Thursday, February 17, 2011

One piece of fabric

Once upon a time, about four years ago, a lonely piece of very 70's style quilted fabric sat on the shelf in Walmart.
Nobody wanted it and it depreciated in value on a daily basis.
Each day, the Walmart worker who worked for peanuts - only, because she was allergic to them, worked for Hershey kisses instead, came along and, with her permanent marker, slashed the price of the fabric.
The fabric was so sad.
It had become a remnant...the curse of fabric everywhere!

Luckily an inexperienced seamstress and her two year old toddler, entered the store as she frequently did, to scour the fabric for remnants and bargains to use for her practice.
She came across the sad little piece of material and grabbed it with both hands. For just $2 there was over 1.5 metres, to think what she could do with it! She had visions of Clothkit-esque padded jackets and bags galore!

However, the material sat unloved and unused in a dark box under the stairs, despite illusions of grandeur of becoming a jacket for the toddler to wear. The seamstress had moved onto other projects and the fabric was cast aside.

One day, the seamstress opened her fabric box...which is the size of Dracula's coffin ("and the rest!" - added the husbeast!) and was already bulging at the seams. She was in a desperate, last bid attempt to downsize, rid herself of the stuff never used and reduce the contents of this box.

She came upon the piece of pink fabric once again and called her, now six year old, daughter down to discuss it's use.

"Socks?" suggested the six year old. The mother realised she had a long way to go teaching her daughter the weaves of fabrics and their uses, or more importantly, their non-uses.

"A jacket?" the mother tenatatively suggested again.

"For my doll?" replied the girl

"Well, I was thinking...oh well ...you wouldn't wear it would you?"

The teenager in the corner, laughed at the prospect of the six year old wearing the garish material and agreed that the jacket was now lost in the blackhole of time.

"A hat?" suggested the boy

"Really?" asked the mother breaking out is a smallish sweat at the thought of putting her still relatively tender skills to millinery purposes.

"Ewww - no!" shrieked the girl, horror abound at the prospect of putting it anywhere on her body that might actually be on show!

"What about a bag?" suggested the mother? "I could make you a bag to carry on your back so you can take your books to school and to Grandma-ma's" (Yeah, okay, so I didn't say Grandma-ma because that would just be stooopid...it was blogger's  license!)

"Oooh, yes, a bag" said the girl - who likes bags for they are good to magpie things that don't belong to oneself!

This was met with protest by the boy who forsaw the opportunity for squirreling to increase before his eyes and could not believe his mother would condone the crimes of his sister and encourage her further by making her larger swag bags!

Thus it was agreed:

The mother made a bag:



And then she made a gift for her sewing machine to hide it from the dust bunnies.






But still there remained around half a metre. So the mother wondered if the toaster needed a cover, but decided that although the material was nicely kitsch, she didn't need to turn her whole house into something from the seventies. So she went back to the drawing board to decide what to do with the rest.

PS:

Here's the rest - turned into a yarn storage bag/sack to replace my much loved bag that the mice got!

1 comment:

judith potter said...

Wonderful work my darling daughter!