My daughter thinks outside the box so fast that I have to run to keep up with her. She arrived at our house with a couple of wooden wire spools, fabric and cloth appliqués.
“We need to appliqué these castles to the fabric, put the old couch pillows on top and staple the fabric over them,” she said, expecting my help – although I had never done anything like it.
It looked easy enough.
As I set up the sewing machine, she looked through my sewing closet and found a fabric panel with sewing tools woven into the tapestry ready to sew into a vest . “You know this would be a cute shoulder bag,” she mused.
“I started to make the vest, but I like your idea better,” I said, pulling the completed appliqué off the machine. “Here you try the next appliqué.” I began looking for seam binding and thread to make a bag instead of a vest.
An hour later, after curving the corners as I sewed together the two fronts, I held up my new catch-all bag.
“Neat!” she said, tugging at the corner of fabric that would not fit over the wooden circle of the spool. She tugged and pulled and even stapled before finally saying, “I’ll look at it in the morning.”
In the morning, she asked, “Do you want the egg carton mattress pads in the guest room closet? I was thinking I could cut them to pad the spools.”
“No. Help yourself, I think one has already been cut to make a doll bed mattress.”
She cut layers of circles from the two pads. She sewed circular hems and threaded elastic through the hems to hold the top in place.
It still did not work.
“It needs something to hold it tight,” I said. “I think I picked up something at a yard sale meant for upholstery.” I wandered off to find the roll of what I remembered was stiff, black tape. It held the fabric without tearing it. The children now have a place to sit and store a few toys or books.
As we cleared the clutter, she noticed the stack of quilt blocks I had received from her late grandmother’s stash. I had hand washed, starched and ironed them while I waited for inspiration to hit me. It hit her instead. “You know they are taking fabric like this, folding it in half to make a triangle and sewing them together in a pennant.” She held up a folded quilt block.
“Let’s do it,” I said.An hour or so later, she tied three pennants along the wall. “I am so ready to have a party so I can put these up,” she said.
Her friends on Facebook loved the idea and she loved telling them that her grandmother had hand-pieced some and machine sewn the others on a treadle sewing machine. She loved the history – and if she tires of the pennants she can always make them into a quilt.
It’s a good thing she came. She also found a use for that tiny 16-patch quilt block of pink and zebra fabrics. “This would be perfect for Daisy. She has been spreading blankets over her dolls for months.” I added a border and binding seam to create a colorful dolly quilt.
I volunteered to make a cat pillow and an apron from the fabric panel meant to be a girl’s jumper. The jumper’s shoulder straps became the neck tie and extra length worked great as apron strings. It fit the four-year-old perfectly. The pillow came out nicely, but the cat could care less.
Before they left, her son sifted through my drawer of fat quarters for quilts looking for fabric to make a pennant for his room. Nearly every piece he chose had a collage of pictures. No triangles for him … he wanted squares and rectangles so he could see the pictures.
He sees a story in fabric; his mom sees a project in neighborhood trash. She told me that on her way to school, she saw a garden hose at a house waiting for the garbage pick-up. “And, I thought, what did I see about using a worn-out garden hose? … a wreath. So we picked it up.” Then to show me her idea in progress, she pulled out some old gloves, worn garden tools and a stalk of artificial flowers she had seen on another pile of trash. “I am going to put them together and make a garden wreath.”
It sounded trashy to me, but I did a search for images of garden hose wreaths on the Internet and found several that impressed me favorably.
They really should come more often. I need their inspiration, ideas, energy and ways to recycle my trash.