I’ve Got to Stop Going to Destash Sales

This time it was one at the Ashburton library. Along with some nice pieces of fabric and a thimble-cutter-pusher doovy, I bought a mystery bag of fabric. Well, it wasn’t that big of a mystery because you could rifle through them to see what each contained, but I found a piece of quilting cotton with a cat print in the first one so I grabbed that and didn’t bother looking at the rest.

Turns out most of what was inside were canvas/duck cloth rectangles. I’ve only ever used this fabric to make carry bags for paintings, so the challenge to make something useful was quite stimulating for the brain.

I gave half to the friend who took me to the sale, who was going to make them into keyring loops to sell. Once home I washed everything then trimmed all the fraying threads, and boy did they fray even through I’d washed them in lingerie bags. Some of the rectangles had a mostly green leafy pattern that went well with the green dotty one. I had been thinking about making a harvest apron/bag, so I did a search for tutorials and then didn’t follow them. The bag came out well despite this.

The blue dotty fabric goes well with the alpaca one, but I haven’t yet decided what to make with that.

There’s enough of the black fabric with blue and pink flowers that if I patchwork it together it could be the front of a half and half skirt. I only recently culled one of those skirts from my wardrobe because I was tired of the front fabric, and I figured I could replace it with something new. So that’s one for the to-sew list.

I also intend to make some little three-sided pyramid pattern weights and maybe a sunhat from the red flowering gum fabric.

In unrelated news, I also did some refashioning.

And covered a hole I got in my only good black long-sleeve top when I took off a jacket and hadn’t realised the brooch I’d pinned on it had gone through two layers.

All this done over two rare free days. They felt like a luxury after months of working in the garden and chasing tradies. There’s just some wall painting to be done and then we can hibernate through summer. I’m already thinking about big projects to do during the last two weeks of December. Hopefully it won’t lead to anything as crazy as the Summer of Quilts!