Stash Ins and Outs

I just knew my post about tossing my crumbs would generate some responses - I just had no idea how many!

Several of you mentioned options other than throwing them in the garbage. Believe me, I thought about those options. However, since this was purely impulsive on my part, and so very unlike me, I was 100% sure that if I didn't toss them immediately I wouldn't have tossed them at all. I thought about posting them free for the asking, but in the time it took to get the first response I would have changed my mind. I needed to do something drastic immediately in order to get the ball rolling.

So I threw them out. There were lots and lots of them, but altogether they didn't amount to much fabric. I put them into one of those little plastic bags from the grocery store and tied the bundle shut with the handles. They all fit into one bag once I squashed out the air. If there had been a large box of bag full I never could have done it.

The action did get things moving however. It had results that I didn't expect - results that delighted me. I received an email from a nice lady in the south east who stepped far out of her comfort zone to ask me to toss anything else I might throw away in her direction. She kindly offered to pay me the postage. She currently had very little stash due to circumstances - what she had fit into a small Ziploc bag. She has been working on charity quilts with what she has but wanted to do much more. In no time I had her full name and address. This morning I boxed up every scrap - large and small - that wasn't cut into squares, triangles, strips, bricks or strings. I stuffed them into giant Ziplocs, squeezed out all the air I could, and packed them into two flat rate priority mail boxes. Those hold a LOT of scraps if you work at it. When I mailed them today I discovered their combined weight was just short of 10 pounds! Considering a pound of quilting fabric is approximately 3.8 yards, I figured she got over 30 yards of usable scraps. It felt so freeing to send them off to her, knowing they will be used for charity quilts now instead of taking up space in my sewing room and waiting for me to get around to using them.

And here's the discovery I made - I feel like a large weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I wanted all those scraps used for charity, so I spent a lot of time this past year sewing charity quilts from my scrap stash. However, I can never sew all the quilts I want to and use up all my scraps in three lifetimes. Now I can have both. So stay tuned - I may be offering up some of my cut scraps next! The more I think of that idea the better I like it!

In the meantime I did fall off my diet a bit. You know how there are one or two particular foods that you can never resist no matter how much you want to loos weight? Well, that's what Judie Rothermel fabrics do to my fabric diet. I love her nineteenth century reproduction fabrics so very much. So when Z&S put her newest lines up on their website I felt my dieting determination slipping. So I found a flat rate priority box for me in my mailbox on Tuesday. This is what it contained - fat quarters of her two new collections - Cambridge and Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum III. I can hardly wait to take these to class with me to see what era Eileen will place each piece into.

************
Gratitudes:
1. The chance to share with other quilters
2. Flat rate priority mail boxes and envelopes
3. Plum trees bursting into bloom
4. The most perfect cup of coffee I've ever tasted
5. Chunky peanut butter on toast