Fabrics

Ah, fabrics. Everyone needs a fabric stash.

A quilt group friend of mind decided to sort through and thin out her fabric stash. She had years of yardage and, bless her, when she bought it, she bought lots of it. I've heard horror stories of people who pieced quilts and ran short on a vital pattern or color.

It was a bonanza for me because our fabrics were roughly of the same vintage or at least relative dye lots. So they fit right in with my color selections. And, I might add, of comparable quality to the cotton I already had.

Something horrible has happened to the cloth supply. None of it is being made in this country anymore, I don't think, and what comes in is loosely woven, inferior thread. If I'm going to invest time and energy into a quilt, I certainly want to use the best materials I can find. I hope the outlook improves in the future.

I went home from the sale with armloads of cloth. Her husband helped me load my car, there was so much. So now, I have outgrown the antique armoire that my stash was in. I've had to resort to plastic storage boxes sorted by color. Not the best solution because I can's see them easily and have to haul the boxes out and unload them to look at everything.

The shelving solution pictured above would be nice. Someone needs to build an elegant piece of furniture with glass doors, good lighting and adjustable shelves to serve as a stash-holder.

I remember the cloth bazaar in Bahrain, much like the photo. It was a winding street several blocks long with open shops loaded with cloth of all kinds and colors. Fabrics from India, Japan, Africa, Britain. Wonderful colors and patterns. Simply mind-boggeling.