Le Wannabut Quilt

The quilt I got for $7.99 during the last round of Wannabuts arrived; let's see if it's as pretty as the pics.

It's a really big quilt -- a couple inches short of a queen size, from the look of it. I think the patchwork is really charming.

I'd say this was made back in the seventies or eighties. It's actually quite well made, likely out of polyester clothing scraps (which is also why the colors are still nice and bright. Polyester generally doesn't fade.) There is no batting, and the backing was probably a sheet the maker repurposed.

I'm not a fan of polyester fabric, but I repaired a quilt very similar to this one many times over the years for my mother. A friend of hers who was wheelchair bound hand-sewed the entire quilt, making it from scraps of her own old clothes. Mom loved it and always asked me to fix it whenever the hand stitching came loose and the seams split open.

At first repairing that old quilt was a hassle, but after I realized how much the quilt meant to her I did my best to keep it in usable condition. Gradually I got to the point that I looked forward to repairing it a couple times every year. Finally I repaired it enough that it stopped needing repairs.

My siblings probably threw out the old quilt after my mother died, as it wasn't something they could sell, but that's fine. I never wanted that one. It would make me sad to see it again. This one brings back the happy memories of all the repairing I did without any negative associations. So I'll repair this one and recapture those memories.

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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.

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...

Valerean

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