quilting - By the Yard®

Fabric Shopping Online Can’t Do This

I only buy fabric on days that end in “y”

Yesterday I went to the quilt shop. Ostensibly it was to pick up a few coordinating fat quarters for a wedding/house-warming gifts I had in mind but in reality, it turned out to be so much more. I didn’t just find the fabric I was looking for, I found beauty, camaraderie and inspiration.

We all know you can find endless fabric online – its easy and convenient – but only in the quilt shop can you lay bolts next to each other, pile up fat quarters side by side and really get an appreciation for what those fabrics will look like together. You can also juxtapose fabrics from different lines, something which is technically unworkable online. I’ve tried assembling a weird matrix of windows, I’ve even tried cutting and pasting screen grabs into one document. There really is no substitute for sampling laying the fabrics next to each other.

The quilt shop has another precious resource you can’t find online… people! The people you run into at the quilt shop are the nicest lot. They will inevitably ask what you are working on and then when you tell them in excruciatingly drawn-out detail, they are genuinely interested in every last tidbit! Try doing that with your Significant Other. Quilt shop folks will also empathize with you regarding whatever quilting challenge you may be facing, in my case, a recent stroke. Finally, someone who understands how I really do need to be able to use that rotary cutter for an hour at a time and no, I can’t just “do something else”.

Finally, any trip to the quilt shop comes with something else you’ll never find online and that is: real live quilts… hanging everywhere! I have to call specific attention to the popular Exploding Hearts quilt, designed by the friendly and talented Laura Piland of Slice of Pi Quilts. I must have seen this pattern 200 times online. It’s very popular and seemingly everywhere but I’d never seen one in person. In my local quilt shop it was made up in a red colorway of Kaffe Fassett which really made it mesmerizing. It almost looked like it was on fire. I was also surprised at how big the quilt was in real life, another attribute which you just can’t get a feel for online. I do not know if I would have the fortitude for all of the hourglass blocks required, but after seeing in in real life, I think I just might!

Don’t Over Think It

Nothing say “motivation” like a quilter with a baby shower tomorrow

Nothing says “motivation” like a baby shower the next day and you haven’t even started the quilt yet. We quilters pull this stunt all the time: always waiting until the last minute to start a project, ensuring there will be one or more all-nighters involved. And you thought you were done with those when you got out of college! What is wrong with us? Why do we always wait until the very last minute to start a special project, knowing full well it will be a nail-biter all the way over the finish line? I have a theory.

Quilters are inherently creative people. For any given project, we may have dozens of ideas or interpretations swirling around in our brains, WHIMs as we quilters like to affectionately call them (Works Hidden in Mind). To that, add our notoriously humungous fabrics stashes with an equally large number of color choices and the possibilities become endless! At some point, we have to commit to something because that baby shower is now just days away! However, once we start, that cuts off the potential of all the other projects we could make and it’s just so hard to decide which idea would be “best”. Add to that the trepidation of cutting into the “perfect fabric” from which there is no return and we may very well end up paralyzed with indecision.

I think the solution to this quilting conundrum is really pretty simple: accept that any number of possible project designs would all be equally wonderful. There is no one single “best” idea. Once we can accept this notion, then it becomes so much easier to select a path and just start cutting fabric. Next time you can’t get started on a project because there are just too many possibilities, trust in knowing they all would have been awesome so just pick one and start sewing!

Big Closets, Big Problems

I haven’t always had a huge stash of quilting fabric. As a matter of fact, I didn’t have any quilting fabric at all when I set out to make my first quilt almost twenty years ago. I wanted to make a baby quilt for my best friend who was eagerly waiting to bring her baby girl home. I distinctly remembering going to the local fabric store, thumbing through my crisp new copy of Eleanor Burns’ Log Cabin Quilt in a Day and buying exactly the amount of fabric indicated.

The quilt was a success, so I decided to make another Log Cabin quilt for my mother. This time, I could not choose between all the fabrics that I liked, so I bought a few “extra”. “If I don’t end up using them for this quilt, I’ll use them for something else”, I reasoned. That’s when the real trouble started. As a busy working mom, I didn’t get to the fabric store very often so on the special occasion that I did, I tended to “stock up”. After all, I didn’t know when the next time I could get to the fabric store would be. It could be weeks or months!

Once at the fabric store, I had many amazing ideas inspired by all the beautiful fabrics. These potential projects just prompted me to buy even more. Having a huge house at the time, with equally huge closets, proved to be a real moral hazard. I didn’t see the problem sneaking up on me. It wasn’t until years later when I moved three times within the span of a few years that I realized I had a serious fabric problem. Packing it up and hauling it from place to place was not only difficult, but it was downright embarrassing. “Why do I have so much fabric?”, I asked myself over and over. It takes a lot of space to store it, it takes time and effort to maintain it – keeping it clean, organized, bug-free etc., and having a lot of it makes you feel really really guilty about buying more. Giving fabric away or selling it is impossibly difficult because after having it for so long, getting rid of it is not only depriving you of the fabric itself, but it also means saying goodbye to the idea of whatever you had planned to make with it. It would have been better to never have bonded with the fabric in the first place.

