getting a handle on my stash

I woke up this morning at 4am because a little person crawled in bed with me. This isn't something new, he has been doing this almost every day this week and at least weekly for a while. He has bad dreams, gets cold, or just wants to make sure I'm still alive. It is really hard to sleep with a not so small child (he will be 5 next Sunday) trying to sleep on your head, so today I started thinking about my stash. I'm not exactly sure why I was thinking about my stash, maybe it was because I have been cutting into it a lot lately, making quilt kits for a friend's mom who is sewing them together like crazy. But I thought a lot this morning in the wee hours about how I have so much, but don't really have a handle on what I have.

I really want to figure out what I have and make my stash work for me. I figure I must have 10,000 yards of fabric. That is not an exageration. 99% of what I have was given to me, so don't think I spent the farm on fabric, or that my kids aren't eating because I'm spending every weekend at JoAnn's (although I do like to use up my coupons). I get a lot of phone calls from people wanting to give me their fabric and I cannot say no to fabric or yarn.

My friend just graduated from college. I was her freshman science teacher so I am a little bit older than she is. Just a little bit. Her mom likes to sew and her mom has an industrial sewing machine that stitches like 50,000 stitches a minute, so when she puts together the quick stripie quilts, she can do one in a matter of minutes. Really!

I gave her about 15 of them last week and they are already done. So, I am trying to cut fabric as fast as I can to keep up with her. I am so happy to have a helper turn all of this fabric into quilt tops that I can work on this summer. But the problem is, the fabric that is in the house doesn't match. This morning I decided to just start cutting the fabric that was in the house and then start bringing in fabric from the garage and see what I had that would match the fabric that I had cut. At 4am that seemed like a good idea. At 2pm that idea didn't seem to be working so well.

I have been cutting for about an hour and now I am worried that I will have lots of cut fabric and nothing will go together. I think what I had better do is start bringing in fabric from the garage and matching it before cutting. I also think I need to recruit other cutting helpers. I can cut for about an hour and get about 5 or 6 quilt kits made up and then my back gets tired. So, I think I will do some fabric matching and take it to church tomorrow and see if I can get some other people to take it home and cut it and bring it back to my friend to take to her mom. The more people involved in this whole process, the better for everyone involved.

Now, if I can talk my friend Carla into helping me out by quilting some of these quilts for me, I think I might be able to work through this 10,000 yards before I grow old and die. (hi Carla, did I tell you how pretty you look today?)