I tend to pick up about the middle of the year - like I do in late morning - when I have reached some kind of accommodation with ongoing reality and I'm busy enough to keep myself occupied. January is too empty for my taste.
But there are some good things about January - the sales! Not for myself so much, but my husband took the opportunity to buy some new work shirts and cull the rest; and I have snaffled the throwouts for a quilt. I've been meaning to do a shirt quilt for ages but the thought of trawling through second hand shops seems far too much like hard work (and I always walk out of those places with far more than I want or need. Remember kids, we are here to drop off, not pick up.) So I am just going to use these shirts, which isn't a very wide fabric selection, but this is about the materials, not the aesthetic merits of the end result.
I had a very happy hour slicing them apart. Once you get over the initial shock it's quite fun chopping off the sleeves, separating off the fronts, chucking away the collars and cuffs. I have both my mother and my grandmother in my ears telling me to snip off the buttons and save them ... but I ignored them. I have a bag full of thousands of buttons that I have carefully saved over the years and never used. So this is a nice pile of pieces of soft, worn cotton, that smell ever so slightly like my husband (which is a good thing, he smells very nice. Another reason I have avoided the secondhand shop shirts). I might even use the inkstained bits.
I made a strip quilt years ago with many pairs of jeans for the top. Most were my husbands jeans that he had worn to work. He worked in a factory that printed stuff and there were many jeans that had ink stains on them. I used them and they added character - hubby could even tell you what job he was running at the time he got some of the stains! Right now that top, being indestructible denim, is waiting to be quilted again with a new backing as the old one disintegrated into shreds.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised. People here don't like January, but then it tends to be the coldest month of the year, and the sun doesn't rise till 8 and sets again about 4. But you've got summer!
ReplyDeleteGreat picture of your lemon tree, by the way. (Lemon tree? I've never even seen a lemon tree, though I did once grow a wee plant from a pip, in a pot in the kitchen. It grew to, ooh, about three inches and then died.
I've always had a soft spot for shirting quilts....something elegant yet homey about them.
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