Stash Accountability

I was doing pretty well as far as creating a stash deficit for the year – until I went to the “Thousands of Bolts (only one nut)” website. 

It is a great site for stash building – not that I need to do any stash building. With the price of fabric today, who doesn’t want to get great fabrics for an average of about $5 per yard! (I noticed that today all Hoffman batiks and bali prints are $5.95 a yard. Hmm, do I need some additional batiks in my stash?)

Since my favorite quilts are scrappy, I buy a lot of fat quarters. But I naturally gravitate towards medium and dark value fabrics – which leaves a definite gap in my stash as far as lights. Also, since I think some scrappy quilts benefit from using the same background fabric (usually a light value), I often buy yardage of a light fabric that I especially like in order to mix it with a variety of medium and dark scraps for a quilt. So, I bought 18 yards (yikes!) of lights from Thousands of Bolts.

Oh, and Thousands of Bolts is a great source for 108-inch wide fabrics if you want something simple for backing – with no piecing. I found a great wide-width flannel that I’ll use for backing the flannel heart wedding quilt for Jenny. Easy peasy!

So year to date here’s my stash accountability report:

• Added YTD: 68-3/4 yards
• Stash used YTD: 71-1/4 yards
• Net stash reduction: 2-1/2 yards

It’s hard to imagine I’ve added more than 68 yards of fabrics to my stash in less than two months. (Can hardly wait to get my AMEX bill!)

I succumbed to another fat quarter bundle over the past couple weeks: Civil War Reunion by Barbara Brackman (about 10 yards).

Plus I bought 5 yards of one of the Bliss fabrics to use as backing for whatever quilt I make using the Bliss fat quarter bundle I bought in early February.

I learned about another great source for finding specific fabrics you might need to finish a quilt: QuiltShops.com.

While at Winterfest Carrie Nelson (Miss Rosie’s Quilt Co.) saw me using my iPad. She came over and chatted about how much she loves her iPad and recommended this website. It is basically a search engine that searches more than 200 quilt shops for what you are looking for.

So when I was looking for some additional fabrics from Basic Grey’s Blush collection that was released more than a year ago, it was easy to find many quilt shops that still had some Blush fabric in their inventory.

What’s more, it’s easy to price compare and find the shops that have it on sale. You do have to be careful if buying multiple fabrics. You’ll want to get them from the same shop if possible to save on shipping charges – otherwise you’ve defeated the purpose of shopping online. But when you are looking for something very specific, QuiltShops.com is a great option.

I also checked out a new website called FindMyFabric.com. It promises to find a fabric based on an uploaded photo of the fabric. I tried three different fabrics -- two of which were older lines and one is in stores now. I also used fabric swatches from the manufacturer for two and a photograph for one. Unfortunately it couldn't find any of the three fabrics. In their defense, the website does say that it is still a "beta" version, meaning that it's being tested and isn't fully ready for prime time.  However, after my three searches, my computer did a memory dump, crashed and it took more than an hour of monkeying around to get it to fully boot correctly and run my typical applications. I don't know if that was tied to trying out the FineMyFabric search capability, or not, but I won't be trying it again any time soon.

On the to-do list for tonight:
• Set the blocks into the quilt top for Route 44
• Begin cutting and sewing two-patches for the Route 44 border
• Continue stitching A Sheltering Tree while watching either American Idol or Survivor (true confession: I do like reality shows.)

Bye for now.