It’s no secret that we have a special place in our hearts for scrappy quilting and we carry just as bright of a torch for hand quilting with sashiko style stitches. We have done our fair share of machine quilting on our domestic machine (as in our latest book Scrappy Wonky Quilt Block Extravaganza) but nothing comes close to the texture of a hand stitched sashiko style running stitch. For our last couple of projects, we have used the new palm thimble from Colonial Needle Company to make this process even easier and certainly more enjoyable for us. We certainly still use this versatile thimble for all of our sashiko projects and mending but it is a game changer for big stitch quilting. Paired with the John James long darners, and Presencia 12 weight thread held double, the combo is a hand quilter’s dream team.

Now you might want to sit down for this part because we are going to say something controversial.

But stick with us.

Here goes: we don’t like buying new fabric.

<insert gasps here>

We know… who doesn’t like perusing racks and aisles of freshly bolted fabrics in immeasurable variations of color, prints, solids, weave, and content types? We do like looking at them but purposely buying yardage is reserved for specific projects like garments and quilts that require a certain type of fabric or unifying fabric such as a single background color. But, when it comes to every day stitching and projects, we like to shop the flat fold and odd cuts section of our fabric store. More than once we have absolutely raided the clothing and fabric piles at tag sales and the 50¢ racks at thrift stores are not safe from us. Everything comes home and goes into a sanitizing wash and is pressed before disassembling into large pieces of flat fabric. This process of rescuing and repurposing found fabric is almost magical to us and we love the textiles they create.

Our latest joy has been working on our clothing quilts. We made a clothing quilt a while back for a charity auction and NEEEEEDED one of our own. For our personal clothing quilt, we sourced all of the fabric from our own garments which wasn’t exactly difficult considering we don’t throw away anything that even remotely resembles fabric. We sorted through bags and boxes of “old” clothes, the mending pile (from which we used anything that had been in there for longer than a year), and clothes that didn’t fit anymore or weren’t exactly suited to us anymore.

As a result, assembling and quilting this piece has been a walk down memory lane. That purple plaid flannel shirt that Shannon used to wear hiking when we took the Shibakidz everywhere with us. The stripped “designer label” button up that was a gift from one of us to the other when we were first married (that was thirty years ago, y’all) and both of us wore as a throw on top layer until it was pretty threadbare. Jason’s red western shirt he used to wear when we went dancing, the fancy shirt he used to wear to teach in. All of these bring back memories of times and places as we assemble them into new textile panels and create this quilt that will live with and beyond us.

The esthetics of this type of fabric cannot be ignored. The amazing feel of these newly created textiles as they move through our hands. The feel of the needle slipping through the layers of fabric and batting. The crinkle (if you know… you KNOW) of the fabric after a section of stitches are completed. And the weight and density of the layers of fabric and batting is like nothing else.

Overall, the process of making a clothing quilt is very different from a patterned quilt made using more traditional quilting cottons off the bolt. The top is pieced together with panels of individual framed improv motifs and larger sections of fabric as well as smaller scrap pieces tucked in to fill space. The back is large panels put together with as few seams as possible to make the quilting easier so the needle doesn’t have to go through too many odd seams at a time. The batting is organic cotton from Hobbs batting pieced together from leftover panels from our last quilting book. Every piece and seam is thought out and considered as part of the whole and serves to create the intricate decoration of the quilt but also is a meditative practice for us where we disregard any of the outside <waves arms about wildly> stuff-n-things that put our nerves on edge. We can, for a time, immerse ourselves in the physical sensation of the weight of the fabric, the feel of the fabric texture, and the ssshhhhhhp sound of the thread being pulled through the quilt layers.

Did this turn into a love letter to fabric quilts and hand stitching? Probably. Do we suddenly feel compelled to go sit and stitch on our quilt again? Definitely. So yeah… gotta go.

But seriously, we hope this inspires you to consider using found fabric for at least one project this year. There is so much joy in repurposing fabrics and in giving them new life while giving our planet a little bit of a break from just that much more fashion and textile waste. Now, really, it’s time for a cup of tea and some ssshhhhhhp, ssshhhhhhp.

– Shannon & Jason

*For a video tutorial of using the CNC Palm Thimble for Big Stitch Quilting, see our YouTube video: