quilting - By the Yard®

I Didn’t Mean to Buy More Fabric

Today I went to the local big box fabric and crafts shop with a seemingly harmless objective. I wanted to buy a little tube of gear grease for my vintage sewing machine. She is very much in need of some long-overdue scheduled maintenance. This turned out to be a much more elusive goal than anticipated. They didn’t have any gear grease. I guess people don’t service their own machines anymore or maybe modern sewing machines don’t need grease? For whatever reason, I could not find it. I was then faced with the formidable challenge of getting out of the store without buying any more fabric. This made me think about why I buy so much fabric in the first place. Here are my primary challenges:

A great idea – Many times, a certain print of fabric will jump out at me. “This would make a great (fill in the blank)”. Whether I actually need or want that thing is another question entirely.
I was once looking for this – Often times, a fabric will jump out at me, “Remember when you were looking for me before?” Something I had wanted for a previous project and never found is now right there in my hands. The fact that I’m now done with that project, usually by finding some substitute for what I had wanted at the time, is largely irrelevant when you are face to face with something you had desperately wanted at some previous time.
It’s on sale – I have to admit, this one rarely motivates me. My capacity for spending money on fabric is pretty high now that I’m a fully grown adult with a day job. I no longer need to scrimp and save like I did when I was in college trying to make a full-length wool coat for job interviews for less than $5 per yard.
Stinkin’ cute – This one gets me much more than I’m willing to admit. I have no idea at the time what this fabric could be used for but it’s just so darned cute I have to have at least a yard of it. Years ago, my BFF fell prey to this scheme when there was a line of Coca-Cola fabric seemingly everywhere. She bought a bunch of it, took it home and thought “What am I ever going to do with a bunch of Coke fabric?!”. Fortunately, I had been an avid fan of Coke for decades, so she made me a Coke apron which I still use to this day.

I did successfully make it out of the big box store without buying anymore fabric, although I can’t say the same for the yarn section!

What To Do with Your Scraps

I never throw away any fabric scraps, no matter how small. I just can’t bring myself to do it. To me, every little bit still has potential. They could be a coaster, or a dollhouse blanket, or a Christmas ornament, or a bunch of them could be sewn together and make a potholder or a table runner. If I was really ambitious, I could cut them all into 1” squares and make a Postage Stamp quilt. That could use up over 9,000 one-inch squares and would make a real dent in my scrap pile. I’ve even known some people to take the tiniest bits (one quarter inch in size or less!) then iron them to a fusible backing to make autumn leaves or snow.

Another fun quilt that can use up scraps is an “I Spy” quilt which can be entertaining for the kiddos and makes a very charming gift for a child. Simply fussy cut visual elements of interest like animals or other objects like cars or dinosaurs or spaceships. Stitch them together any way you like. You can have a good time with the little ones finding all the cool things hidden in the quilt.

If you can’t think of a use for your scraps or you simply have an overwhelming number of them and are looking to clean house, you could:

Bag them up and sell them on ETSY or eBay. I know this sounds ridiculous… why would any buy something you are trying to get rid of? Surely, they must have plenty of their own scraps at home! Strange as it sounds, I urge you to give it a go. People will buy bags of scraps online.
Trade with other quilters such as at a guild or sewing group or even online. That doesn’t really reduce the total number of scraps you have but at least you will have different scraps to inspire you.
Rehome them on Facebook Marketplace. Simply bag them up, put up a listing, and leave them at the end of your driveway. Trust me, quilters will come.
Use them as stuffing for stuffed animals or other objects d’ art. Frankly I’d have a very hard time using perfectly good scraps for stuffing because you would not be able to see them anymore, but if the pieces were very small and a lot of them had been collected over time, I might be able to do this.

Whatever you choose to do with your scraps, keep on quilting and making new scraps!

Why So Many Quilts?

Too many is never enoughI recently saw an Instagram reel where a happy quilter pulled Christmas quilt after Christmas quilt out of a chest. There were at least nine of them. All of them unfinished, of course. I’m sure the casual observer would say, “That is a ridiculous number of quilts, let alone Christmas quilts”. If the same video were shown to the average quilter, I am sure they would conclude, “That’s not so many quilts”. Why so many quilts? The answer is simple.

To a quilter, a quilt is not just a practical thing which keeps you warm and toasty in bed at night. For that purpose, you’d literally need one quilt, maybe two if you had a summer one and a winter one in a diverse climate. But to us quilters, a quilt is not a mere utilitarian object, it’s a work of art! Hours are spent choosing the design, the layout, the color scheme, the type of stitching, the type of binding and more. Maybe we are choosing the perfect arrangement as a gift for an important life chapter such as a birth or a wedding. Maybe we are making a gift following a theme we know the recipient will love. Maybe we are creating a wall decoration to emit a certain vibe. Maybe we are honoring a loved one with blocks made from cherished bits of clothing.

