I've only been quilting seriously for about 5 years, and I have been working for about a year and a half to keep my amount used numbers greater than my amount added. It is getting harder to do. It seems about every other time I go to make a quilt, I'm missing yardage that I need for that quilt. I work hard at using up my scraps, but then I'm missing certain scrap colors. Right now I'm short on pink, yellow and orange, so I've added a few fat quarters in those colors.
I have almost decided that if I break even this year in my yardage in/out counts, maybe I have the correct amount of fabric in my stash. I'm not sure yet.
Maybe instead of thinking of using up yardage, I need to thing of a concept my husband told me about. He is an accountant, and I am not, so I may be explaining this wrong, but here goes: LIFO (last in, first out) or FIFO (first in, first out). I think my goal should be FIFO, trying to use up my old fabric first, before it goes out of style and before I get tired of it.
Next year maybe one of my quilting goals should be to make an old fat quarter quilt, where I pull out some of my oldest and oddest fabrics and see what I can do with them. These are just ideas now, but I hope to have a more concrete plan before 2014.
In other news, I mastered fried green tomatoes this week.
I had them for the first time last Friday night. The restaurant served them with goat cheese, and they were outstanding. Unfortunately, they were an appetizer that we got for the whole table, so I just got one. This week I saw green tomatoes in the grocery store and thought, 'How hard can it be?' They are pretty darn easy and pretty darn good, and I don't even really like tomatoes. But with any vegetable, if you bread it and fry it, it turns into something yummy. I don't think it counts as a vegetable that way, though.
I heard on NPR (so it must be true) that if you don't try a food before you are 35 years old, you are unlikely to ever try it, so get out there and try things while you are young. Or if you are old like me, prove the experts wrong and try something new.
2 comments:
Fried green tomatoes are AWESOME :D I miss those - they don't have them in restaurants out here in Colorado. heh! Stash - - - oh, boy, does mine need reducing. I'm working on that - it's slow, but it's satisfying to see the excesses of fabric diminish. :)
As far as critical mass, I don't feel any need to limit or reduce my stash. That happens by itself. And I hate designing something new and finding that I don't have what I need to do it.
Oddly, how you store fabric really makes a difference. When I kept mine in plastic totes and couldn't easily find things, I thought I had a huge stash. When I folded the fabric onto comic book-acid free cardboard protectors like mini-bolts and put them onto bookshelves, it was easier to see what was missing color-wise and that I wasn't actually at critical mass yet. I'm closer now.
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