Fabric hoarding, I mean shopping, in Old Adana and two quilts in the wings

Helga, my sewing machine (she's a Viking) is all packed and on her way to Nevada with all our other household goods. We are neck-deep in that lovely paperwork/busywork quagmire they call out-processing. And I am really missing the stress relief and therapy of sewing.

So what does a girl do when she can't sew? She goes fabric shopping of course!! It was actually on my list of things-to-do-before-leaving-the-country to go buy more Turkish fabric. If you remember from this post and this post, Turkish cottons are 96 inches wide and make really fabulous quilt backs and binding fabrics. I compared wide quilt back fabric prices online the other day and the cheapest I found for 106 in wide fabric was $20.00 per yard. And I can get 96 in wide fabric for 10 Lira per meter which works out to $5 per meter (yard) and sometimes even less. Gotta love that!!

So my daughter and my friend Linne and I headed to Old Adana's fabric district on a sweltering hot day to see what pretties we could find.

Here we are contemplating yet another purchase.

See that pile on the counter?  You can't look at the fabric yourself here. You have to point to the one you like and they will unroll it on the counter for you to examine. Then they just pick up a meterstick, do a rough measure in the air and then cut or sometimes tear the fabric. No exact measurements and no 'cutting table' here.

Here is what we ended up with:

I already have the top one in black and red but had to go back for the brown and red. Love the vintage look of both of these. I bought 2 meters each which is plenty big to back any size quilt. Kinda crazy that these fabrics are made in Turkey but have English text on them. I never saw that when we got here a year ago but now there are in almost every shop.

Delaney, my pianist, picked the music one. The ships are on a map background. I love finding nice masculine fabrics that aren't cheesy. Two meter pieces again.

Some awesome solids and tone on tone plaids for bindings. I bought half meter pieces of each color. Making binding is a breeze when each of your 2.5 inch strips is 96 inches long!

So all these will go in a box and be mailed to Nevada to await the arrival of Helga. And someday they will be used in a quilt and remind me of my year in Turkey.

I did keep one quilt out. Well, two as I am working on two quilts at once from the same pattern. I'm hoping to borrow a friend's machine and get the rows assembled into complete tops before I leave here. Here's a sneak peek:

 These HSTs are really really small. They finish at about an inch. That's the smallest I've ever worked with. I've always thought pieces that small were just too fussy to be worth it but these are a bonus block from the main charm square blocks and I just couldn't throw them away. The pieces strips will become a top and bottom border on the finished quilt.

Here is one of the ten rows, finished, pinned and labeled in duplicate. The fabric line is Juggling Summer by Zen Chic. Great colors! I can't show you more than that because the future owners of these two quilts read my blog. But as I have missed being able to have a finish for Amanda Jean's Finish It Up Friday, I will content myself with linking to Freshly Pieced's Work in Progress Wednesday. Cuz just knowing that I have two lovely quilts patiently waiting for me to finish them helps me keep a little happy space in all the craziness of a trans-oceanic move.