Reclaimed Wool

Remember those hideous wool blazers I bought at Goodwill for a project? Well it turns out that cutting them up to get to the wool is kind of a pain. I had thought it would be a great thing to carry along with me to football practice or carpool, but you need too much space and too many bins (one for the uncut jackets, one for the wool, one for the lining fabric, one for the buttons, one for the scraps). And it's itchy.

Last week there was a communication breakdown and only one WannaBee showed up at my house. Since Caroline was working on hand applique, I decided it would be a good time to pull out all of those jackets and start cutting. We spent the most lovely few hours working side by side in the sunroom, chatting about all sorts of things, with Daisy dozing at our feet. Caroline is one of the WannaBees I know less than some others, so it was really nice to have her to myself all day and get to know her better.

By the time she left she had completed quite a bit of work (amazing how she does such beautiful stitching!) and I had cut up the last jacket. I threw it all in a hot hot hot washer and hot hot hot dryer for several rounds.

Now I have a very large pile of wool scraps, a large Ziploc bag of lining fabric scraps, and a bowl of buttons. I spent some of Friday sketching the applique shapes onto Wonder Under and fusing them to the wool. This afternoon I went to the thrift store and found a pale pink flannel crib sheet that I am going to use as my background, and a blue and white geometric print that I think will work for the backing.


Here's what I have so far. Once the sheet is all washed and dried, I will cut it to the finished size and see how many more shapes I need. It is very hard to gauge when I don't have the fabric in front of me. How I got into quilting with absolutely no spatial ability and such abysmal math skills is beyond me!

Hope you all had a happy Monday,