I’m so excited to announce that I am participating in Sew, Mama, Sew’s Giveaway Day this year! This is a first for me, since I’ve never hosted a giveaway here at Raindrop Stitches, but it won’t be the last.

The prizes are:

1. Four fat-quarters from Amy Butler’s Love collection
2. One sashiko embroidery kit

If you would like to throw your name in the hat, then just leave a comment here by 12:01am PST December 7th. The winners will be randomly chosen and announced that morning. If you would like to earn a bonus entry, follow me on Twitter @ahavajora and include your Twitter username in your comment here. I am happy ship internationally, too.

Enjoy and good luck!

I’m so sorry that I’ve been neglectful of you, my little blog. I’ve meant to check in many times, but as we all know, life intervenes. I’m here now and that’s the important thing, right? Right.

This week everybody is getting ready for Halloween, but I’ve been distracted by another project. It was like a good book that I could not put down. It all started back in June, when I received this bundle of goodies:

Isn’t that Anna Marie Horner just a doll! Her Good Folks line has all of my favorite colors and color combos. I couldn’t resist anymore. I loved these fabrics so much that I stashed them in the “Too Good to Cut Into” pile. I couldn’t decide how to use them, and so I saved away.

A few weeks ago, my good friend Quynh at Nha22 (you won’t regret clicking on that link, btw!), went to a Kaffe Fassett book signing. Since I didn’t own any of his books, I purchased Quilts in the Sun for the event. We met both Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably, which was fun. You could see the color wheels spinning in Kaffe’s head! So, anyways, it wasn’t until a few days later that I was admiring the graphic nature of the quilt on the cover of the book and realized that it was the perfect pattern to showcase my Good Folks collection.

I began last Saturday:

And finished the top yesterday:

Esther seems to approve. What do you think?

My 28th birthday came and went last month. Despite my lack of chatter about it here, it was pretty well spent. I recieved some wonderful gifts, impecably chosen for me. My favorite new toy is my Speedball Screenprinting kit gifted to me by the Mister. Ah, he knows me so well! I’d been wanting to try screenprinting for a very long time and had experimented with some diy methods, but was never able to get the results that I had hoped for.

The kit comes with two basic methods for creating the screen. The first is the screen-filler method. You paint a plasticizing chemical onto all of the areas where you do not want the ink to transfer through the screen to the material. This is the simplest, easiest, quickest method to prepare your screen, but the second is much more fun. The second method is called photo-emulsion. With this method, you coat the screen with a light-sensitive chemical, then you place a graphic that has been printed or drawn onto acetate or tracing paper between the screen and a light source. All of the places where the light reaches the chemical on the screen (i.e. all of the places that aren’t blocked by the graphic) harden and become plasticky, the rest of the areas (the graphic) are washed out so that the ink penetrates the screen.

Okay, that’s a rushed and super-simplified explanation of the screen printing process. If anybody cares, I can do a more detailed post in the future, but there are already some great resources out there for those of you who are interested in doing this yourself, in particular this MAKE and this Threadbanger video.

All of that was just so that I could show off my first semi-success:

This is my Set of Numbers Matrioshki print. It’s a math joke. Let me explain: The font was a little bit too fine to print well, but you can sort of make it out. The smallest matrioshka is N, the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…). The second smallest is Z, the integers (-1, 0, 1, 2…). Maybe you remember from math class that all natural numbers are integers. We say that the set Z contains the set N. Do you see the joke now? As we move further to the right we have the quotients, which contains the integers, the reals contain the quotients, and finally the complex numbers contain the reals. It’s nerdy, I know.

This image has been floating around in my head for years and I’m so excited to see it finally come to life. Even though the screen isn’t perfect, I think I’m going to make myself a t-shirt. I don’t think that I have the patience to try the same graphic twice. There are too many things to make and only so much time!

This is a smattering of the fabrics that I’ve been collecting recently. I’ve noticed that they go together rather well. So, I’m thinking that maybe they’ll become the queen-sized quilt for our master bedroom.

The question is: Which pattern should I use? At the moment, I’m leaning towards something like Anna Marie Horner’s Folk Dance pattern or, along the same lines, the Zig-Zag Quilt from The PurlBee. On the other hand, I’m really really drawn to the quilting on this one over at Red Pepper Quilts. Whichever I choose, I think I’m going to need to go fabric shopping. Oh darn.

We are having the most gorgeous summer-like weather here in Seattle. It’s fabulous! My little family has been running errands and finding excuses to be outside all day long and now we’re all pooped and ready to nap. I was pretty sure that the sun had zapped all of the energy out of me and then I checked the mail only to discover this little surprise awaiting me:

I won this embroidery kit from the lovely Jen over at IndieFixx. If you recall, Jen is the brains behind the Feed Your Soul project, which offers art free to download. (Seriously, the new one from Mara Girling is almost tailored to my livingroom’s decor!)

I’ll have some more things to post about this week. Just as soon as I finish my nap…