Good progress on the wedding quilt

Believe it or not, I did go upstairs to work on the customer quilt. It's a beautiful quilt - done from Robyn Pandolph's Folk Art Wedding pattern. My friend's quilt has only 9 blocks arranged 3 by 3, and four of the hearts have pictures of the wedding printed inside the heart instead of the applique. I'd already loaded the back, but still had to cut the batting to size and load it and the quilt top onto the machine. I got all the edges based down and the stitching in the ditch done around all the blocks and the sashing. The curved feather border is marked on one long side - and was stitched for awhile. That's when I discovered the tension was off and the underside was loopy. By the time I got that taken out it was time to fix dinner. It's still really hot - 88.7 was the high for today - so we just had bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, fruit and milk. When I went back upstairs to work again I discovered it is now unbearably hot up there even with the fan going. I feel OK with my progress so I'm going to call it quits for tonight. Cooler weather is supposed to be coming, including possible rain on Wednesday. Much better weather for quilting upstairs.

Several of you commented on the size and organization of my stash. I think the gene for "organization" is one of the strongest genes I have. I've always been very organized - and I can't stand to work in a place that's unorganized. Organization just comes naturally to me - I don't have to work at it. If I'm pulling fabrics for a quilt or have a lot of stuff out in the sewing room I can stand it just so long - then I have to stop working long enough to straighten up. As far as the size of my stash goes - I've been quilting for over 20 years and sewing for over 50, so I've had a lot of time to collect fabric and other stuff. For a long time good fabric was very hard to find, so we tended to buy it when we found it. Eventually it became clear that good quilting fabric was here to stay - about the time I decided I should start buying for retirement because at the price of fabric I'd never be able to afford it after we retired. Then the fashion in colors shifted. Cool colors - which were all we could find for years - were out and warm colors were in. The large pieces in my baskets are primarily from the cool color era. Once I started to collect some warm colors I discovered the cool colors didn't work that well with them, so I kept buying more warm colors. Then I started using plaids. Then I discovered folk art quilts. Then all the fabulous reproduction fabrics started coming out - and I could finally make quilts that looked similar to the 19th century quilts that had made me fall in love with quilts to begin with - 20 years before I made my first one. And that, dear readers, is how an obscene stash is built - one piece at a time. Until one day one looks at the shelves and realizes one would have to live to be 500 years old to use it all. I'm certainly going to try - but I've put myself on a strict limited fabric buying diet! No more fabrics bought on speculation - only things I need to finish a current project.