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!