Now - I have a lot of fabric and quilting supplies - A LOT!!!! When the fire was headed our way last year (the sockeye fire) I took pictures of my fabric/sewing/laundry room and my hubby said "Take pictures of the important stuff like the appliances and tv's and the couches!" and I replied to him "the insurance company will believe that I have all that stuff - they will never believe that I have this much fabric!" Here is a small sample of my stash - before I cleaned it up the other day!
Design wall and sewing tables - design wall is made with a piece of batting tacked to the wall - cotton works best and the blocks just stick to it without having to pin them - its great!
One wall-o-fabric - see what I mean about them not believing that I have that much?
Fabric, books and project boxes.
Under the sewing tables, more supplies for quilting including project boxes.
So when we heard that the lady whose estate we were going to was a "fabric hoarder" we thought - really how much worse than us could she be? So we only took one car - there were 5 of us but it's an Expedition and has lots of room in the back - right? And off we went on a fabric adventure!
We pulled up to the house and its a rather large split level with a basement apartment underneath - we went to the basement apartment. Spooky.....Nope!
We walk in and this basement apartment is at least 1200 square feet of fabric wonderland!
This short video is just a small sample of the wonderland that we encountered here. Luckily my cousin works with one of this lady's daughters and we were able to get the Pre-sale preview and be first in the room. I cant believe that her daughters dont quilt - she was a fabric hoarder but she was a fabric hoarder of great taste! It was fun to see the girls smile at our ohhs and ahhs over the cabric and at one point one of them was on the phone and said "I gotta house full of crazy quilters you should see this"! I was able to smile some too.
She was so well organized. She had all her projects in plastic "snap tite" boxes like the ones from Joann Fabrics. In each box was a pattern and all of the fabric to complete the project, most of the time including the backing! She also had some of the Rubbermaid tubs full of fabric and all had labels like "green batik, or blue batik" I got one tub of each! There were yards and yards of fabric in them. Good stuff. We each started making a "pile" of our choices from the stacks of stuff.
Above you can see the Expedition filled to the brim with some of the purchases made at the sale and you can see some of the boxes and tubs that she had! The Expedition ended up only holding my cousin and the two aunts stuff!
Above is Cousin Patricia wedging into the back of the Expedition. She had stuff on her lap for the ride home and she had stuff next to her head that she had to hold in place or it would have knocked her out!
So Cousin and I had to call in the big guns - Bob - my cousins husband came to the rescue in his truck with a cap on the back to pick us and our haul up from the sale. He laughed when he realized that only my hoard would fit in the back of the truck - luckily it was an extended cab so cousins stuff could fit in the back seat of the truck!
As we were leaving one of the aunties said "well that cleaned out a little bit of the stash" and one of the daughters said "yes - now we can go out to the Connex and get some of the other stuff to bring into the house"! All organized the same way! I could not compete with this woman as far as a fabric stash goes - I have a long way to go!
It was a really fun outing and I got some great things that I will be featuring on here soon - including some ideas for some new quilt designs - stay tuned for that.
