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.

Are Quilters “Too Hard to Shop For”?

You are so hard to shop for

People who have very specific hobbies such as quilting are often told “you are too hard to shop for”, no doubt because our hobby is confusing to others who couldn’t tell a walking foot from a fat quarter. That doesn’t mean you can’t still give a thoughtful gift to a quilter. Surely, they don’t need any more fabric, and sewing machines are so expensive. What can we do for our quilting friend that would be appreciated? Instead of a tangible gift, how about an experience? An afternoon at a quilt museum would be great fun for your quilting friend and you might even learn something, too. The New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA was a delightful experience for me for the beauty and craftsmanship of the historic quilts and there were so many looms and machines of infinite complexity that my husband was captivated.

A road trip to a far-off quilting shop could be fun for the both of you, as the destination does not have to be the only purpose. A scenic ride and a nice lunch someplace could both be part of the journey. I can always find a model train shop along the way to any quilt shop so there can be a fun stop for my husband, too.

If road tripping for quilts isn’t your jam, how about something that would make your quilter’s hobby experience better? I do not know a single quilter who does not get excited about storage solutions. How about a trip to Ikea for shelving?  A friend in my quilting group was ecstatic on Christmas morning when her husband gifted her a 5×5 cubicle set-up for her workspace. She posted photos of it before she posted photos of the kids!

The next time you are stuck for gifting ideas for that special quilter in your life, be creative and think outside the block!

The Couple Who Hobbies Together

Payback for last year’s Tri-County Quilt Show

I was recently asked, “where do you get your inspiration for By the Yard”? The interviewer was rather disappointed when I replied, “ripped from the headlines of my life”. I don’t have some kind of clever writing process. Instead, almost all the By the Yard® comics are based on real life occurrences. This particular comic is pretty much word for word based on a real event. Train Guy and I had gone to a train show where the organizers were indeed boasting about how many acres of model trains were on display and that the event consisted of five gigantic expo-sized buildings. I dutifully trudged to and from all five buildings, enduring the New England January snow and ice. We had a nice time. We even saw the actual steam train from a village in Maine where my parents live. Train Guy visited every booth, some of them two or three times. He acquired some steam engines he had his eye on, literally dozens of train trucks (for the uninitiated those are the little wheely things that go under train cars) and a bunch of other widgets that served some unknown purpose.

After this auspicious day, a quick Google search revealed there was a quilt shop nearby. Being more than two hours from the house, of course we had to stop in. After all, when would be the next time we’d be out this way? As if we were in some kind of 80’s sitcom, the very second that we stepped into the quilt shop an exasperated patron burst through the doors and shouted out at the top of her voice, “And THIS is for the train show!!”. Train Guy and I gave each other a knowing glance and had to struggle to control our guffaws. He proceeded to putter around the shop while I checked out the goods at my leisure. He then tried to convince me to buy four yards of a fabric instead of the one yard that I thought was all I needed. That would be the inspiration for another comic for another day.

Since then, we discovered there are a lot of quilt-loving/train-loving couples, maybe some more so than others. My advice to couples who must endure their other half’s obsessive hobbies – whether they be trains, tractors, trucks, fishing rods or whatever – just be gracious. Sure, I can’t tell the difference between HO scale or ON30 and Train Guy still thinks a jelly roll is some kind of wonderful dessert, but by going to these events together, we learn more about each other’s’ interests and most important of all, we spend time together doing things that we love.

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!

Finding Quilting Inspirations… in Magazines!

When you think of where quilters are most likely to find inspiration you might immediately think of online resources, such as Instagram, Pinterest and a wide variety of quilting blogs. But did you know that 85% of “dedicated quilters” look for inspiration and information about quilt making from magazines? According to the Quilting in America™ 2017* survey, a Dedicated Quilter is one who spends $500 or more per year on the hobby, including books, magazines, fabric, tools, supplies, etc. The survey also revealed these other fun facts about Dedicated Quilters and their magazines:

  • Dedicated Quilters have spent an average of $136 on books, magazines, and DVDs in the past 12 months.
  • They read an average of 3.4 magazines regularly and spend an average of 6 hours a month reading quilting-related magazines.
  • The top reasons they read magazines is to learn new tips and techniques (88%), get quilt making inspiration (75%), find out about quilting products (63%), look at photos of quilts (62%), and find block patterns (60%).

I personally enjoy reading a lot of quilting magazines, both the grocery store variety and the high end, specialty magazines. To me, the appeal of magazines are many: no glaring “screen time” and no hunching over a computer; magazines are battery-free and can be enjoyed anywhere, from a couch, pool or airplane to an office building while you are  you are stuck waiting for a boring appointment; you can cut out images for a vision board; you can cut out pictures and file away patterns for a later date, in your “someday I’ll have time to make this” pile; and finally, they are made by industry design professionals so they are very pretty and enjoyable to just sit back and absorb.

The next time you are looking for quilting inspiration, education, or simply relaxation, pick up a magazine or two!

*Presented by The Quilting Company brands: Fons & Porter, McCall’s Quilting, Quilters Newsletter, Quiltmaker, and Quilting Arts in cooperation with Quilts, Inc., producers of International Quilt Market & International Quilt Festival.