Using It Up

I am a selective hoarder, and yes, I do cling to that adjective because I don't hoard anything or everything. I am, as I said, selective about it. Just ask Richard, although he's likely to point to some of my more, err, notorious accumulations, like The National Trust: The English Country Town (it looked historical AND useful at the time), or the 30 large, interestingly-speckled rocks we hauled down island from our summer holiday during my speckled-rock obsession (notorious because we all had to haul them up a long, slippery, sandy bank to the van under a very hot August sun). After that I developed a white rock obsession from which the kids still haven't recovered. Or even the many fabric book samples I found in a dumpster when we lived in California, ohhh, maybe 8 years ago...

It's all good stuff but it does pile up, even though we have moved 4 times in the past few years and I do jettison a lot of the more extraneous stuff. Really, I do. So this week I hauled out a few bags of fabric and attempted, in a fit of industry, to utilize some of it. The four fabric samples in the top photo were turned into 18 napkins. It was a bit assembly-line actually, once I got going. I even used slightly mismatching threads just to use up my thread hoard as well.

Now all I have to do is get these two pieces of material turned into a quilt for FDPG before she turns 18 and leaves home...