Waste Not: Fabric

Quilting, a popular pastime among American woman and men, has come a long way from its humble roots. Quilters today visit fabric stores where they have a myriad of patterns and colors to choose from. If not for quilters’ insatiable desire to accumulate fabric, the fabric stores of American would surely die out for lack of custom.

In America’s early days, women quilted by necessity, using partially worn-out clothing as their material. They salvaged the unworn parts of various garments, cut them into carefully planned pieces, and sewed them together. Their piecework had a softness of color and texture that comes to fabric only when it has been washed and worn repeatedly. Spreading a quilt on a bed, one could point out bits of the shirt Billy wore in first grade, or fragments of Betty’s eighth-grade graduation dress. Family history was written in fabric for those whose memories it jogged.

Quilting originally was an act of frugality. “Waste nothing” was the credo. Being a child of the late Depression, I learned frugality at my grandmother’s knee, watching her sew my tattered storybooks back together. I learned frugality from Aunt Vena, who constructed a warm comforter from Uncle Ben’s old pants. Frugality is deeply ingrained in my psyche.

Although most of Dennis’s and my clothing isn’t appropriate for the quilting projects I undertake, I have enough of the Depression mentality that I almost never purchase new fabric for my projects. Instead, I go to a thrift shop, looking for garments made of fabric that suits my needs.

When I was planning a wall hanging inspired by a sidewalk in Delft I found at Goodwill a large, ugly pair of women’s shorts made of a tightly-woven grey cotton. I paid $2.00 for the privilege of cutting those shorts into four pieces, applying acrylic paints, and cutting them into appropriate sizes – two squares and five rectangles. After sewing them together, I used a lot of black thread to create the illusions of cracks in the “stone.” Finally, I flung some splatters of white paint, just as the Delft sidewalk had been splattered. I backed the piece with unbleached muslin and bound the edges with strips of black cut from an old pair of pants.

Somehow, this frugal approach satisfied me more than new fabrics would have. For better or worse, I’ve passed this “waste not” mentality to my daughter Carol. Last week told me that she had sewn an Advent calendar using fabric scraps. She said she found it especially satisfying because she didn’t have to buy anything new to make it.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer