quilttiludrop

Atta, girl on all the lovely quilts! Also, it's great to keep a record of all the quilts you have made and donated!

pocoellie

Welcome, so glad you joined us. Thanks for doing so much for great charities. I don't know if you've got the biggest stash though. I've got 7 of the pattern cabinets from House of Fabrics, when they went out of business, all full of fabrics, folded, sorted by background color, and 24 large totes (65 qt.) full of fabrics, plus 5 totes(65 qt) full of scraps, plus 3 of the big black garbage bags full of scraps. This winter, I'm going to try to get through my scraps and get them all cut into squares and strips and organized.

beautress

Thanks, quiltiludrop. I have a large nearly full picture book of many of my quilts rather than a journal. My DH is getting on in years and doesn't take pictures any more. I just can't. So, I just take the quilts down to the guild for the local battered people shelter. I designed quilts, wrote teaching manuals to go with them, taught locally at my shop in Wyoming for 23 years, then retired after contracting fibromyalgia. I can still do tops and the quilting on infant-sized quilts. I miss my longarm that we left in beautiful Wyoming. But I love and seriously needed the r&r that retirement is on account of my muscle anathema.

beautress

You have almost as much as me. When I wrote this back on page 1: "/anteing up 40 large plastic storage containers of 1 yard pieces or greater, 14 medium-sized storage containers of 30s, 30 large containers of paint pot colors separated as to light and dark with extra containers of reds, blues, oranges, yellows, purples, greens, and light neutrals...a 100-yard reel of sturdy muslin, and 12 library wood drawers full of fabrics for the upstairs sewing room, visited only when I need an extra cutting area when the dining room storage cupboard and huge table get covered with itsy bitsy pieces, the quarter yard stash, and too many finished quilt tops...

I forgot about the room full of bins to the ceiling on the 3rd story of our quilt business' building--no less than 60 bins in that room.

I don't have room for them here. We need to put a tall metal building on a slab in one of the unused horse pastures on our new farm. We really need to get after that and get it done by next summer when we can go back with a trailer hitch and bring the rest of the fabrics and my longarm back here. Also, I forgot about all the boxes left unpacked in the converted garage here. The trouble with those plastic bins is that it's hard to get stickers to stay on them, and if you drape quilt material or a sample quilt square as to color or UFO in the bin, it can get damaged. I had to do all the samples in the store, and the leftover scraps piled up. I saved them all because I knew someday I'd retire and need them for continuing the work. I'm a believer and that to whom much is given, much must be given back. The fibromyalgia put a screeching halt to all my plans for years, then I discovered a product called Vital Factors that helps ease the pain but doesn't incapacitate the mind from getting things done timely. Even so, the cold weather sent us south, and we moved last year to beautiful Texas.

I think they should redesign all the bins to have clearview plastic and paper covers for marking what's in the container in very large letters so even the most nearsighted person can see them from the floor if they're piled up to the ceiling.

That'd encourage us to get back to the UFO in the 10 gray containers you bought to house leftover fabrics. I collect bird fabrics, animal fabrics, and use fabrics like an artist mixes colors--only we can't do that unless we get into dying. I don't like anything about the dying process except the finished product, and I need all those value shades, and I have to replace all the blues if I get on a kick and complete 10 full-sized blue log cabins, which I can do in a short 3 months.

Do you feel bad if you lose all your favorite colors after binging on blue like me?

pocoellie

I give! It sounds like you've beat me with your stash. LOL

I have a couple of friends with fibromyalgia, I would like to tell them about the Vital Factors and that it has helped you, maybe it would do the same for them. Where can they find it?

thequiltmama

Welcome from Michigan

beautress

http://www.vitalfactors.com

They will probably be convinced it's just another blind alley, so they should scroll down where it may still offer a week's supply for the price of shipping and handling, or call the 800 number listed there and call in and ask if the offer is still good. I have a hunch it will be. I started taking Vital Factors on a Monday, and by that Wednesday, I was able to put the Neurontin my doctor had prescribed for excruciating pain on the shelf never to take it again. That was about 6 or 7 years ago. You take it 5 days and skip 2. All it is is natural vitamins and minerals and plant extracts from around the world that some doctors and biochemists collaborated upon and are still improving to this day. After I post this, I will try the website again. I haven't had to call them except when I moved from Wyoming to the farm in rural Walker County where I live now. I still take it faithfully. It still stops most of the pain (about 90%). Bless your friends with this disease. I will put the friends of you on my prayer list for alleviation of their pain and send you a pm with this message in case you miss it.*

Edit: * The vital Factors website is still good after all these years. No wonder. Their product really, really works for many people.

Doggone it! I have to go get another plastic tub: Our hobby is driving around taking in another Texas quilt store every couple of weeks. We found one in Stafford Texas called the Quilt Emporium, and they had: complete new Wildflowers IV from Sentimental Studios by Moda. I fell in love with the allover forget-me-nots in dark blue and light blue and decided they'd make a great background for a postage stamp map I'm designing of the state of my birth here, so I got yards and yards of both blues. I've been doing some serious nonstop sewing for the last 2 or 3 days between postings here. It's going to take all that fabric just to go around Texas, and I calculate she will be a queen or king sized quilt when I get her done. I'd already done my homework of getting a map, doing some math calculations to dumb down inches to 10-to-the-inch engineering paper, but the map took every square from one side of the paper to the other, so I decided I had to have squares 1.25 inches and had to replot the whole thing as 4 squares on the paper to be one square. So it will be a little boxy, but that doesn't matter. I love the quilt, and my math formula helped because Texas is 83 or 85 itsy bitsy squares high and about 87 or 89 wide. I had a couple of places where I had to add a row to get some visual details in at the Red River area of the state, and I will also have to exaggerate a little on the Sabine River between Louisiana and the Lone Star State of me birth, so that means adding an additional row of width to get a visual product I can live with as to counted work. That means I will also have to add a row somewhere in length, most likely an east west row within the Llano basin region between the city of Llano and Corpus Christi, except going perpendicular to the Llano basin, which if I remember from my 7th grade geography class was shaped something like a huge swan's neck with the head up north and the base of the neck way south. The other thing I remember was it had the characteristic of having blackland farms and was thought to be the richest farmland in the world at one time. I always thought, wouldn't it be neat to farm and never have to fertilize with that kind of soil. (Youngsters have notions that probably aren't very accurate).

Anyhow, I completed the Amarillo panhandle area this morning, and it will take 2 or 3 days to get the El Paso and Big Bend area joined.

With all due respect, I blacked out parts of New Mexico and Oklahoma around the panhandle with the pretty blue Forget-me-not light and blue fabrics, which was the nicest way I could handle the delicate issues of how to deal with Texas' bordering sister states and still stay friends.

:mrgreen:

I apologize in advance when I add the south of Arkansas and the western area of Louisiana with the same precious fabrics. Oh, and probably the greater part of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the south and southeastern coasts of the Friendship State.... Let's see if I can get a picture over here from the good people at Moda Fabrics:

beautress

Thanks thequiltmama from Michigan!

pocoellie

Thanks for the site, beautress, I'll let my friends know about it.

amma

Hello and Welcome to the board :D:D:D
Love you quilts!!