Virginia Robertson's Blog

(Or How My Studio Storage Is Out Of control!)

I have the best job in the world! I get paid to sew with the beautiful Princess Mirah batiks. I am on staff at Bali Fabrics as the quilting and design coordinator. Any way, they send me all the latest sample cuts to use for projects for the Batik Expressions pattern line, Quilt Market and to make projects for magazine articles and ads. I also order bolts of batik to make kits to sell on my web site.

Here are some captioned pictures that share some of my studio storage ideas.

Since I am currently without a store front, ( I have had four quilt shops in the last 25 years ) I have to tell you about my recent “storage” adventure. Needless to say, after four years working with Bali Fabrics, the fabric inventory has grown to over a hundred bolts of batik and many yards of leftover cuts.

First, we stored them in the shipping room until it overflowed. Then, we started storing it in the entry room next to my studio where I cut kits for the web site. Since it is the “company” entrance to our home, it needs to be pretty. My husband, Lynn, turned an old entertainment center into fabric shelving.

Art quilts hang on the walls and fabric bundles, buttons and dolls are displayed among the house plants.

Still, I was running out of storage space. I drew up a shelf plan for the entryway to hold the new bolts. Lynn looked at the plan and groaned. He thought his days of building store displays were over! He exclaimed “Is this another store?” I assured him that is only storage that is pretty.

On top of the new shelf are the fabric birds that we used in the Bali Fabrics booth at Quilt Market mixed in with a Jester doll created from Princess Mirah batiks.

I love buttons. I started using the giant Dill buttons on my purse samples. When the big button orders came in for the kits, I needed a pretty way to store them in my studio. I started out by color coordinating the warm colors, cool colors and the black & whites in baskets. It is sort of a “Button Soup”.

Then I ordered more buttons to do new assortments on the web site. These new assortments were displayed in pottery bowls and stacked on a shelf in the entry. There is an old round table that is loaded with buttons. I use baskets, ceramic bowls and even a 35 year old rotating monkey pod flower from Vietnam. The flower petals are bowls and they are removable, so they are perfect for colorizing the buttons.

I did a “Take and Teach” class at Spring Quilt Market for the Dill Button Company. It was called Button Stacking 101 and the ladies loved it! Dill sold a lot of buttons afterwards, too. Check out my web site for the Button Stacking 101 booklet and to the button section to see the different assortments.

When my quilting friends, “The Art Girls” come up to the studio to sew, they think it is a store. It is hard to get any art made because of all the shopping that they do! Watch for an article in Quilter’s Home magazine featuring my home. They will be doing a photo shoot in July and the article will be out in the fall or winter.

January  2010

” Old Dog, New Tricks”  is the name of my blog  and this story is how the name came to be. I did a lot of sewing while snowed in over the Christmas holidays. I had purchased a lot of the new fabric collections at the Quilt Market ” Sample Spree”. The fabric that I collected is designed by the hip, new designers. I made a series of table runners from the collections to try and understand how to use the bright, busy prints.

Frankly, I found the new fabrics hard to work into my projects.  The fabrics are busy with no visual relief in the fabric  selections and no quiet connectors.  I have been adding  my own connectors and quiet background fabrics by including textured batiks. There is an entire article called “Taming Wild Fabrics”  in the spring issue of McCall’s Quilting magazine issue on color.

So, I used each new collection  to do a series of table runners.  I tried to only use fabrics from the  same  collection. A table runner can be done in three or four hours, so it is a good way to experiment with new color combinations and small cuts of fabric.  I started by cutting several 2 1/2″ strips from each fabric in the   collection. Here are the new table runners that resulted from my experimentation.

At first I didn’t like the runner. I thought it was too busy with no quiet background fabrics for visual relief. But when I left the studio and then came back  and saw it on the design wall I liked it!  It is a different way to use fabric. The surface is blended together into an even surface of similar values. The fabrics remind me of my first quilts made from 1960’s clothing scraps. There were no quilt shops then, just double knit polyester! I have made several more projects with Art Gallery fabrics and they have recently come out with some wonderful, new blenders. The hand on the fabric is fabulous, too.

I just love Heather Bailey’s “Nicey Jane” collection. I mixed her prints with a little Kaffe on the nine patch to give it a checker board effect. The one inch lime green border helps seperate each block  from the edges. I call the pattern “the Three Hour Table Runner” because it is so fast to sew.

A yellow micro dot border frames the blocks and a combination of four patches and triangles fill in the sides of the runner. The pattern is called “The Four Hour Table Runner”.

The fabrics look like 1960’s kitchen curtains! I made this as a shop sample for Beth Watts at Fabric Chicks shop in Minden, Nevada. (There will be a separate post about my visit to her fabulous shop.)

I replaced the pink border with a black & green dot border on version #2 and it gives the runner a different look.  The fabric collection is by Fabri-Quilt. The pattern is “The Four Hour Table Runner”.

I picked version #3 for the pattern front. The pattern is called “Black & Orange Kaffe Modular Table Runner #1″.  I did a lot of experimenting with the fabrics and I like the way the squares seem to overlap on version #3.  The black edges seem to make the squares show up better.