The 9 Lb. Lot Arrives

The nine pounds of fabric I won from a Goodwill online auction arrived, so let's see what I got.

Here's a shot of everything. I got A LOT more fabric than I expected. Among them are some very nice batik scraps, bird and peacock prints, and a bunch of quilter's panels. I can already tell whoever owned this fabric was a huge fan of bird and outdoor-themed quilts.

I'll have to count all the panels when I measure the lot, but there are a pile of them. Weirdly, there's one cartoony space panel. Then again, I have a fat quarter with an ancient Egyptian print, right? So you never know what will make it into a stash.

This Halloween panel is just adorable. Pretty sure that's a Hoffman (checking, and yep, circa 2017, which gives me a rough estimate of how old the stash is.)

Some of the panels are older than the Hoffman -- maybe from 2000 to 2010? -- but in new condition. All of the fabric is. There is a bit of a storage smell, so I'll have to wash everything, but this was definitely more quality than I expected.

Stay tuned to see how many yards of fabric I will get out of my 9 pounds. :)

Comments

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

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