Friday, July 4, 2025

Bits and Pieces and Pieces and Pieces

The Community First! Quilters recently were gifted a portion of a hoarder's stash and I've been curating it for the severak weeks: sorting, organizing, culling, selling, and generally getting to know every.single.piece. It has easily increased our stash by 50%, a stash which currently is homeless as we've lost our usual meeting and storage space. I've got four bins at home with me and the other 15 or so are in our fearless leader's vehicle. When next we meet we'll have a better idea of the lay of the land, and where these bins are landing.

In the meantime! It's been very interesting seeing the results of a hoarder's addiction (which pales compared to the stash Nann had been describing throughout last year.) One of the oddest things I dealt with was scores of BOM bags that had been sold at $6/pound at a store going out of business. I know this because the sign was included with all those bags. A few were unique, but most were duplicates of BOM kits the store had made up but never sold. The biggest duplication was 17 kits of the same pattern/colorway. 

I tried folding all the identical pieces together, but that ended up being awkward and taking up a lot of room in their respective bins. As space needed to file FQs diminished, I finally decided to pull the biggest piles of all those BOM pieces and see what I could make of them. Backs, preferably, so I set up a spreadsheet with the goal square inchage (like footage, but for inches, yes?) of 7,000 (that covers something slightly less than 75"x95"), and started subtracting the pieces to see how far I could get.

From there, as any regular reader will know, it was a matter of playing on the computer. A couple of backs were planned around odd pieces (either in design or in size/shape), one of which was this 20"x79" Pine Garland Plaid:


The dark teal and aqua pieces listed on the spreadsheet (yellow is yellow is yellow in my book):

Mauve dots and the black specks:


All together into a backing:


Today's backing from plan (the last list in the spreadsheet above) . . .

. . . to fact:

Some of those fabrics:

The first backing I made was mainly from WOF pieces that didn't need a whole lot of planning and came together very quickly:

I don't know how many BOM kits this represents (at least four), but these were the players:


I've the plans and fabrics for three more backs which I'll put together this month, between other quilting projects such as finishing a quilt (YAY! Binding to sew down and post to come when it stops raining and I can get a photo op) and being involved in a group quilt again. Then there's the personal sewing I've promised people, and my own projects yammering away in the background....

2 comments:

  1. There seems to be a lot of quilt estate destashing these days. I continue to admire your charting method for creating backings. Hope you find a place to put CFQ's recent bounty.

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    Replies
    1. I suspect all the buyers in the heyday of the quilting boom (when new designs were coming out fast and furious) are now making good their jest that "Someday, all this will be yours!", and their survivors have no idea what to do with the bounty!

      C

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