The Challenge

Ever since she was a senior at Cal, my stepdaughter Sarah has worked for a couple who own a small clothing design business in Berekely. The wife designs all the clothes, upscale women's casual wear, and her husband manages this business and several other ventures. Sarah started as an office assistant in 2000 and now manages the business while they are on frequent trips. Last spring, she brought me two enormous sacks of trimmings from the sewing end of the business (done on site), and asked if I would make her employers a quilt for Christmas. The Asian women who sew don't like to throw anything away, so the fabrics are from last year's lines and mainly rayon weaves, linens, textured linens and pinwale cords among others. These bags weighed a TON, and the first thing I had to do was sort through and pick out the fabrics totally unsuitable for a quilt, which was almost half of it. I donated these pieces to the guild's various projects and a couple of ladies who sew for a living.


I was left with a pretty good amount of fabric that would work, but obviously, this stuff had to be sewed on a foundation....a fabric foundation. Here's a shot of the fabrics I'm getting ready to cut. The white strips are the remains of the patterns that are lightly glued to the fabric before cutting. Every raw edge of this fabric is serged because they buy plain greige goods from China and dye it themselves before making the garments. They may have garments of the same color, but different fabric type, so I will have strips like that as well.

So, I started cutting......and cutting.......and cutting. Strips, tons of them. Ala Bonnie Hunter. That would be because I'm using one of Bonnie's patterns, but you won't know which one until tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a pic of the strips. I have to say that I found this project pretty intimidating, because I am a traditional quilter, so I had to spend a couple of months looking at Bonnie and Tonya's blogs, as well as Gwen and Freddie's work to get my courage up.