2007-10-26

Stalled

I have many many projects i want to work on, and a lot of fabric to play with, but I seem to have stalled. Maybe it was the drama of the work week or the drama of the guild meeting (yes, my quilt guild has drama. I'd like it much better if it didn't. I like my drama at work, where it belongs), but I have no motivation to pick up a needle (I voted for "betweens" btw) tonight and I haven't all week.
We just got back from the movies. Gone Baby Gone was very good. Casey Affleck is actually kind of cute in a Boston-Irish sort of way. I did notice one quilt in the movie.. please comment if you saw it too.
On my way home from work I stopped at Fabric Place to see how their clearance sale was going. Of course I had to do my part to help out and I came home with 14 yards of fabric for $57. 14 yards! what am I, crazy? I just walked through the aisles and picked out all the fabrics that I really really liked. Mostly blue-ish greens. I tried to get all shades. Most days when I'm driving home and trying to convince myself not to stop there I think about the "Use what I have" movement that swept through blogland and flickr some 18 months ago. In the months that I tried to do it, it felt really good. I keep telling myself I should commit for November, maybe even for all of 2008, but is that really realistic? When I stop and add up all the yards of fabric I bought in 2007, I shouldn't even question it, I need to stop buying.
Maybe I should join the "fabric diet" or "stash busters" groups that I used to see buttons for in people's sidebars. There was one blogger (remind me who, if you know) who was tracking how much fabric she bought versus how much she used. Now that's what I need to do.
I adore scrap quilts. I love using up small pieces of fabric. Somewhere deep inside of me is a very frugal midwestern woman. But I have all of these big pieces. Lots and lots of yardage. I think I should save it and make something big out of it, but really, I don't like to make quilts that use just 2 or 3 fabrics. I want scraps, but in order to get scraps you have to first make something. Aaahhhh. What I really want are someone else's scraps. That's a lot of fun. I love going through other people's fabric.
Back to my fabric diet daydream..
maybe sometime during NaBloPoMo I'll do a list of all the projects I finished this year. I made a lot of tops, I started a lot of new projects. Browse my archives, I sewed a lot this year. That's great. All of that sewing should have produced some nice scraps, don't you think? But 3 of the tops were scrap quilts to begin with. My scrap bucket has gotten emptier this year, but my fabric shelves are bursting. Really. This isn't a problem, I'm just thinking about what I have and what I want to do with it all. Tonight it's easier to write about it than sort through it I guess.
Tomorrow I'll sew though. It's our last Sit & Sew at the Lions club for the year and I plan to stay all day. Don't yet know what I'll work on. Theresa's memory quilt is still packed in the bag I brought to last month's sit & sew. I'll probably bring it and see how I feel.
Ok, I think I talked myself into wanting to sew now. Thanks for listening.
Hope everyone has a good weekend. I've got another houseguest on the way, my cousin Amanda, a Smithie after my own heart. Looking forward to lots of catching up, a good Halloween party, and plenty of fun.

(L->R: me, mayu, & amanda in the Mill River, Northampton, MA, early september '07)

2 comments:

Donna said...

that's a good idea, tracking what you buy with what you used. I decided last August I wouldn't buy any fabric during the entire month just to see if I could--what I discovered was that while it was good to really assess my fabric buying, I really do sew a lot and try and utilize what I buy.

LuĂ­sa Silva said...

You can draw data sheet with two columns, one with the fabric you use and another with the fabric you buy. It's easy to monitor the balance between both and I think it could works for you, and for us :) ,if you show on the blog your progresses from time to time. Good luck!!

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