Skip to main content

NC by the Numbers

This is what 40 lbs. of fabrics, patchwork and books looks like after it's been sorted and the fabrics measured, which I did. Hold onto your hats, pals. Altogether it's 163 different fabrics that add up to 103.25 yards. To give you some real-world perspective, that's close to the length of a football field (120 yards). When I tell you what that works out to cost-wise you'll probably tear up. I certainly did.

Before we get to that, let me tell you more about the fabric. All but two quarter-yard pieces turned out to be quilting cotton (the two oddballs are flannels), and most of the lot has designer names like Moda, Robert Kaufman, Mark Lipinski, Susan Winget and Maywood Studios. I would say the original owner went to quilt shops and shows to buy fabrics, which aside from the storage smell are in pristine condition. This person also loved fat quarters. I have tons of them in this lot.

There are a some batiks and funky prints, but it's mostly florals, tonals, holiday and juvenile prints. There's so much Christmas fabric I could probably make a quilt for every bed in the house with what I have now.

I actually like most of the holiday prints, too. The original owner had a wonderful eye for florals. There are about a dozen fabrics with enough yardage to work as backings.

Not sure what I'll do with eight yards of a mascot print from University of North Carolina, though. He's kind of cute, huh? Ha.

I also have nine yards of John Wolf's Chateau St. Maigrin decorator fabric, too. I priced that at $32.00 a yard new online, so this one piece is $288.00 worth of fabric. Which brings me to the value and cost figures. I will price the quilting fabric at $5.00 a yard, so that works out to $471.25, plus the decorator fabric = $759.25. I paid $15.00 for everything, which works out to a cost of around fourteen cents a yard. That makes this my biggest and best thrift haul to date.

I feel pretty humbled and privileged, actually. Fourteen is my lucky number, but I never imagined I would get this lucky. So now I have to seriously think about what to do with this beautiful fabric.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...

Fell Off the Wagon

I did cut up that plastic dollar tote to make into something stronger, but got caught up with work and set it aside. Then last night some hand-dyed silk and pretty threads called my name, and, well . . . Felt SO good to do some handwork, except my neck began hurting about an hour into it. I tried changing the way I sit and work, but it's pretty obvious that the doc is right.

T-minus Day

This was our little Thanksgiving dinner last year, when it was just the three of us. Time keeps whittling down my favorite holiday; this year it will be just me and my guy, and we likely won't even have a turkey.* That will be a first in 35 years. I feel about Thanksgiving the way other people do about Christmas, and while it's a lot of work it's my favorite holiday. Of all the Thanksgivings I've had in the past sixty years, only three were truly terrible: one when I was a kid that I don't talk about (#1 most miserable); the time I roasted two turkeys together and hosted fifteen people whom I cooked for and served with zero help (the largest and #2 most miserable); and the one I spent in basic training (the #3 most miserable.) I have no pictures of any of those, thank heavens. In addition to doing all the cooking I'm the one who takes all the pictures, washes all the dishes and puts away all the leftovers. I suppose no one else cares because to them it...