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.