Turning Frogs into Princes

It happens to the best of us: we buy a fabric or 2 or 20, and then things change. Maybe our plan of attack for a project evolves and those fabrics don’t fit into our new vision. Perhaps we purchased some yardage online only to realize that, in person, it doesn’t work with our other selections. One way or another, we have some unloved and unused fabrics hiding in our stash.

Rachel at Stitched in Color is looking to do something about this problem for herself and, in the process, help you and me purge these no longer enticing fabrics. Step one: identify what needs to go.

I did not investigate my scrap piles. I went straight to my yardage and found this …

I can identify the projects these neglected fabrics were originally purchased for. The guilt lies heavily on me. But I moved things about, and look what I discovered …

Although these fabrics were initially bought for different projects altogether, two colorways emerged: orange/brown/mustard and teal/tomato/gray. Go figure. I think I can make quilts out of both of these groupings without buying much, if any, additional fabric. Somehow, these unloved chunks of fabric have a promising future. I may actually be excited about using them.

Starting with the teal/tomato/gray grouping, I looked through my scraps and solids. There are some Denyse Schmidt scraps from this quilt and some Kona tomato that I considered for this quilt. I also found that I own some selections from Tula Pink’s Prince Charming line. (Yes, this was news to me. I must have bought them in a pack of scraps.) The Tula Pink designs are small snippets of fabric, just 7 inches by 8 inches, but I could incorporate them and expand the color palette here to teal/tomato/gray/salmon. I have a bunch of Kona salmon and Bonnie and Camille’s Happy-Go-Lucky in salmon left over from my Farmer’s Market quilt.

Yes, yes—this is definitely excitement I’m experiencing over these previously neglected fabrics! Can I turn these frogs into princes?! You’ll just have to come back and see …

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