remind myself to clean it out after each quilt.  Will you look at all that fuzz-goop-yuck!?

*And the contrast sheet to the wild pink vintage sheet above is a sheet that dates to the early 80s.  I know this because it was a wedding present.  When does a sheet become vintage? I had actually passed that sheet on to Mum to transform it into a rag rug but she brought it back to me when I started this quilting with sheets thing.  It works well as a background contrast but is it really vintage?  Who cares.  Happy Sunday!