fabric stash

Finding Fabric.

photoquiltfabric3Fabric2Quilt Fabric

There is a conversation going on over at a quilting group to which I belong. Art VS quilt, hand-dyes VS commercial, old fabric VS the latest pretties.

A rather typical conversation, actually! 

I am of the commercial collection side of the discussion, and I don’t like buying lines of fabrics, I can identify by designer only a handful of fabrics, and I don’t want ALL the newest fabrics in one quilt.

To each his or her own, but I enjoy digging through my collection and finding things to pair together that weren’t meant for each other.

 

(This reminds me of the conversation I had with my daughter when she was four. We were getting appetizers ready for company, and I wanted sliced cheese and apple wedges. In her four year old logic, she told me they didn’t go together, because mice and worms don’t go together! —Happy almost 30th Birthday!!!)

 

Back to the subject at hand, however.  Digging and digging, I cannot for the life of me find any scraps of these fabrics. It seems impossible that I don’t have a strip of any of them in the house, but…

I have this UFO that really needs to be finished. It has sat at the point where a normal person would say, take it to the quilter already. I am not satisfied with it. Something was missing.

I had an epiphany last week, and know what I need to do to make it work for me. But NOT a scrap of any of the fabrics are around!

I need possibly a 12 x 12 inch square of these fabrics. Not all of them, but definitely the black floral, and at least two of the other colors.

They are about 8 years old, ancient in quilt years, and I don’t know the manufacturers.

Anyone recognize any of them? Anyone have a scrap or two they would be willing to give up?

 

I have reasonable Plan B, but it is rather involved and not necessarily what I would prefer to do….

If you can help out, please contact me!

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

Fabric 401K…

(Totally stole the title from my best quilting buddy, E.T.)

I was at my quilting group today. Surprisingly, after an hour or so of chatter, out of all the bizarre subjects we could have touched upon with a dozen women sitting in front of sewing machines…the conversation actually turned to FABRIC!

The color, feel, texture, ownership, collection, lusting, cutting and quilting of fabric. Believe it.

This is my theory on collecting fabric.

Fabric has to ‘age’ like a fine wine…

There are so many kinds of fabrics for quilting. Solids are like vegetables; good for you and all that, but hardly sexy or desirable when you start trolling around the quilt store.

What catches your eye are the sparkly things; the bright colors, the fascinating patterns, shapes, the hand-dyes, the novelties. All the candy shop portion of your diet. You know, the tasty bits. Those are the pieces that you can’t forget if you walk out of the store with your hands full of sensible solids.

The adorable snowmen, the Bali batiks, the swirly kaleidoscopes, those are the fabrics that you’ll dream about.

I can’t claim to remember all of what I own, (and I choose to put the blame squarely on a faulty memory rather than a surplus of fabric, thank you very much!) but if I find myself on multiple trips at multiple places buying (or lusting after :P) the same fabrics, chances are it will age well.

If it has been in the stash for a few years, pulled out and packed away repeatedly because it hasn’t found a quilt to call home, it doesn’t necessarily make it a bad piece of fabric. After countless auditions with so many other pieces of fabric, I will eventually bring home the right mate for it, I will find the pattern that will make it sing.

I have this secret aversion to using fabrics designed to go together together. I may like and even purchase multiple fabrics from the same line, but if they accidentally all end up in the same quilt it makes me crazy!

(If there is an easy and a hard way to do something, well, yeah…with me, the hard way wins out every time! I guess I figure ANYONE could come up with a nice quilt if the fabrics all matched!!! LOL)

I did ONE quilt, a Trip Around the World, for Arlie’s 16th birthday, and unwittingly collected a series of matching fabrics over a period of time…I did use them and it did look nice; but I had to purposefully go and find a few pieces that didn’t ‘belong’ and include them, for my own piece of mind.

tripWorld

So, the 401k. It’s like this. Our economy is uncertain. Times are tough, what will retirement be like in 20 years?  But, a yard is a yard is 36 inches, and THAT will never change.

I rarely buy fabric because I need it for a specific purpose, I tend to buy on ‘spec’, I buy what speaks to me loudest!

…. In twenty years, those vintage pieces of fabric will be full of unique, no-longer-trendy shades of brown and aqua. Their designs, by blending them with bits and pieces from here and there, will result in quilts which  will have a flavor all their own.

Oh….and having NOTHING to do with anything else except shameless self-promotion, don’t forget to go to my photo site, (to the right) and look, and BUY something pretty! 🙂