BEFORE AND AFTER

Last week all our time in the Sewing Room was spent sorting fabrics.  We received two enormous donations, having already received another rather large donation earlier.  Because this is a 55+ community we do experience the loss of members frequently.  Some die, some move to care centers.  Often their heirs are confronted with a house full of accumulated  possessions, and this sometimes includes a sewing room and we are often the recipients of that accumulation.

One of the donations was HUGE!!!  It was only when we were almost finished sorting that we thought of taking this picture:

This doesn't begin to show you the PILE of boxes and bags.  There were at least a dozen of the big black garbage bags filled with material and accessories for quilting.  Joan and I both took home a new, clamp-on magnifying light for our sewing tables.  I also "inherited" a 6" x 24" quilting ruler and a cutting mat.  In addition to the bags there were maybe six or seven big cardboard boxes also full of fabric.  It was overwhelming!

We made piles of this and that kind of material: pieces large enough for quilt backings, medium sized cuts, maybe a yard or half a yard, fat quarters (18" x 22"--a standard quilting cut), cut squares of several sizes, 2 1/2" strips, and even several half finished projects.  The quilt in my last post was one of them.

And this was only one of three donations in the past three weeks!

Quilters prefer to use only 100% cotton fabrics and many of these fabrics were cotton/polyester, slinky knits, dressy materials or even drapery fabrics.  There were bags of lace.  All of these other fabrics went back into boxes and bags.  Joan and her husband stuffed their car full and took them to Goodwill to donate them there.

Finally the sewing room was almost back to normal.  

 

Now we have to go through all the materials that we saved and ask each other: Will we ever use this piece?  We need to do a further cull.  Otherwise there is enough fabric here for each of us quilters to sew with until we're 100 years old!  And there would probably be some left then.