Using the 'good' fabric

 I share a problem with many other quilters in that we buy special fabric that we love, then save it because it's too good to use on just any old project.  Meanwhile it gets older and goes out of style and doesn't match newer fabric or newer pattern trends, plus it gets supplanted by newer special fabric, and eventually you have several baskets and shelves of 'good' fabric and the regular fabric is becoming the minority.  

I am trying to break this cycle, and have already used some of the most recent fabric I bought in Japan and Korea on zip pouches and a totebag.  This week I used a bit more of the Japanese fabric (the retro kittens) when I tried out Erica Arndt's free pattern for a retro train case on Youtube.  This wasn't a difficult sew but took a while, but the end result is quite cute and I am now storing my embroidery panels in it. It's stiffened with foam.

It's a great project for showcasing speical fabric, and before I knew it, I was pulling out lots of 'good' fabric to make a few more. I've cut out another in Korean fabric which I will give my son's girlfriend, then fabric for three more from the 'good' baskets.  So much fun to pair up coordinating fabrics.  Do I need three more train cases? Hard to say, lol.

Last week I blocked, starched and pressed all 12 of the Dresden Fat Cat plates and they are now parked waiting for background fabric.  I tried them against multiple fabric colours from the stash, I liked them best against a raspberry pink but of course I don't have enough of that colour so I need to get to a quilt shop to try to find something similar.

We've had another heat wave, so it's been too hot to go into the attic much. I have loaded the pink doiley quilt onto the longarm but haven't decided how I want to quilt it yet. I would like something that looks vintage but with the ease of an allover pattern rather than trying custom quilting. 

I finally finished the Paducah cotton shawl that I bought the pattern and cotton yarn for on my trip to Paducah Kentucky back in I think 2021.  I liked knitting with the cotton yarn but the shawl is knit from the point upwards, so later rows were really long and it got a bit tedious.  Of course it doesn't look like anything as it hasn't been blocked yet.  I'm hoping I've made it wide enough at the top to drape well, I will stretch it when I block it.

The last few weeks I've been working on the Betterley Silver Thimble 1/48th scale quilt shop kit. I've finished the exterior. The kit includes a picture frame to go on the front, but I thought that made it look less like a realistic shop and more like a shadow box, so I don't think I will use it.

And now I am assembling the Betterley furniture kits for the inside.  1/48th is so small!

The mountain of shredding I mentioned last week has gradually shrunk down from about 12 inches to only 1 inches, I've been doing two minutes (the maximum run time for the shredder) several times a day all week.   The next big job in the attic is the four-drawer file cabinet full of decades of magazine pattern pull-outs over several hobbies that need to be downsized.  I've never found a good solution to organising magazine patterns although I've tried various methods: keeping all the magazines (too hard to search, too much to store); organising the patterns in ring binders (too many patterns to be practical); scanning and digitising (I did this with my recipe collection and never looked at them again and then that cloud provider disappeared); keeping them in plastic folders by yarn weight (my knitting pattern collection, which is a big mess spilling out of folders); creating card indexes (did this for my machine knitting magazines, it sort of worked but was very time-consuming); and the current method where the patterns are stored in hanging folders by sub-category of each hobby (the patterns sag down inside the folders, the folders break and/or fall off the rails, the filing cabinet drawers are hard to open and if you open them too far the whole cabinet wants to tip forwards).  I don't look at my files that often but sometimes I feel like making something, or making a bag, but I don't know what, then I can just sift through a few folders looking at pretty pictures. It's also where I store patterns I've used and might possibly make again (although this rarely happens). But the filing cabinet needs to go and I need something smaller and better.  Any suggestions gratefully received!