A Favorite Fabric

I’m sure I’m not the only person who hoards hides hangs on to a favorite fabric.  This is one of mine.  It’s Garden Glory by Debbie Caffery for Northcott.  I first bought a FQ the summer of the Iowa road trip.  I think that was in 2004.

That summer I was collecting blue fabrics for a blue quilt I was doing to make for my husband. This was one of many fabrics gathered that year.  Since I only needed a 6 x 12 piece of each fabric for the Blue Applecore, I had lots of fabric left over.  The following summer I made THIS quilt from my blues.  When I got to the borders I decided the perfect fabric would be the fabric pictured above.

There was just one problem.

My FQ did not have the identifying information on it.  That Iowa trip — 10 or 12 quilt shops in 3 days — not to mention prior to that I had been in multiple quilt shops before and after the road trip.  Canvasing my two favorite fabric search engines FabShopHop and Quiltshop.com didn’t turn up the fabric. Finally I sent an e-mail to the Fab Shop Hop network and The Virginia Quilter responded that they knew what the fabric was and sent me a link to order what I needed — or maybe I took all they had at this point I can’t remember.

A few months later I spied some at Quilters Haven  (probably where I bought the first FQ) and bought the rest of the bolt (about 2 or 3 yards) even though I didn’t have any plans for it.  Since then I’ve used it several times first in a matching baby quilt and then carefully in a block here or there, including in the Birthday Quilt.

So, when I started digging in my box of blue fabrics looking for something for the binding of the Birthday Quilt I knew I had found the right fabric — if I had enough.

I do.  The piece left measures 31 x 28  — which should leave me with a 3″ strip of fabric 31″ long.  Hum… may be instead of a pillowcase with a blue cuff and yellow accent, I’ll go the other way and make a yellow cuff and use the remaining blue strip as the accent.

Then again, I may just hoard it.