Category Archives: fabric

Back-to-School Supplies are Not Just for Kids

Back-to-school supplies are not just for kids

My absolute favorite season of the year is fall. It’s not just the crisp air, the colors and the smell of the leaves, it’s the anticipation of back-to-school supplies! Kids might hate it when the stores break out the displays of backpacks and pencils, but I could not be more excited.

I always loved school and I was very good at it, so I always looked forward to September not only for the new school experiences but for the back-to-school shopping excursions. I loved new pencils, a new lunch box, cool erasers and of course a new notebook. I spent a lot of time agonizing over what kind of notebook I was going to have that year, what kind of folders would I use and most importantly, how I was going to decorate my notebook before school started. My best year I think was 8th grade, the year I made a denim cover for my 3-ring binder with a rust-colored leafy print quilting cotton on the inside.  Denim was very hip due to the popularity of skintight “designer” jeans, a new thing at the time. I’m sure the other 80’s kids were unimpressed with my denim notebook cover, but in my creative mind, this one-of-a-kind creation was infinitely cooler than any Trapper Keeper.

Even though I’m now long done with school (and college, and grad school… I’m really done, I promise!), I am still very enthusiastic about my own version of back-to-school shopping. With the long, hot summer months in the rear-view mirror and a merciful end to sticking to my fabric, I turn my attention to fall decorations and handmade holidays projects. The quilt shops are full of leafy prints in orange and rust, fun Halloween novelty fabrics, even cute Christmas prints and now is the time to get started. Every year my ambition always exceeds my accomplishments but nevertheless I persist. And what would a big pile of fabric be without a couple of cute new notebooks for my fabric measurements and project design ideas? While I’m at it, I’ll grab a handful of folders and a pack of colored pens, too!

What is your favorite supply, back-to-school or otherwise? 

What to Do with an Ugly Quilt

Regrets. I have a few.

When it comes to quilting, I’m more of a Process Quilter. I’m really good at the mechanics: cutting, piecing, matching points, sewing and the like. The aspect of quilting that I struggle with is color selection. Many times, I’ll “cheat” and simply chose a handful of colors all from the same line. They are pretty much guaranteed to match, but when I strike out on my own, there can be disastrous results. Aside from gifting the quilt to someone you don’t like, what should you do if you’ve inadvertently created a monster? Here are some ideas:

  • Add a Border, A Really BIG One – Presuming you haven’t quilted and bound the beast yet, you can create new interest and even distract from some negative things going on in the quilt by replacing the existing border with a different fabric or adding a new, really big border. I’m thinking 10” or more.
  • Cut It Up – I know, cutting up a quilt may be anathema to some quilting devotees, but you really haven’t had time to bond with this quilt yet and it is truly hideous. You could make piles and piles of potholders by cutting the quilt into 8” squares then binding them. Now you have emergency holiday gifts! If the quilt has some good parts, you could go a little larger and make a table runner and placemats.
  • Repurpose – I was once gifted an enormous, purple Crazy Quilt as a wedding gift. It was considerably ugly, but I did think it was nice that the maker knew I liked purple, and she definitely stuck to that theme. Color aside, it had some other problems: it was too small for our king-sized bed and, on top of that, it was unbelievably heavy. I think the batting was in fact a bunch of old blankets. Whatever was in there, if you tried to use this quilt it felt like lying under the leaded blanket at the dentist. As a result of these numerous issues, it never made it as a bed quilt. We ended up using it as a couch cover for a couple years and then we later moved, we used it as a moving blanket to protect furniture. It’s been over 30 years and I still use the quilt for moving furniture so you could say the quilt ended up having a well-loved life after all.
  • Embrace It – Maybe it will grow on you? You could always just turn it over.
  • Gift It – Someone you know has to love puce, orange and hot pink, right?
  • Use It Ironically – Tell everyone you made it and be really proud of that fact. No one will have the heart to tell you that its actually ugly.
  • Donate It – It might end up as a dog blanket, but at least you won’t have to look at it anymore.

 

Good Uses for a Lifetime of Fabric

I still don’t have what I need

I currently have more fabric than I could ever use in my lifetime, yet I’m still buying more. This causes me to wonder more than a little, “What is going to happen to all of this fabric after I’m gone?”. When a quilter passes on, her well-meaning relatives are left to deal with her stash. Sadly, most times their carefully curated years’ worth of fabric ends up in the trash due to the lack of knowledge of what to do with it. This is a sad state of affairs for a number of reasons. The quilter had hopes and dreams for that fabric. Now those dreams are gone and just clogging up a landfill. Don’t let this happen. If you become the caretaker of some other quilter’s stash, make a real effort to do something good with it. There are now such things as fabric thrift stores. Here in New England, we have Swanson Fabrics. From their website, “Swanson’s is a community fabric and fiber craft store stocked with the unused items of other sewers”. The shelves are stocked with donations, often times from individuals who have inherited boxes of goodies from loved ones.

A few weekends back, I went to a “yard sale” (pun intended!) of vintage fabrics left behind by a couture garment maker and drapery designer. I was delighted to acquire uncut yards of real bark cloth, which used to be in great supply in the 40’s through 60’s and was very popular for upholstery and curtains. I’ll be upholstering a mudroom bench seat with this beauty, a perfect addition to my midcentury modern home. You can also find antique shops that will be happy to rehome a fabric stash, especially if it contains vintage elements.

