My mother passed from Alzheimer’s in 2023. She had become a quilter later in life, after my kids were born. She was a very accomplished shopper.
I got her stash.
It has everything – from beautiful fabrics – some obviously grouped together with some sort of intent and others just random, to partially finished projects, to kits that were never opened.
My plan is to work my way through her stash in order to:
- make use of her fabric instead of it potentially ending up in a landfill
- save money on fabric
- try new techniques from the kits
- try new tools
- spark my creativity through limiting these projects to fabric from her stash
As I finish projects I add them to this page. Some projects will be big enough to have a whole dedicated post, some will just be a picture and a caption.
2024
July 2024
I designed and sewed a quilt for my niece and her fiance using only fabrics from the stash. You can read more about it here
June 2024
This was an unopened kit. I don’t like applique. You can read more about this project here.
May 2024
I got a new longarm this month. Now I will really be able to finish all these quilts! But a lot of the month was getting it set up and reacquainting myself with the process.
April 2024
I realized this month that I was going to need to take true ownership of her stash if I was ever going to have success in using it. I spent a couple weekends going through every piece of fabric and sorting it by color and pattern. Kits or fabric bundles like jellyrolls were grouped together as ‘projects’.
Some obvious groupings – like lots of music themed fabric were kept together. She had moved shortly before her Alzheimer’s really took hold, so the bins that came from here house were not necessarily sorted as she may have intended – I had to do some guessing.
Fat quarters were also sorted by color. I was able to absorb a lot of the resulting bins into my studio, including boatloads of fat quarters.
These are the bins that DIDN’T get absorbed into my studio. There is an entire bin of Peter Rabbit themed fabric, included one finished top. There was some talk of making a baby quilt for each of her six grandchildren, so one project will be trying to accomplish that with the Peter Rabbit fabric. I’ll likely wait on that until there are great grandchildren on the way 🙂
March 2024
Sawtooth Star pillow cover
This pillow cover was also quilted, all it needed was to have a back put on. There was matching fabric with it just barely the right size to make an envelope back. This was not taken by any grandkids. It doesn’t quite match any decor that was in her house…was likely started for someone…but who?
Green Sawtooth Star baby quilt
This quilt was almost complete – everything but putting the binding on. She had machine quilted it, still had the pin basting in it. The binding was cut, but not put together. This was a good project to get me back in the studio after some surgery I had in February. I offered it to the grandkids, and had a taker.
