Sorting the Fabrics

Yesterday I made it back to the quilt group at my local church.  Until this fall semester, I had been going every Wednesday.  My teaching schedule this fall made me get there just as the group was finishing, but it did help me feel connected, even if I didn't do much quilting work.  In the upcoming Spring semester, I won't get there at all.

We have just finished a yearly cycle, which means that just before Christmas, all the quilts were boxed and taken to the drop off location where Lutheran World Relief will pick them up.  Instead of leaping right in to making new quilts, we are taking advantage of the empty tables where quilts usually get stacked and we're organizing all the cloth by color.

It's a HUGE task.  For years, when people have donated cloth, we've just put the box on the shelf or added the cloth to the bins that we have.  In the past two years, I've spent a lot of time rummaging through boxes, so I have an idea of what's where, but that's clearly not a good solution for the long term.

We have plenty of bins, so that's a plus.  Most of the cloth is fairly easy to sort by color--most of it does have a single dominant color.  I started a bin labeled "multi" for those that truly do not.

As we sort, I notice how hard it is to throw away fabric.  Some of it is too small for us--but it seems a shame to throw it away, particularly those small squares that were cut for some past project.  It's easier to throw away some of the polyester, particularly the springy knits.  Some of it is heavy duty upholstery fabric, most of which we are keeping for now.  I did throw away a velvet-esque on one side, upholstery fabric on the other side piece, since I just couldn't see how we would use it with anything else we have.

It's also hard to throw away fabric because I know that even if I don't like it, someone else will.  And I feel a sense of the person who owned the fabric there in the room with me.  We often get donated fabric when a quilter has died.  Throwing away the fabric feels like we're not honoring the person, even when I know that's not how most people would perceive it.

We have so much cloth that we could sew for 8 hours a day for the next few years and still have plenty of cloth.  In some ways, it's wonderful--our own cloth shop, right on site.  In some ways, it's overwhelming.

I have a vision of a future generation of quilters, 30 years from now, wondering why on earth we kept what we did.  What fabric now will seem quintessentially 2020's era fabric, the way that some of our fabric is so 1970's?  Will they delight in calico the way that I do or will that be only for women who grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder?  Will people still be quilting and sending those quilts overseas?  How will the world be different in 2054?  What will we have held on to?