Someone's Scraps and Remnants

My friend has been cleaning out her mother's house and recently asked me about "some material scraps" that she'd found in the attic. What should she do with them? Would I have any use for them? After all, I am a quilter.

If you're a quilter, too, you prolly have a similar story to share. I said I would take the scraps off my friend's hands, and we agreed that she didn't need to know about anything I couldn't use.

We met for lunch and when I came home, my car trunk was full of boxes and bags; the scraps were sorted by color, each one in a different container.

So little of it is actually usable for a quilter. We are talking, here, fifty years' accumulation of dressmaking scraps. There is lots of polyester, some lace, some boucle, some pique, stretchy knit, heavy linen, heavy unknown, slithery rayons and jerseys, some very flimsy stuff I remember as "whipped cream," and not much cotton at all. I sorted out four piles -- the cotton that I might be able to use in my veterans' lap quilts; some small exotic pieces that my granddaughter might like to play with; the large purchased remnants, 1-5 yard pieces of chiffon, polyester, linen, unknown, that will go to the rummage sale in a few months; and everything else. There was one big piece that I believe will back lap quilt #3. Most of it went into the "rummage sale" and "everything else" piles. You don't need to know, either, about what happens to the "everything else."

My friend's mom was partial to blue and to green, preferred bright colors and textured fabric, and apparently never, not even once, got rid of any left-over fabric, however small. The photo above isn't any of what I've been dealing with this afternoon, but rather an internet image. But you get the idea.