Old Treasures - what to do with them?
 

Hey Y'all,
A friend of my family just gave me a large box full of her deceased aunt's quilting blocks/fabric, etc. It's mostly old 1930s fabrics & blocks. (Not my style.) On the bottom I found a bunch of blocks with newspaper templates still attached to them. I finally found date on one of the newspapers - 1935. Wow! So here's my dilemma... I don't want or need this old fabric & blocks. I have some old blocks from the same era that my grandma made - so keep them for the sentimental value and direct family tie. And I have a LOT of fabric & projects of my own going on. I"m trying to thin out my stash! hahaha! I was going to give it to the Goodwill and hope someone would find a use for it. But when I found the old newspaper templates & realized how old they were - I thought maybe there would be a place than would treat it like the antique treasure it is. Any ideas of a place that would want these blocks? All ideas and thoughts are welcome and appreciated.
Thank you,
Donna Mc

You could contact your local quilt guild.

What about contacting you local Historical Society. We have displays of crafts from past era's at our Historical Society.

There are tons of people who would love vintage 30's fabric. (I'm one of them.) In fact, I concur with ptquilts about emailing a quilt guild.

Historical societies usually have many more donations than they can display (and the only people interested in old quilt fabric is quilters).

Don't give it to a thrift shop. I'm basing this on the fact that I never see any quilt fabric in a thrift shop. I believe it gets bundled in with the unsellable clothes, at least here in DFW. One person who posted here previously was in the Seattle(?) area and found lots of quilting fabric in thrift stores. Obviously, all areas are not the same.

bkay

You could always sell them on ebay. The newspaper templates batch will be an interesting auction to watch. Don't give them to goodwill! Perhaps trade it for something you do want at your local guild table? Or even in the quilting board Members Only Thrift shop?

Bkay, if you have a goodwill clearance store in your area, try for fabric there. They sell clothes (and fabric) by the pound. At the one here in Corpus, 50+ pounds are $1/pound. Less than 50 pounds and it costs $1.49/pound. Today I found 8 pounds of patriotic-themed cotton fabric and a sleeping bag :-). I also ask for fabric at the regular goodwill because the folks who price it generally let it sit in the back until there is enough of it to price at once. As you say, every area is different. I was surprised to see the amount of fabric available in this town at the Goodwill clearance store as compared to the one I came from.

I was shocked at our local Goodwill store. I needed to drop off a donation, and since I hadn't been in the store since covid started, I decided to run in to see if there was any quilting fabric. My shock was the Goodwill Store did not have one single donated item in it. It was basically now set up like a dollar store. All and I mean all of the items in this Goodwill Store were new. They were the kind of items you would find at a dollar store, new clothes, under clothes, towels, sheets, pillowcases, vases, fake flowers, gloves you name it they had it (hugh store). I couldn't beleive it. It looks like they had bought old lots from other stores. All in their orginial packaging. The entire store!

I make my donations to Savers, another thrift store, I only didn't this time because it didn't open until later in the day and I was out early running errands - Goodwill opened earlier than Savers. Savers is definitely a thrift store, everything is donated and sold through their network of stores. I am going to save my donations for Savers from now on - I have no idea what this Goodwill does with all the donated items. They difinitely don't put any used/donated items on the shelves there.

I think the reason you don't see much good fabric at thrift stores is that it gets bought up quick! I know I got a great deal once on jelly rolls, fat quarters, and other precuts. I keep looking for more, no luck though!

I brought 3 "old" projects to my quilt guild. There were from my mom, who got them from my grandma, maybe her great grandma, and maybe a great aunt. Nobody knew for sure. Anyway, they were hand pieced, still had the cardboard templates with them cut from old cereal boxes. I had kept them for quite a while. Finally figured out that I would never do them and did not have anyone who would want them even if a managed to get them done. Seemed like not a good idea to just toss them. So off they went. I had no problems at the quilt guild. There was someone who wanted each one.

Contact quilt museums...contact quilt collectors...please try to give it to someone who will make the effort to document with photos and written historical accounts of who the makers were and include the newspapers for date references. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would send you the postage to have it sent to them - me included. Just PM me if you don't find a home for these antique treasures of the quilting world.

Osewfast -- what did you end up doing with your treasures?