Quilters are Everywhere

My son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter just got back from a week in Hawaii. They apparently strolled past a quilt shop in a small town and thought of me. I was touched. How nice to be remembered even when on vacation and how sweet of my daughter-in-law to tell me so. My very practical daughter-in-law, an excellent chef and an avid hiker but a non-quilter, was a bit surprised that there are quilters and quilt shops "even in places where it is too warm to use them".  This made me smile.

The mention of a Hawaiian quilt shop made me want to dig into my stash and ferret out Hawaiian fabrics I had bought decades ago. We were on a family summer vacation in Hawaii in 1996, when my kids were 10, 13, and nearly 16 so these fabrics are close to 20 years old. That is of course unless I bought them on our trip before we had kids. That would have been fall 1978, making these fabrics 37+ years old. A true quilter has to let her fabrics age. Here they are. Now what to do with them.

I bought one half-yard of each of these colorways intending to combine them in a quilt. I checked the selvage and there is no year of print there. I love two-color prints but always find them hard to work with when the two colors are present in equal amounts. I have a jelly roll of chevrons for example that I am trying to incorporate various places but the 2½" wide strips waver off grain and the zig zags look kind of drunk.  I have managed to use some in my Owl and the Pussy Cat quilt as accent strips and in my Traveling Mandala wall hanging as the geese of flying geese. At first blush these Hawaiian blocks look on grain. I am leaning toward making non-pieced blocks of 2x2 or 3x3 squares fussy cut from this fabric and interspersing them with other pieced blocks containing all three teal, red, and blue colors.

I bought four yards of this colorful beauty probably with the target being a Hawaiian shirt for my husband. The photo shows one quarter of the fabric width. I count fifteen different dye colors for this yardage. No wonder it is so rich looking. I can tell from the selvage it is a Hollytex Screen print but again no year. Could it be perhaps that decades ago putting a year in the selvage was not a common practice? Thank goodness my husband and I write an annual Christmas letter so I can look up such things – dreadfully vital, yes I know. Anyway, it had to have been a long time ago. If the trip had been more recent I surely would have brought home more than merely 5½ yards of fabric.

I really do need to get back in my sewing room after my spurt of traveling. But for now I am linking up to this week's Freshly Pieced's Works in Progress. I see too that her crafty endeavors have also wavered from quilting only. Maybe we quilters all needed a summer break.