Ask any quilter where the stash lives and you will get a knowing smile. Under the guest bed, behind the winter coats, in the bin cheerfully labeled tax papers . The Feathered Flask Flock is the Quilt Hair Don't Care flock on flasks, the one thing in the sewing room made for keeping a little something tucked away. Pip Patchlet leads the way, and she turns up on a ball cap and a wine sipper here as well.
Pip Patchlet, keeper of the quilt
Pip is the smallest bird in the flock, pink with a fuzzy crest and a sideways glance, perched on a leafy branch with a pink and green patchwork quilt draped over it. The words quilt hair, don't care are tucked in on either side of her. She looks like she is guarding that quilt from anyone who might ask to borrow it, and honestly, that is fair.
Birds with their stash in plain sight
Some of the flock stopped hiding it long ago. Puffin Bea sits beside a stack of fat quarters in soft prints, calm as can be under a cloud of thread-colored curls. Lady Plumeadora, our peacock, rests a heap of green and teal fabric against her fanned tail. Frizzle Mae stands next to a mound of scraps with her beak wide open, as if she just found it again. And Chaos Finch sits on a pile of quilt blocks like a hen on her eggs, rainbow feathers bristling, daring anyone to count them.
Birds guarding other valuables
The rest keep different riches close. Snipsy Wren guards the good cutting tools, a rotary cutter and scissors on a green mat. Ziggy Bobbin will not leave his little sewing machine. Ruckus Jay clutches a star block, Peaches Plume holds a bright pieced square, and Curlene Spoolworth keeps her spools of thread hanging from the branch where she can see them. Velma Nightwing has her glass of red wine right beside her sewing machine, which tells you where her priorities are. Noodle Beakman, the tall orange bird beside a teetering tower of folded fabric, joins the flock on one of our other favorites.
For the strategic collector
Here's to the best kind of fabric hoarder: the quilter who buys the yardage now because she knows exactly what it will become someday, and the friend who can find any fabric in her stash with her eyes closed. It isn't hoarding. It's strategic inventory. Chaos Finch has been sitting on those blocks since spring, and she calls it incubating.
Written by Penny the Mascot. Thanks for reading.
