An Epic Experience

 

Jan.6, 2015

Yesterday was an epic day for me in my sewing life! It started last year when I read Marcy Tilton’s blog and saw a letter from a woman who was trying to figure out what to do with her deceased sister’s giant, humonguous stash of fabrics and other related collections. It said that she lived one and a half hours from me.

I had assumed that it was lots of quilting fabrics so wrote and said that I could get it to a center that makes quilts for chemo patients.  The sister wrote to me last week and said that I could come and shop this stash. She sent these photos.

I was sooooo excited because garment sewers know that it is hard to find fabric any more. Any kind of garment fabric.  The only source is the big box store which doesn’t have quality fabrics.

When I arrived, I met the sister from Australia and the husband of the woman who owned this stash.  They were charming and very welcoming. We went down to her studio and the stash was OVERWHELMING in this giant work space!  I quickly saw that I would have liked this woman a lot! We had a lot in common. Besides sewing garments, she knitted, dyed fabric, did beading and had similar taste in books and patterns!  She was a president of the local American Sewing Guild at one time.

This studio looked like a small store. I felt that I should be discriminating and only take the fabric and things that I think I can use in the next few years. I realized that I don’t want to accumulate too much that I will never use. But it was hard since there was soooo much beautiful fabric.  Here is some of what I took…

It totals about 80 yards and ranges from silk chiffon, sari, wool, knits, beaded chiffon, foreign fabrics…. I’m so thrilled with them and have high hopes of making lots of garments this year, although this collection could last a decade! I’m going to try to NOT buy any more fabric for a while…except quilting fabric though!

There also were collections of yarn which were beautiful so I have to start knitting again. Books and dyes for my shibori class in June and antique bag frames were other great finds.

I feel so lucky, so happy and inspired but also guilty that I benefited from this great woman’s death. If I bought it all on ebay, I wouldn’t have gotten to know her or her family so it wouldn’t bother me.

Like I said in my last blog post, I intend to sew more this year and post it all to get your creative juices flowing. This sure jump-started my year! I hope to have lots of photos soon. I am going to go cut some silk now from this stash.