This is what happened - the guild sent a notice around that a lady from South Carolina had closed her fabric store and is spending the summer on PEI and she happened to bring her left overs with her. To be sold at 2$/yard.
Weeeeell! So off I drove, 50 km west of PEI's capital, through fairly rural areas (well, never mind, this whole province is rural, urban doesn't really exist. In fact, there's a big farm smack in the middle of the capital Charlottetown).
The choices weren't what I had dreamed off after reading Hawaiian prints and Japanese "cute" prints.
It was more stuff like this:
But heck, for 2$/yard, I bought anything I remotely liked and then some - most of these fabrics will hopefully go into charity projects, e.g. for the children's hospital. There were a lot of "scrubs" type prints, with dogs and cats wearing nurses' uniforms and blurting out courageous messages.
Not my usual taste of prints (the cartoon animals), but since I'm not likely to cut into my designer fabrics for charity quilt (my charity stops there!), these will be ideal - also for the backings of those quilts!
Oh, and the striking red Hawaiian print - I read Hoffman on the label and thought "Heck, that's good quality, it won't bleed, I'm not going to wash all these fabrics by hand in scalding water", so I chucked it in with the others - the water started to turn red immediately.
So after a quick rescue and hoping that dilution is the solution to pollution in my washing machine, I ended up hand-washing the red anyway and then just chucking it in before the spin cycle after most of the red had run out in the bath tub. Sigh, disaster averted, and I'll think twice about the fabrics I'll match this one with!
.JPG)
3 comments:
Ahhh, 21 yards of fabric and nice fabric to boot! How satisfying. Can't wait to see what you do with it.
My experience with reds is that the water in your house has much to do with whether red runs or not. We made a friendship quilt in our guild, exchanging blocks. When the quilts were finished, all of us, washed them. Only one ran, and that was from a particular part of town that has a unique type of mineral in the water, unfortunately can't remember what that was. I would test all reds before using them as you fortunately did.
Hi Karen, don't know if you check back here, but I can't reply to your comment, you don't have a profile, so...:
That's really interesting, never heard that before. But of course, PEI is known for it's red soil because of the iron, and i"m actually having a problem with rusty water when I turn it on first - very old pipes in my apartment!
From your discription of the fabrics this lady sold, I believe she was not selling top of the line quality, even the big name fabric companies make mistakes and sell those mistakes at greatly reduced prices. That being said, I'm a HUGE believer of testing all fabrics before use to make sure they don't run...been burned once or twice when I've skipped this :0)
I'm glad you caught this in time!!
Crispy
Post a Comment