So, gentle quilters, heed my warnings. Next time you see that fabric that is just too beautiful to leave in the shop, unless you have a specific and immediate use for it, don’t buy it. Pick it up, admire it, maybe even carry it around the shop for a short while, but then – ever so lovingly- set it back down and step away. Then go home and chose something from your stash instead. Your closets will thank you later.
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There Are No Mistakes in Quilting

There is an old anecdote about Amish quilters that asserts every quilter must deliberately leave one mistake in each quilt as a lesson in humility. Speaking for myself, I certainly don’t need to make a concerted effort to leave a mistake in my quilts as they are full of all kinds of blunders. From the block sewn in upside down to the piece where I didn’t quite have enough of that one fabric left, it all goes back to how I learned to sew in the first place. When I was a kid learning how to sew, I didn’t go out to a fabric store to buy patterns or even fabric for that matter. I sewed with whatever leftovers scraps I could find in my mother’s sewing machine cabinet, and I just made patterns up from whatever came to mind. I was in a hurry to “make-do and get done” so I could either start playing with what I had just made or move on to the next idea that had already popped into my head.

Today there is a lot more pressure on quilters to be perfect thanks to endless pin-worthy pictures online. Every quilting blog is full of magazine-quality photos coupled with a dubious humble-brag about “just learning to quilt less than a year ago”. We must not fall victim to all that marketing hype. It’s OK to make mistakes and I would even go so far as to say making mistakes results in quilts that are special and unique. In this quilter’s opinion, it’s better to get done and be different than to give up in frustration or to produce cookie cutter perfection. Anyone can make a quilt that looks just like the one on the pattern cover but only you can make one that is truly your own.

Do You Want a Receipt for That?

Many quilters will attempt to conceal a fabric acquisition by claiming its “been in the closet forever”! Why is it that if a stash of fabric has been in your closet a long time, you somehow feel less guilty about buying it than you’d feel if you bought it yesterday? Perhaps responsibility for fabric related splurges is inversely proportional to time because if you bought 20 yards of fabric years ago, it was certainly a lot less expensive than it would be today. Or perhaps your fabric buying behavior was rampantly out of control six years ago and your shopping today has become politely more restrained.

Maybe today you are mostly “shopping from your stash”. If that were the case, you would be among good company. According to the 2020 Quilting in America survey funded by F+W Media, 41.1% of respondents said they are consuming more of their stash than buying. That may not be too much to brag about because with the same survey quoting the average quilter as having a stash of fabric worth more than $6000, there is still clearly a lot of fabric acquisition going on. At the end of the day, don’t worry about whether that fabric has been in your stash for years or you just bought it yesterday. The important thing is to get quilting. Make something beautiful today!

Work Less, Quilt More

As crazy as it may sound, I have indeed skipped work in order to sew. In my defense, I was trying to finish a bridesmaid’s dress for a wedding I was in…. which pales in contrast to what the bride did. She didn’t finish her dress in time for her destination wedding, so she brought the sewing machine to the hotel the night before the wedding in order to finish the dress. Fortunately, there are simpler ways to make more time for sewing.
• Cut Down on Cooking – No, I’m not talking about skipping meals or getting expensive takeout. Try making twice as much food as you normally would for one or two meals per week. Then you’ll have an entire meal ready to go for later in the week! No food prep, just heat and eat. Hours saved.
• Go on a Social Media Diet – We all think we have “no time”, but have you ever really taken a look at how much time you waste online, especially on social media? One quick peek and before you know it, you are down the rabbit hole. Same thing with email. When I was a software manager in a previous life, I often advised my harried and overworked teams that they could get more of their day back by only checking their emails first thing on the morning and before they left for the day. This significantly cut down on the running around all day trying to answer every little thing. Note that if it’s really important, they will call you.
• Judicious Punting – When I was a freshman at MIT, the first week I was on campus I was advised by an upper classman that the key to survival at The Institute was “judicious punting”. Not “punting” like on the Thames, “punting” as in football: just kick it away. Decide what is really important, and just don’t do the rest. Do you REALLY need to make something homemade for the bake sale or could you just buy something? Do you REALLY need to answer that work email after hours that was CC’d to forty people? Nothing copied to a huge recipient list is ever legitimately urgent.
With a bit of practice and a little bit of prudence, you can cut your to-do list down to what’s really necessary. And THAT leaves more time for quilting!

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