Stash

As soon as I saw the donated partial bolt of fabric I knew exactly what flimsy it was meant for, so I took it home with me after one of the Community First! Quilters meetings. The sheer amount of fabric made it a good candidate for trying the folding-and-pinning method of washing/drying (works wonderfully, and well worth the effort).

(I know, you feel like you jumped in at the middle of the story, don't you? It'll resolve soon.)

Recently,  after washing/drying the last couple of quilts and measuring how much shrinkage resulted, I padded the raw flimsy guidelines to 74"x94" (for a Twin). Suddenly, that perfect piece of backing yardage was a smidge too small, and I'd have to embiggen it with some of my stash.

My stash isn't huge; I'm not sure I'd even categorize it as "large", but in it I found two perfect pieces.

I'll show the resulting back in a future post, once I've finished quilting everything together.

This serendipitous find led me to ponder a few things, such as 1) how great it is to have a place (or two) to donate my handiwork, 2) how great it is to have a definite size (limit, in some cases) to work within, 3) how lucky I continue to be to have just the right fabric on hand for making/finishing these tops, and 4) would anyone care what my stash looks like?

January seems to be a month of accounting, based on the various blogs I follow, so here's me showing you my stash in its near entirety. I didn't empty out and chronicle the POUT drawers, as they've been accounted for already.

My yardage is kept in a tall file cabinet, finally consolidated into the top three drawers.

My smaller-than-a-yard pieces are sorted into plastic shoe boxes by color. Flannel scraps are overflowing the bottom right cubby, and pieces too small to bother folding but too large to cut up into Scrap Users sizes occupy the upper left cubby (divided by color, roughly).

I have two plastic 3-drawer units stacked alongside my cutting area. One drawer corrals my batiks.

Another holds DVDs and the Kaufman FQ bundles I was gifted for my donations to the California Fires effort.

A third drawer holds the weird stuff I can't quite figure out how to sort or file. This is the first drawer I pillage when making trash bags.

The top drawer of this stack holds the 2.5" and 3.5" Scrap Users System pieces.

Expired/emptied gift cards serve as dividers for the squares.

My 1.5" pieces are stored in a couple of plastic cases, kept under the cutting area.

My 2" stash is kept under the ironing board, within reach as I sew, because my default Leader-Ender is sewing the squares together.

Over the years, this has resulted in several 9-patch blocks.

My stripes, sequestered from the other fabrics for use as binding.

And finally, the triangles that I hope one day to turn into a Snail's Trail top.

Strings aren't enough to qualify as a stash, and are emptied periodically when the container gets stuffed.

All of the above has been with me, in some cases for decades, from which I've been self-shopping happily for the past several years. Recently, a stash of kid-oriented fabrics has been added, rapidly outgrowing its assigned two cubbies.

In my next post I'll reveal why I may never have to buy fabric ever again (much like Nann).

Circling back to the top of the post, this weekend I pin-basted that embiggened backing to the final N1C string flimsy. I was only 4 pins in when I caught my mistake. Whew!