She who dies with the most fabric…

There is a saying among quilters that she who dies with the most fabric wins.  My husband has decided that I am going for the supreme title.  He discovered my fabric stash the other day when I got the bright idea to clean my quilting room.  It has been several years since I have worked on a quilt and I thought I should get back to it but first a cleaning was in order.  I dug through all my bags of fabric purchased for a specific quilt and put those on a separate shelf so I would be able to locate them but wouldn’t use the fabric for another quilt.

 There are probably 35 bags of fabric here.

Then I organized all the bolts of fabric I have by color so I could quickly locate a fabric to fill in to complete a design.

Then I cleaned off my cutting table and organized all my quilting books, stencils, marking pens and pencils, rulers, etc.  (we quilters have a lot of stuff!)  I also organized the milk crates of fabric that I have under my sewing table – there are 12.  Then I dug out all the quilt tops that were finished and just needed to be quilted.  As I was contemplating what to work on, my daughter walks into my quilting room and reminds me I haven’t finished her quilt I started 10 years ago and asked if I thought I would be able to finish it before I died.  So I got busy on it – I only had about 1/4 of it left to quilt.  When I finished stitching the binding on the back, my husband walked into the room and after looking around at all the fabric that was beautifully organized had the nerve to tell me I needed to get busy and make some quilts.  Men just don’t understand!  It’s a process!!

I don’t know if I am like most quilters or not; you see, I usually have several quilts in various stages of completion.  Some take many years to complete while others are done in a few days.  I guess I like to have a variety to work on so I can choose one that fits my mood at the time.

This is an example of a multi-year quilt.  I have been working on this whole cloth quilt for about five years.  It is beautiful so I don’t mind how long it is taking.  I work on it a lot in the winter and not so much in the summer since I don’t need the added warmth of a quilt over my feet.  It is a hand quilted piece and is a queen size so it is obviously going to take a while.  Hopefully it will be done before I die.  Mind you, I don’t have any immediate plans for the dying part there are just too many quilts to make and too much fabric to use up.