You can always find a new beginning for an old stash by donating it to a charitable sewing organization. These groups sew quilts for cancer patients, children’s hospitals, shelters for persons experiencing homelessness and other good causes. They are of course happy to take donations of good quality fabrics, especially quilting fabrics. You can find these organizations through local churches and quilt guilds.

Finally, I have had great success donating good quality, unused fabric to local public schools. After experiencing a downturn for a number of years, Home Economics classes are now coming back into fashion and they need fabric to help educate the next generation of sewing enthusiasts.

Top 5 Excuses for Projects I Won’t Finish

Quilters, sewists and crafters alike all suffer from an abundance of unfinished projects. We feel really guilty about it and struggle against it as if it were a rip tide, often to no avail. The causes of the stacks of uncut fabric and the bags of partially sewn treasures are many.  Here are the:

Top 5 Excuses for Projects I Won’t Finish

  1. It’s too difficult – As an accomplished seamstress who has been sewing long before prom dresses had poofy sleeves, you will never hear me use this excuse. For me, no project is too difficult, so I’ll have to move on to one of our other excuses.
  2. It went out of fashion – I know this excuse sounds hard to believe, but it happens more than you might think. Back in college, my sewing bestie and I decided to make sexy knit dresses that were basically a tube dress with a wide off the shoulder band. We trekked down to Boston’s Chinatown, where all the good fabrics stores used to be, and bought bright 80’s knitted prints for what we were calling our “She-Woman” dresses. Neither of us started sewing the dresses for several years. In our defense, we were both undergraduates at M.I.T. and thus were kinda busy. My friend eventually made her dress, but I never did. At least two decades passed, both the dress pattern and the print became hopelessly out of date, and I ended up giving the fabric away.
  3. I ran out of fabric – Running out of fabric is a very good excuse for not finishing a project. Sometimes, this excuse can be mitigated by searching online for just a little bit more of the fabric in question. Both eBay and ETSY are great places to start. You can even use Google reverse image search to find a matching swatch!
  4. I don’t have time – This is both a common and very sad reason for not finishing a project. After sewing for decades and always having a heinously demanding day job, my best advice to ameliorate this unfortunate condition is to make sewing a priority. Don’t wait for the dishes to be done and the laundry sorted before you will allow yourself sewing time! Sew first, do household chores later.
  5. Shiny! Shiny-object syndrome is quite assuredly the number one reason I continue to stockpile unfinished projects. Something pretty and distracting (i.e., “shiny”) will pop up on my Instagram feed and I simply must make it as soon as possible. I always tell myself, “I won’t start a new project until I finish something I’m currently working on”. Predictably, this never works. My best recommendation for combatting this syndrome is to get together with your other sewing friends and have a “finish it up” challenge whereby all participants agree to complete one UFO (un-finished object) by a specified date. You can then move on to the new project with slightly less guilt!

The Rewards of Shopping Local


Everyone loves online shopping: it’s so easy, convenient, and you get exactly what you want showing up at your doorstep. It would be naïve to say we should refrain completely from online shopping – we are just not going to be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube. We should, however, be aware of our choices and make a conscious effort not to forget about local businesses that make up our communities. Not only do these local businesses rely on us for their survival, but their survival benefits us as well. Let’s think about how:

  • Local businesses are owned and operated by our friends, our neighbors, our kid’s best friend’s parents – all people in our communities. These people represent “the little guys”. Big online retailers and megalithic marketplaces are already getting enough tax breaks and other incentives, its up to us to help the Little Guys buy supporting them with our dollars.
  • Money spent locally in our communities goes back into local economies and helps us, too. When we spend our money in a Local Quilt Shop, that business pays taxes to our towns. That money goes to school, roads, police and other local services in our towns – all making our lives better.
  • Shopping local is much more fun and interactive than sitting behind a keyboard. In a time when “working from home” is all the rage, shopping local enables the chance to get to get out of the house, talk to other people, and learn about new patterns and projects you otherwise wouldn’t have.
  • Local Quilt Shops have many unique products you would never find online, items ranging from beautiful hand-dyed materials to tools and accessories made by local artists.

Now get out of your pajamas and make a trip to your Local Quilt Shop. You will be glad you did!

The Worst Day Quilting

Quilting is better than working any day

The worst day quilting is still better than the best day working, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a pretty bad day quilting! We asked our readers “What was your worst day quilting ever?” and got some pretty “bad” responses. Here are some of the worst:

  • Sewing in a block upside down and not noticing it until after it was quilted.
  • Miscalculating the yardage needed and running out of an irreplaceable vintage fabric.
  • Spilling a glass of red wine on a baby quilt top the night before the shower.
  • Finding out your husband used your good quilting scissors to cut wire… as evident by all the mysterious notches in your cuts.
  • Sewing an applique block to your pant leg.
  • Deciding to pre-wash your fabrics and finding out that one of them wasn’t color fast.
  • Discovering the hard way that the cat got accidentally shut in the closet and then relieved himself on an unfinished, folded quilt top.
  • Investing untold hours into a Dresden Plate baby quilt with scalloped edges for a family member only to be told by the recipient “This is lovely, but I already got a quilt for the baby… at Target”.

Your well-meaning husband mistook a bag of quilt tops waiting for the long armer for a clothing bag destined for the donation bin.

  • And, finally, the winner of the Worst day Quilting was hands down (no pun intended): Cutting the tip of your finger off with a rotary cutter. Don’t worry, this fearless quilter went straight to the ER and her steadfast dedication to quilting was unharmed.