Who needs Black Friday when you have Goodwill!

Today I returned from Northern Arizona back to my house and had a few hours to work on quilting and getting laundry done. Before I decided what I wanted to work on I decided I would check out Goodwill to see if they had more fabric in. When I was there on Tuesday, the cashier said they get fabric and patterns all the time... and surely enough that was the truth! 

When I got to the area they sell fabric in there were many bags of mismatched fabrics. There are a few down falls with shopping this way: 1.) You can't touch the fabric 2.) You don't know how much of each fabric you're getting and 3.) If it's an ugly fabric they have a lot of they put it in multiple bags hoping to get rid of it! The good thing is, the positives outweigh the negatives. I picked up six bags of fabric ranging in price from 69 cents to 99 cents and when I rang up I only paid $4.84 (some bags were on sale!). Below is a picture of all the fabrics I got: 

Starting from Upper Left: Purple Hat Society Fabric, Paisley Flowers, Mauve, Light Pink, Red with Colorful Hearts (A LOT of this), Yellow and White Moon and Stars, 1/2 a purple bandanna,  about 20 10"x10" silver squares that once ironed and trimmed are beautiful. From Bottom Left: Small Blue/White Flower print, Medium Blue/Green Flower Print, Light Blue Solid, Pink Solid, and then two dark blue solids and a silver solid. (Dark blues and silvers are not cotton so I won't be using, but I'll get them to someone who can use them.)

After sorting and ironing this lot of fabric I decided to give the Simplified Lover's Knot pattern from the old quilting book a shot. The directions were not the most simple to me because they gave you the information on how to make the blocks as if you were making an entire quilt. So instead of saying for block one you need two strips of this and one of this, it told me I needed 16 strips of this and 24 of another. After doing some math I was able to break down the pattern and put it together. The nice thing about this is it is like the Split Rail or the 9 Square Block, you take two fabrics and alternate the colors and sew together so you have a light, dark, light panel, and then a dark, light, dark panel. Once you have those done you just cut strips to size, match seams, and begin to sew again. 

Lover's Knot Block

As you can tell I used a very light blue and a semi-light blue for this block. The very light blue is pretty sheer so I may not use it again unless it's in small doses. Not everything ended up matching up and I think this is partly due to the fact that both fabrics like to stretch a little. Overall not my favorite, but would like to try again with different fabric because a completed quilt with this as all of the blocks would be lovely. 

After making this block I decided to practice sewing the 9 square patches again and matching corners so I cut up one of the silver 10 by 10 squares, and took some scrap peacock fabric  and some of the new bright pink to put the mini-blocks below together. Since the size was kind of weird I couldn't figure out how to put them all together where they would look good, so for now they're just 4 separate mini-blocks.