While making the purple quilt, there were a stack of postage stamp twosies to sew up, so they were sewn between segments of the purple quilt. As the stack grew, there were about 21 or 22 16-patch postage stamp squares for "a future quilt start." Believe it or not, you use less thread when sewing into something, whether it's a useless half-inch piece of two selvages sewn together that winds up in a pillow someday or actual pieces to the next or a future quilt. Postage stamp twosies are made from sewing 2 strips together, then cutting them at a 90 degree angle to make two postage stamps apiece, then placed into about 20 different sacks, one per each sack. Then when you have a thousand pieces in 20 sacks, you have 20 postage stamp quilts or enough pieces to do sashes, sets, borders, and things that show you worked your fingers to the bone at one time or another doing the heavy-duty job of sewing a bazillion squares. You may not have any replications of fabric if you play your cards right, which results in the rare quilt known as the "charm quilt" which can boast having no two pieces alike. Not important? A textile afficianado who knows how valuable having a cross section of a person's lifetime made into a quilt knows that it is. Lay people would not know this. But the quilt could someday be worth its weight in gold bars. Of course, it might take ten quilts to weigh the same as a gold bar... but I'll leave that to the textile specialists of 100 years from now of any of my quilts that are rescued before destruction and saved because someone had a collector's head for what is and is not valuable. I could be mistaken, but the work of 50 factories around the world between 1930 to 2030 in one quilt could be the apple of a collector's eye in 2230, who was researching the last homemade quilts of olden days.
Well, didn't mean to get into THAT, but anyway, I found a piece of fabric a child might like of big cats and notice the male lion's mane was the color of an old rusty nail, and there was a lot of black in the quilt. So for some reason, my box of rust evaded me, but I did find one solid rust that seemed about right, and certainly right on a galloping horse. Also, found some spotted dark material that could pass as a panther or dark spotted big cat somewhere on the globe. Then, while looking for rusts, I found a bit of something that reminded me of a savannah, and the color of it was right for the quilt, maybe. Unfortunately it only contained a half yard which means it will have to be cut into 5 strips to go around to barely be 3 inches, the quilt better not be too big, plus, no mistakes allowed. Can it be done?
We'll see. Seems the fabric travelled with me, but it also is torn, which my local shop did up until about 6 months ago, when they started cutting due to the shop owner's torn ligament in her wrist. So not sure where the piece is from. And where are all those pesky rusts that used to be always underfoot? They're somewhere, but my fibrofog is not helping find them. Oh, well, you can't have everything.
Two fabrics and the first square that started out as purple thread-saving go-betweens:
