Making Progress!

Well, I didn't get the quilt shop open by September 1st, but I am making progress!  All of the fabric has arrived and I am working on getting all of the information for each bolt on the website.  That is a tedious, time consuming task for sure.  As a reward for taking care of the tedious tasks, I have gotten to remove the plastic from all of the bolts and to fondle all of that gorgeous fabric.  So yummy!!!

As I opened each bolt I also cut a strip off the end to create a clean edge for cutting orders.  These are the same cutoffs that I used to buy from one of my Phoenix shops, so of course I saved them.  My initial plan was for a string quilt, but then I came up with an even better plan.  I have always wanted to make a Snails Trail/Virginia Reel quilt, so I found a paper piecing foundation on the web and I am going to use these scraps to paper piece the blocks.  I shrunk the foundation to just over 4 inches so these will be little blocks that should really sparkle with the batiks.

Here is the basket of cutoffs from the bolts:

And the strips all sorted by light and dark after washing:

And here are some previews of the fabric I will have for sale in the shop.  Please ignore the extraneous boxes, etc.  This room is also my personal quilting studio and office for my CPA business and I am still unpacking :-).

The shelves were already built in when we bought the house and are perfect for holding the bolts.  I had a wish list for the house, but shelves to accommodate a quilt shop inventory was definitely not on the list lol.  God is so good!  He knows what we need even if we don't :-).