What I Did Saturday

There was some fabric that needed putting away and I thought, "I should get out all the fabric boxes sometime and sort them." The boxes live under the bed and it's kind of a pain to drag them out, but next thing I knew I was down on the floor tugging awkwardly-sized plastic boxes from beneath the box springs. Since there was nowhere else to put them, I piled them on the bed which was stripped for purposes of laundry, leaving only a pile of quilts and a few random cats (not pictured). There are, I think, seven boxes down there altogether, four of which hold fabric. They had been organized by color and I've been careless recently in stuffing things back wherever it's convenient, so I thought there might be a few pieces totally in the wrong box but otherwise it would be mostly a matter of refolding and stacking.

Ha.

The first box was once filled with what I think of as the 'neutrals:' blacks, whites, off-whites (a LOT of off-whites because of that Here Comes Santa counter that I made eight of about ten years ago), and also browns and tans and ... you know, like that. It turned out to also have reds and purples and blues and scraps from Halloween costumes and quite a few old unfinished projects, including a decent start on what was intended to be a baby quilt for Alyssa (ouch!), a bunny wall-hanging for spring (with 3D ears), and a full set of sunshine placemats that I made back when I had nine kids at home. Or, rather, began to make.

It turns out I also have half a dozen grey fabrics (who knew?), some of them quite small, and as I stared at them wondering where in the world they came from, because they weren't exactly 'cute,' I would never have bought them for their charm -- I remembered! My oldest (longevity-wise) friend Sam! When I moved back to Mesa in '95 we found each other again and she had grown up to be really seriously skilled with a sewing machine and mad for machine appliqué. We started doing wall quilts together (that's where the Here Comes Santa originated), and sometimes she would find a project and (because I was almost desperately poor at the time and she and her husband were doing well) photocopy the pattern for me and then give me little bits from her vast fabric stash for elements of the design. She has an eye for finding 'practical' fabrics, ones that can easily be sidewalks and roofs and brick walls in a design, whereas I generally just want to buy the pretty colors and cute flowers. That's where the greys came from, that's where I got the patch of cloud print and the foggy one and the tiny bricks. I sat with some of them in my lap for awhile and remembered how much fun those sessions were.

The other three boxes were just as jumbled.

This is about halfway through the sorting:


It took all afternoon and most of the evening, with a short break to make dinner (that thing with the chicken rolled around stuffing and salami and mozzarella, and a pan of veggies). It might have been a little faster if I hadn't found scraps from Mikayla's moose costume and the gorgeous sparklies leftover from the fish costumes I made for Lyndsay, Dylan and Aiden, pirate vests for Ash and Camden (it "was" Ash, right?) ... and on and on. Quilt squares with fat flannel cats on them, a pattern I designed for exchange with an e-group 9 or 10 years ago and then never assembled my own. Three Dresden Plate squares in a rainbow of colors, never used for anything. Scraps from dresses I made for my girls when they were little. Hey, scraps from a dress I was wearing right after Jenna was born and through my pregnancy with Ethan.

Wow, it takes a long time to process and sort all these memories!

But finally, a little after 9, I was done:



And the Unfinished Projects Box:

For extra fun, here's the box of Double-Knit yarn that also lives under the bed and was already sorted, but I love to look at it anyway:

And so, with all that put away, I made up the bed and found, between the feather-top and the mattress (photographed atop the laptop for clarity):

That's just going to have to wait til later.