No matter the motivation, every quilt is different. Each has its own personality and its own purpose. For that, we are going to need a lot more quilts!

Halloween vs. Christmas Grudge Match

When I was a kid, way back in the early 80’s, Halloween was not much a of a big deal. You thought about your costume literally days before the big night and you usually ended up with grocery store fodder: one of those cheap plastic masks with the vinyl poncho printed up to look like your favorite cartoon character. In later years, I’d actually start planning my costume a week or two in advance, so I’d have time to make something myself. Usually, I’d scrounge some old clothes and pull it all together with some face paint if I was feeling very ambitious.

These days (look at me sounding like a real old timer), it seems that the Halloween season starts even before Back-to-School season. This year, I definitely saw back packs right along costumes in the local Big Box store and Halloween now has as many decorations, kick knacks and outfits as Christmas. I have even seen Halloween “trees” – black artificial tress with purple, green and orange sparkly ball decorations. As a quilter, this really offends me. Every good quilter knows that fall is for making Christmas quilts, pillows, placemats and adorable fabric gift bags. Now that Halloween is crowding my style, I feel the pressure to make Halloween stuff too, which leaves me so much less time for Christmas. What is the dedicated quilter to do?

I feel like there is just not enough time to do both, so I’m going to have to go about it like a divorced parent: alternate years. This year, I am picking Christmas. I have that Log Cabin couch throw that I started back in 1996 that still needs backing and binding, and I had some ideas for some fun new stockings. Next year, I might skew Halloween, or I might just skip it altogether. Either way, poor Thanksgiving is drawing the short straw. I’ll be lucky to put out a store bought tablecloth!

This is No Time for Cleaning

If you have time to clean, you have time to quilt

I hate cleaning. There are no two ways about it. If given the choice between cleaning and literally any other task, I would choose anything else. Cleaning takes hours and hours and hours every week, and for what? For the privilege of doing it all over again? Let’s do some simple math. Let’s say you do the absolute minimum of cleaning – barely doing a load of laundry per week, making dinner every night for seven nights (wait, didn’t I just make dinner last night?), the lamest job possible in keeping the bathroom tidy… just slightly above grime-inducing levels, and let’s just forget about ever putting anything away or keeping your office space from attracting mice. Even with the very minimal of Cinderella duties, we are talking at least two hours of cleaning per day literally flushed down the drain. What could you have done with those fourteen hours instead? You could have made an entire quilt top! Why, YES, Eleanor Burns, you really can make a quilt in a day! A pretty long day, but still technically a day.

You could have made seven of the very cute Baby Puzzle Ball, a pattern from Sew Fun®. You could have made at least a half dozen quilted placements. You could have made enough themed potholders for your entire neighborhood potluck club! I think you are getting the message. Time spent quilting is time better spent than cleaning, or even cooking for that matter – don’t get me started! When you make a quilt, it stays made. When you make your bed, well you are just going to have to do that again tomorrow. Your path is clear! Just sweep everything on your kitchen table into a box and set it on the floor. Now you have a whole clean space to start your next quilting project!

Sick of Quilting? Oh My!

It can happen to the best quilter. You are sick of the quilt you are working on, or worse yet, you could be sick of quilting altogether! What’s a dedicated quilter to do? You converted the entire downstairs to support this all-consuming passion, spent more on a sewing machine than you did on your last car and now you are ready to put your entire stash up on eBay? Do not panic, you are probably suffering from quilting fatigue. There is hope.

Before you leave your sewing machine by the curb, consider other options. Try another outlet for your creativity. When I’m exhausted from measuring, cutting, hunching over, and pushing yards and yards of fabric through the machine, I find relief from other simpler endeavors. My go-to fiber relief valve is crochet. Crochet is basically the opposite of quilting: it simply involves a funny looking stick and some fuzzy string. You can do it anywhere, specifically, on the couch while knee deep in a good binge watch. You can bring it with you. You can even do it in the car! You don’t have to worry about complementary colors or matching corners. You don’t even have to worry about making something square. You could literally just go round and round in circles until you run out of yarn or maintain your composure, whichever ever comes first.

After a little bit of stitch, I can always return to my considerably more complicated quilting projects with renewed perspective. I can appreciate the colors, the prints, the diversity of shapes, the piecing, and the reward of making a really big project. If crochet isn’t your thing, you can experiment with other hobbies. Baking, painting or beading, to name a few, although I don’t recommend scrap booking because that’s just a big black hole you will never return from. Many times, your side projects can help inspire new quilting projects. Recently, I crocheted an entire chattering of baby chickens then felt inspired to quilt a flock of chicken potholders as holiday gifts.

Taking a break from your quilt can sometimes be the best thing you can do to help get it finished! What do YOU do when you need a break from quilting?

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