Buck A Bag

The BEST part of the Shining Tides quilt show was an area tucked away in the hall with 5 bins and a sign that read “Purchase a brown paper bag for $1. Fill it with as much as you can.” I hadn’t been in the show more than 5 minutes when I found this corner, and promptly grabbed a bag and fell into heaven.

I ignored the nearby vendors and curious Shining Tides guild members and proceeded to dive into the bins and pull out gems as if they were filled with $1 bills with only a few precious $20 bills hidden inside. I knew exactly what I was looking for and the “bags” were only brown paper lunch sacks so I thought I needed to get the best scraps first. 25 minutes later I had filled two bags and my back had started to hurt. I didn’t know how long Costas wanted to stay at his office so I paid my $2 and walked off to see the rest of the show.

On my way out though, I knew I needed another look through, so I picked up another bag. By this time the volunteers working the area knew me and were cheerfully making comments and conversation—one of them even does English paper piecing with the Quilt Patis templates so she could understand why I was passing up the ½ yard pieces in favor of the 2.5” strips. This time I went through methodically, laying a large piece of white fabric over the second bin and piling all the scraps I didn’t want from bin #1 onto it. Then I’d grab the corners and carefully dump all the undesirable scraps from bin #1 back in and move on to bin #2. This worked a lot better than my original method of digging, pulling and turning, which threw a lot of scraps onto the floor. There’s something about that feeling of digging your hands into a bin of scraps and turning it over to see what’s hidden on the underside… (aaah..)

35 minutes (and another backache) later I had filled 2 more bags. The ladies were happy to have someone take away their scraps, I was overjoyed to have paid $4 for so much fabric, and everyone ended their day smiling.

Sorting and washing comes in the next post, but here’s a peek at my haul..
This is the contents of one bag.


I was really surprised when I laid it out that I had fit so much inside, then I remembered I had 3 more to unload (yay!). Some of the really cool finds included these guys:

And some big pieces of vintage florals.

I’m trying not to feel overwhelmed by it all. It’s just fabric, right? I was looking mostly for pieces to cut into diamonds for Travel quilt #2 but I also threw in some novelty prints because now that I’m having a kid, I need to start planning to make this quilt.