My husband has a friend that recently moved to Australia. He and his wife work remotely to Vancouver and Burnaby. Each week they rent a new house and live in a different city. When my husband told me about this I thought, wow! how freeing. To shed all our stuff and just have the essentials seemed like such a freeing idea. Then, I looked over at my newly acquired tape dispenser I brought back from San Fransisco and I realized, I like stuff. I like MY stuff. I like Chris’s stuff. I love that he collects comics, even if they are prone to invading my nightstand space. Actually we just recently cleared off the comics from my nightstand and sorted them into two piles, unread and read. We have storage boxes for the comic books but we have them inconveniently tucked away which makes them hard to get at. Hence the pile on the nightstand. I’ve been meaning to rearrange the storage space but one thing or the other had distracted me from doing it.
As we were talking about the “read and unread” pile my husband said, “just put them all into storage.” My face flushed with, back the truck up, that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I respond with “why? Why even have them if your not going to read them?” Then I realized I like stuff but it drives me crazy when it isn’t used for its purpose, or used at all. We purposely bought our house because we wanted every room to be used each day. We didn’t want any room to be like my neighbours growing up. You know the houses with rooms where children weren’t allowed and all the furniture is all covered in plastic, even the lamp shades.
Then I realized I buy fabric much the same way. I don’t buy fabric for fabric, or because it’s a great price. I buy it per project or if it’s a STOP EVERYTHING I LOVE THIS AND I MUST HAVE IT! Do I use that kind of fabric, eventually, but often I keep it out as eye candy until the perfect project comes along. Having loads of unused fabric around stresses me out. I’ve seen lots of stashes and don’t get me wrong I love to look at stashes big or small. Just personally I don’t like my stash to get too big.
Which leads me to scraps. You can’t help but generate scraps if you sew and I love to use up my scraps. Sometimes I think I’m a reincarnated great depression farm wife because I love to use things up. Waste not want not! So when our guild, The Fraser Valley Modern Quilt Guild was invited to join in on the Ridge Meadows Quilt show May 3-4 we gave ourselves the challenge of doing a pillow, using a traditional pattern and to make it modern. I knew right away I wanted to do a postage stamp quilt. At first I thought I’d use a zipper in my pillow but then I decided against it. Mostly because I realized I’d love to do this same thing with more of my scraps and make a full quilt out of it. So I tried to keep the pillow as easy as possible to seam rip, when the time comes. I’ve seen a sneak peek of the other pillows and we’re really excited about this show. We’ll have up other quilts as well, not to mention all the quilts that will be up from the Ridge Meadows Quilt Guild. If you get a chance come on by and say hi!
