Recycling Remnants

There are a lot of small and large pieces of fabric sitting around in Canadian and U.S. houses. Not just the fabric that is in dresses and sheets and upholstery, but loose pieces. Some eyelet that someone bought once to make a baby bonnet but never got around to actually making and now the baby for whom it was intended is graduating from college; some remnants from a beach cover-up that was made of fabric too cute to throw away, and even though the cover-up was eventually cast off, the remnants remain in a drawer. A fancy fabric piece from a South Pacific vacation. That kind of thing. If you are a quilter, people eventually give you this fabric. And if you are a quilter, you accept it because it’s absolutely possible that someday you will need it, even if that day is far in the future.

If you are a quilter known to use unusual bits and pieces of fabric in a quilt (as I am), then even other quilters give you fabric. It is the fabric that they can’t imagine ever using themselves, so it tends toward the unusual and the exotic and the not-cotton or not dress-weight anyway. And you accept it because you are doing them a favor taking it off of their hands and it is always possible that some day…etc.

In just that way, I have acquired left-over stretch bathing suit fabric, fiber-glass screen, indigo blue landscaping/shade cloth, many and varied pieces of silk and satin and lace and velvet and velveteen, and an entire large paper sack full of excess prom dress or fairy costume materials (not obvious which). Costumers for theatre companies send me small boxes of fancy costume stuff. There is no end to it and I have many boxes of it in my workshop, nicely labeled as ‘Exotics’ or ‘SILK/SATIN’ or ‘Miscellaneous.’

One of the largest caches of such fabric comes from interior decorators or friends of interior decorators. Apparently, the decorator fabric companies put out new lines regularly and send sample books to two or three million interior decorator stores or free-lancers. Then, when their next line comes out, they send out another two or three million, and the previous sample books get given to me. Sometimes, especially if they are elaborate prints, the samples can be quite large and in that case, they can be quite useful. Mostly, however, they are small, emphasizing texture more than design, and then a sample book may be around 6”x10”, and not so useful. A sample book can contain 20-30 different pieces or, more likely, slight variants of the same piece. Each sample has a heavy and permanently-glued paper label that covers about one-fifth of its surface, further rendering this fabric not so useful.

Nevertheless, I and many of my quilter friends have entire boxes of these things. Beautiful fabric, beautifully designed. Must be useful for something.

Today, I spent about five minutes looking at them, trying to figure out some better, higher use. I had actually been using them to make disposable booklets for an Art Walk in which we are participating in Point Roberts next week. In my five minutes of thinking, however, I figured that if I doubled the samples, used rag bond for the inside paper, and ribbons to protect the central paper seam, I would have a very classy little blank book. Which would take me about ten minutes to make.

So now I’ve found a super use for all these small fabric samples. If only I had a super use for large numbers of very classy little fabric covered books with high-quality, blank paper pages.