About other stashes

I have numerous stashes, not just yarn. If you know me, this will not come as a surprise. 

Before I got back into knitting 25-ish years ago I did a lot of quilting. My quilt shop locating skills were on point (pun intended). This was before you could just plug “quilt shop” into Google Maps. Every time I went on vacation I would visit the local quilt shop and purchase “souvenir” fat quarters to add to my ever expanding fabric stash. I really enjoyed the method behind piecing quilt blocks either by hand or machine. I owned a lovely singer treadle sewing machine that was an absolute gem when it came to precise seams. I belonged to a fabric of the month club. I had bins of fabric stacked in my sewing room. 

Have you noticed that I speak of all this in past tense? 

When my son, Zack, was 4 he started playing on sports teams. I wanted something that I could do while sitting through the team's practices. I took a book but found myself reading the same page over and over. I took fabric to hand piece into tiny squares but the task also required close attention. I brought knitting and voila! I could keep my eye on what was happening in the field and also maintain a good clip with the needles. 

So what to do with all that fabric? Enter my mother. She is also a quilter and the one who taught me all my sewing skills. I let her raid my stash, and raid she did. All that remained was a single bin of mainly Christmas fabrics, batiks and fun juvenile prints. As for the treadle sewing machine, I hadn't used it in over 20 years and there was no room for it in my new downsized life. It really deserves its own post, but I sold it to an avid fiber enthusiast who was delighted to acquire it. More about it (along with photos) in a future post. 

Enough back-story...on with it! 

A friend of mine uses fabrics to paint on canvases. I thought I'd give it a try. A winter birch tree scene immediately came to mind. I pulled out my bin of stashed fabrics and took inventory. All wrong. There were a few good pieces, but I was going to have to augment. Yay!

I went to a shop over in Nashville's Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood called Turnip Green Creative Reuse. It's a non-profit store where people donate used art and craft supplies. Turnip Green sorts and resells the items. It's an amazing place! I was able to pick up several fabric samples for just a few bucks. 

From these fabrics with a bit of Mod Podge and Heat-N-Bond, this is what happened. 

10" x 20"