Sorting and Playing with Fabric

A story book I read as a child had a picture of King Midas in a room with piles of gold coins which he was stacking on a table. The look on his face was one of gleeful cupidity [words I didn't know at the time] and he seemed to be chuckling "heh-heh-heh-heh." This is how I felt a couple of hours this morning as I pulled out plastic bags and boxes of fabric scraps -- not my bags of fat quarter and larger pieces. These were scraps that needed to be sorted into strips for string quilts, and usable pieces. I also have baggies full of squares of different sizes, also triangles although the sizes were mixed somewhat carelessly.

So I sorted and arranged by shape and size and color. So many squares -- I need to make several quilts somewhat like the vender's show quilt in the picture above [those are African fabrics, most of mine are not]. Anyway, seeing, touching, arranging, packing up, all those quilt possibilities, all those lovely colors and patterns made me feel like King Midas. What a treasure I feel I've amassed. What dreams of simple and complex quilts danced through my head. Goodness! I love fabric and patterns and colors and I loved being immersed in it.

Those are bagged and boxed. I have many, many other sorting chores to do -- books in particular. I love books, perhaps more than fabric, but in a different way. I have saved books because their contents have delighted me and I've thought I might find someone to whom to give the book. Others I've kept because I can't help feeling a home should have Shakespeare's plays, Joyce's Ulysses ... Oh, I could go on and on and on. I will keep many of the classics but I want to at least decimate these book shelves. I will never reread Sontag's The Volcano Lover or Lessing's Children of Violence books, and so others. In fact there are so many books I want yet to read, that I am unlikely ever to reread the ones I've read once -- I have a good memory for the books I've read. But they seem to be loved friends. It's very hard to pack up a friend and leave it at a thrift shop.