In my take is a dress that someone, or someone's mom, has made by hand. It's nothing that my girlfriend would wear, but I've learned to know quilting-weight fabric when I see it, and I'm thrilled to have something new for my little stash. I disassemble the dress into its component pieces, and wonder what uses I might find in the future for my big score...
1997: Bits of the fabric find their way into the pieced border of my first full-sized quilt.
1998: I use the fabric in a very scrappy "Around the World." The piece ends up winning a blue ribbon at the county fair when a error in the published rules creates a category that only it fits into. I feel famous!
1999: A single square of the fabric shows up in a little wall hanging, the last piece I make in Kansas.
2005: Several pieces of the fabric find their way into the big Log Cabin.
2007: Squares of the fabric show up in a child's blanket.
I sometimes wonder if the woman who used to wear that dress still remembers it at all. I've still got plenty of fabric from it left. I'm sure I will find at least a few more uses for it before it runs out....
11 comments:
Once upon a time I was a graduate student studying history, and I well remember those lucky finds! I even picked up change I'd find lying on the sidewalk. And the historian in my just loves your retracing the path of that fabric.
You were a bold beginner, doing a slanted pieced border! Wow!
A. Love that border.
B. Do tell us about that quilt show error.
C. I am so impressed with how well you have spread that fabric!
This is a marvelous history! There are certainly some items I've "let go of" and wondered where they ended up . . .
oh, i love tracking the fabric like this! it's almost like organ donation. :)
Clever guy! The Trip Around the World and the Log Cabin are REALLY nice! Great job.
That's fantastic, Micheal. Funny how wonderfully a piece of fabric weaves its way through our work over the span of years. I love fabric with stories.
Loved this post. Since I read it, I have thought about it several times, just like I have on occassion, wondered what happens to the clothes I donate to Goodwill. As always I look forward to your entires. -Canadian Gail
We call that "Dumpster Diving" and it's a treasured year-end activity on college campuses everywhere!
Glad to see you put the fabric to such good use!
That's a great part of "good old fashioned" quilting, huh? The scrap of fabric that shows up in quilt after quilt and always reminds you of that one time... When I first started quilting I thought it would be cool to always use one fabric from the "previous" quilt in the "next" quilt, but then I discovered that my process isn't quite that linear...
@Calico: Not much to tell about the quilt show error. I never figured out what had "gone wrong." You could tell it killed them to give me the blue ribbon, though! : )
Thanks for the nice comments, everyone!
This is great info to know.
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