Shirts and Sheets

13/02/2009 by Kevin.

As an ‘outsider’ to the patch world – I am totally amazed about how the perception of patchwork is so different to the reality.  The public perception of patchworking is a woman sitting in a rocking chair, cutting up old shirts and sheets with scissors and sewing them together to eventually make a quilt.  How different it is in reality.  The low-tech impression is much more high-tech.

Take the old shirts and scraps used as a basis for the quilts.  I wish it was the same in the new world.   However, rather than oddments and scraps, it seems my wife spends a fortune on by purchasing ‘fat quarters’ of exotic patterned fabrics. (Fat quarters are quarters that are square, rather than a running quarter metre off-cuts).  In reality even these seem to be the cheaper option, since sometimes the material is hand dyed.  And although there seems to be a large variety of different ways of doing this, most seem to involve a large purchase of plastic buckets, various dyes and other specialist material, that then seem to fill up our kitchen and garage. If this wasn’t enough – each time a new technique is used, not only does it require the purchase of more buckets, etc – but normally involves going off to some specialist place for a training day, and also the purchase of a book.

I suspect even on material cost alone – you would be far better off just buying a completed quilt – when all the associated cost are taken into account I think people would be very frightened with the real total.  I certainly am.

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