I’m looking at an inventory of some of the dress fabric I have in stash. I went through it my stash last year and cut swatches and made 3×5 cards to show me what I had.
I want to save it all. I want to make something special. I want to not make mistakes when I use it. Yet, at least half of what I’m looking at came from the thrift shop in the first place, or going out of business sales, or end of bolt cuts that were on sale for 75% off. If I don’t use it up, all of this fabric will go back into the thrift shop stream, if not into a dumpster.
Don’t laugh. I have worked in Thrift Shop intake, and I see what comes in, and I have a pretty good understanding of what sells, and what doesn’t. We cleaned out one house, years ago, and filled a 15 cubic yard dumpster with a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff that had no resale value.
Some of this fabric is fine silk, acquired in the days when we still wore business suits to work, and silk blouses were a treat. I don’t dress like that anymore, and I doubt I ever will. Some of this fabric is glittery evening wear, acquired 20 years ago when my life included fancy evening dates to shows and concerts every week. That’s not my life today, and I don’t expect to return to that life again.
I suppose I could donate the evening fabric back to the thrift shop, but maybe I could make it into something that I could wear on a regular basis.
Thinking about this fabric is sort of like looking at Grandma’s china, and deciding to use it more often. So what if it breaks? You’re not using it anyway, so it’s not like you lost something you are going to notice when it’s gone.
So what if I make something that’s not perfect? I have sewn up two lengths of the louder knit yardages into everyday tights that don’t fit too well. So I learned that the particular pattern I was using isn’t one I ever need to use again. That’s valuable. (Upper left corner; orange fabric with pink daisies.)
There’s one length that will make pretty good his and her Hawaiian shirts (bright print at the bottom; I have four or five yards). I hesitate, because I have two Hawaiian shirts in process, and they’re both stuck at the buttonholes. My collection of thrift shop sewing machines doesn’t make buttonholes. Why put more effort into shirts that will stop at the buttonhole stage again? (I may have solved the buttonhole problem this past weekend; we splurged and bought a NIB Singer that does one-step buttonholes. Hurray! Need to test…)
One complicating factor is that I am in the middle of a weight change, and the clothing that I make at the lower end of the weight change is more demanding of fit than clothing I make at the higher end. I am afraid to commit my fluorescent denim into jeans that may be baggy in another 3 months.
I’m practicing “use it up” thinking. The river flows. There is always fabric. If I ruin the natural fibers, the project can go in the compost heap and in a year or three from now it will be back to dirt. I dumped a load of cotton scraps two years ago and they’re gone now.
