My stash Needs Sorting

 I'm still wandering around the sewing room, opening boxes and being bemused with what I've squirreled away. I'm finding fabric I have no memory of, and remnants of old projects, and little collections that I might have meant to start new projects with. But it's all a bit of a mystery.

This fabric is not something I ever would have bought in a quilt shop, and there's so much of each that it's unlikely I found it in an op-shop 😕. I would remember that.

The fabric is probably from a huge haul we got from a garage sale earlier in the year. A crafty lady had passed on and her family were trying to get rid of her stash, which wasn't just fabric. She had enormous tubs full of feathers, or sequins, or modelling clay, or buttons or paper or paint.  It was mind-blowing. We took about 10% of the fabric, but it was all prepacked in bags, with a lot of rubbish packed in with the good stuff, and it was priced way too high. We haggled over the bits we did want, and didn't pay too much, but the bulk of it all was still there when we went back in the evening of the second day. (Just to check there was nothing there we missed.) I'm actually glad we didn't get any more, because it's been difficult for our spaces to absorb the amount we did buy.

Going through my boxes and drawers has made me realise that the things that are giving me grief are the bits and pieces that I didn't want, didn't buy, and have no idea what to do with. We accumulate a lot from the quilts we finish for other people; they don't want the backing scraps, and we can't bring ourselves to throw it away.  It's mostly narrow strips and strings of really nice fabric, Tilda and William Morris to name a couple. Hence my foray into String piecing earlier this year, in an attempt to use some of it up. I was moderately successful, but the baskets of strings are still overflowing.

I did finish a string pieced top made from Kaffe offcuts from the patchwork shop in Jamestown. 

I really enjoyed working with those prints, but I didn't need to keep the top.

So I did what I usually do and sold it. And no, I don't make a lot of money from that, but this top was constructed from a small part of a $15 scrap bag, and fabric from the deep stash. I'm not in it for the money, I want to use my stash. The hours and hours of enjoyable sewing is an extra bonus.

We've been watching The Quilted Forest on You-tube, and her attempts to clear out her 2.5" bucket of strips. It's fascinating to watch, she's up to 24 videos in that series, and sometimes she makes 2 quilts per video. Very inspiring. Maybe if I could commit to a string pieced project every month I'd see progress.  Even 5 blocks a month would dent that pile of strings.

What I really need to do is start donating fabric back to the charity shops.  If it's not my cup of tea, get rid of it instead of trying to incorporate it into a scrap quilt.

Polyester. That's an instant No. 

Technically not ugly, but not my style at all. Back to the charity shop to make someone else happy.

I don't like Debbie Mum fabric, or 90s fabric with geese and straw hats and teddies. I don't like black backgrounds and dreary greyed-out colours. It can all go straight back. I think I will start a donation box right away. I'd better show Mereth, otherwise she might find it in the shop and bring it back again. We've done that before. What are we like?