There should really be some photos to go with this post, but there just aren't. We will proceed anyway.
Instead of sharing the long, boring story with you, let me just say that I went on a little redecorating/rearranging binge recently. My office/studio and my sewing room have changed places and I'm finally able to get the rest of my sewing stuff out of the basement where it has been residing for the past 2-plus years. The downside of this is that I now have to face ... The Stash.
Before we moved, I did do battle with The Stash - the result was six large black trash bags stuffed full of fabric, along with a handful of other assorted bags and boxes, going off to a friend's mother to be used by her church sewing group. I don't know how many yards of fabric we're talking about, but I do remember losing count of the number of individual cuts of fabric after I hit 115.
In the past couple of years, I have managed to keep new fabric purchases to a minimum. (Patterns are a whole other story.) So I really don't feel too bad about The Stash as a whole. But there is a subcategory of The Stash that I've realized needs to have something done about it. Friends, I'm talking about ... cat fabric.
A ridiculous amount of cat fabric clogs up my sewing room. There is one of those big wire shelving units (60" x 72" x 18") in the closet, and one entire shelf is nothing but kitty fabric. And that's just the neatly folded quilting cottons. Cat fabric has secreted itself on other shelves, hiding among garment or decorator fabrics.
There are a few pieces that I don't love anymore, and that I could get rid of fairly easily. There are other pieces that I could talk myself into purging, but I don't feel good about just hucking them into the Goodwill box with all the other tchotchkes. My ideal solution would have been to pack them up and take them to the thrift store run by our favorite cat shelter. The problem is, they closed that thrift store down as of the end of December, and none of the other animal shelters run a store. I could pack them up and sell them on Craigslist or eBay or Etsy, but I don't really want to.
I know ... it's a ridiculous problem. It's actually more of a ridiculous non-problem. Just pack them up and get them out of the house and quit obsessing about something so dumb.
1 comment:
I don't think it's all that ridiculous, actually... I mean, there's so many things in life that none of us really have any choice about, if you have a preference in regard to something like this, what's the harm in following it?
And I do have a suggestion: Robyn (the lady who runs Love & Hisses) does a post every Friday wherein she answers questions from her readers, either that have been posted in the comments or sent to her in email, and I know she has a HUGE readership with a good share of people who also do fostering or volunteer work at local shelters, etc. So maybe you could send her an email and ask her to post about your fabric stash problem in the next week or two--I'm sure she would be happy to do so, and I bet there's somebody someplace who could make those fabrics benefit shelter kitties in one way or another. (Her address is on the "about me" page--it's linked from underneath the calendar in the right sidebar.)
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