Saturday Shopping

I avoid like the plague all the challenges to "bust my stash." Maybe it's the genetic remnants of my parents' Depression child thinking, but I love my stash. I love its size, its pretty colors, and its potential. I love to add to it. I'm unabashed in this regard.

On Saturday, I met up with Candy Tucker, a fellow Pickle who drove down from Syracuse to meet her fellow Candy (aka Wizard) and me. We did a mini-shop hop of the three stores in Endicott, Johnson City, and Vestal, NY, and got great fabric. Candy T. scooped up wonderful brights; I scored some more fabrics for my Coral Pink Wip, some mulberry & related brights for a quilt so abstract right now that I've not even decided what I want to do, just some color families I know I might want to do it in, and some watercolor fabrics. I also got a long length -- on sale, of course -- of a fabric I already own. It's a bright green leafy print on black background and was part of a collection put out by Possibilities for Avlyn called "On My Porch." I had scored two fat quarter bundles of the collection (also on sale) at the same store months ago. In fact, that was the second store we went to, but at the first store, I spotted a black-background floral in another room that made me think of the On My Porch fabrics at home. (When I got up close, it was clear they wouldn't have liked each other if they'd met. The Porch fabrics are all Peter Max colors on a black background, and this floral was more Grammy's pajamas on a black background.)

Well, this got me thinking -- always dangerous -- and so I have decided to participate in Judy Laquidara's Star BOM from blog, Patchwork Times. Using the Porch fabric. Here's the irony. . . I pulled all the other fabrics (and this is NOT a scrappy quilt, so she had some real yardage requirements) from my stash. All of them! I was just about to buy some more of the largest of the Porch fabrics (a real dazzler -- it's brilliant yellow & pink hydrangeas on black) on eBay when I realized that I didn't need to because I could just use existing batiks. Amazing.

I might even end up having inadvertently busted a teensy bit off my stash with this decision. But that's only if I offset fabric recent use vs. Saturday's haul. If you include the fabric I bought in the last few weeks, I'm over the top. And I love it!