My stash has been growing and it was time to start sewing from the stash instead of helping the economy by buying new fabric. I love supporting the economy but I’m running out of storage room.
So I went rumaging around in my stash until I saw some fabric that I had found at the thrift store and previously used part of as a backing for another quilt.There was about 3/4 or so of yard left and it cried “do something with me”! I forgot to take a picture of it before I cut it but here is a picture afterwards.
I followed the link on the selvedge of the fabric. It redirected me to a site that let me know that the domain was for sale for $1,795. So I went to the archive.com and found that the website had been active between 2011 and 2014. I did find a link on the northcott website to the designers but no mention of the collection. So the fabric is about 10 years old – I would have guessed it was older.
Enough dilly dallying. I went to pull fabrics that worked with the print and initially found the following in my stash.
Close but not quite right. I kept searching and ended up with this after a few more failed auditions.
Better! Now I had my material I was able to start designing. I worked out that I had anough of the focus fabric to cut 35 5.5″ blocks. So I started with that.With their size being 5″ after sewing I decided to cut strips of the cordinating fabrics 2″ wide to frame the focus blocks – leaving me with an 8″ finished block.
Then came even more fun! I only had enough of the coral/pink fabric to frame 9 bocks. I knew I’d have plenty of the brown, green and blue fabrics but I needed to come up with a design that would work with only 9 blocks in pink. Ah, the fun of making what you have work!
Out came my markers and some paper and I drew up two possibilities.
The first one didn’t work but the second one did! Here is a picture:
Now to decide on borders. I think the outside border will be brown but what colour to make the inside border. Time to go check out the stash as I want to be sewing from the stash rather than buying new fabric. Especially because I hit the thrift store today and got quite a few yards of 1st quality quilting fabric for much less than retail. With fabric retailing for around $20 a meter here in Canada I am always happy to find a deal. So much for reducing the stash, LOL.
Very clever design to use up that older fabric. And very pretty too–I love it! Great way to use up your stash. Thanks for sharing on Wednesday Wait Loss.
Wow! Way to make that big print focus fabric SING! Your fabric pull for it is spot on. Way to use up that stash.
Yep “shopping from the stash” I find things I forgot I bought – this is such dramatic fabric and the colors are wonderful! Thanks!
Hi,
I love this quilt. All the pretty colors and they are
each framed. Great job using your stash.
Have a great day!
What a great way to feature that beautiful large-scale print! Sewing from the stash is the best! I need to save this idea for some of my big prints.
Absolutely gorgeous! Such a great way to show off that beautiful print.
This top turned out great! You pulled the right colors and made an interesting layout with them – well done!
Excellent idea and great follow through. It’s hard to sew just from stash — I never seem to have enough go with fabrics. I have pulled out a bit of fabric I had left from a previous quilt. It’s the focus fabric and I’m trying to figure out what to do with it to use it up. This is a great idea. Thanks for sharing your thought process.
Wow! What an eye catching and vibrant top. That bit of focus fabric and the way you framed it was perfect! Well done, using from stash! Making room is good as I’ve been stitching from stash because I’m running out of “storage” space too!
I absolutely love this! What a great way to take that “busy” fabric and make something great. I’m putting this post in favorites to come back to. I would also like to make one similar
This is a very inspiring post, motivating me to ‘dig deep’! Don’t we all have varying lengths of big print fabrics that we’ve stashed because we didn’t know what to do with them because they were too pretty to cut up into little pieces? I’m looking forward to seeing how it turned out with its borders.