Tuesday, May 10, 2011

When you are overwhelmed by your fabric stash…Make pillow cases

In my effort to re-organize, downsize, reflect (you get the picture) I have come across bins of fabric that I purchased during my early days as a quilter. Back then, I mindlessly purchased lots and lots of fabric because, well that’s what quilters did. I lovingly chose fabrics for all of the potential quilts that I was going to make for family and friends. I had all of these ideas for quilts swimming around in my head causing sleepless nights and non-stop day-dreaming at work.

Well….do to my infinite wisdom (and trying to be budget conscious), I decided to make Mother’s day gifts for my family members. The main criteria were to make the gifts from my stash. I didn’t have time to make everyone a quilt or a cute wall hanging. And since pillow cases are all the rage right now, I asked my friends to give me a quick lesson on making them. They are so easy and fun to make, so I continued on. Now, I needed to keep on track and shop my stash to find just the right fabrics for everyone’s gift. I am feeling good about this effort when it would have been so much easier to go to Macys. I was excited at first to look through my fabric. There was some yardage, a lot of fat quarters. And there were the obvious mistakes. I obviously had quilts in mind when I purchased it, but I can’t remember back that far and I really don’t know what I was thinking about. That excitement immediately turned to dismay, when I saw how much fabric I had collected in a 10 year time frame, most of it completely forgotten. Needless to say, I have more than I will ever use in my anticipated life time. Three hours later, I found enough fabric to make 6 sets (2 each) of pillowcases. I didn’t put a dent in the overall stash, but I felt good about not spending more money to make gifts when I had everything that needed right there! Everyone loved their gift…that makes me happy. And I have turned into a pillowcase-making maniac. My goal is to make one pillow case for charity for every set that I gift to family. So the moral to this story is “who knew” or when life gives you too much fabric… make pillow cases. There is a great tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYWCma9wgM . There are others, but I really liked this one (and I watched them all).

Here are a couple of my new creations.





I also hand quilted this small wall hanging panel and glued on crystals for my aunt.



On another note, I am quilting tops for long promised gifts and getting back to long-suffering UFOs. I will post pictures soon.

3 comments:

Eat Sleep Quilt said...

Great idea about the pillow cases! I'm loving that shoe panel, it'd make a quick and easy gift.

Linda

Barb H said...

Thanks so much for the link to the pillow case tutorial. I've been wanting to make some cases for a while now and have been too lazy to search for directions. Thanks to you, I no longer have an excuse to procrastinate! LOL Looks like a fun project.

Dee J. said...

Love your pillowcases. I made a few Christmas gifts one year and found them so much fun to play with. Enjoyed visiting your site and the stories and beautiful work you exhibit here. You are welcome to visit my site too http://fab-lover.blogspot.com. And thanks for introducing me to the Library site.