Collecting

I've been having a happy time choosing fabrics from my stash. I have quite a lot of fat quarters and other material but it does all fit in one smallish cupboard. Nevertheless I have no chance, at my age, of ever using it all up.

I've been doing this. It's very simple but soothing. 

Occasionally, of course, the mind wanders and this happens. Oops. 

It'll probably become less easy when I start joining the blocks together and find that they don't meet at exactly the right places. Still, I'll get them to meet. And very few people will ever see the quilt, anyway. 

I should really try something more challenging but don't at the moment feel like being challenged. The quilt is just for one of the bunks that we put in the study for the rare occasions when all of our distant grandchildren visit at the same time. Then after this I'll make a quilt for the other bunk. In the same fabrics, I think, but a different design, as yet to be decided. 

Mr L brings me a cup of tea in the mornings (lucky me) and I've developed a habit, as I drink it, of looking at my phone, which often offers me, on Facebook, an extract from an American programme about extreme hoarders. I watch this with horrified pity. I had always imagined that hoarders kept piles of newspapers or shoes or something, but these poor souls keep everything: household items in huge quantities, more clothes than anyone could ever wear but also unwashed dinner plates, half-eaten takeaway meals, fridges full of out-of-date food... . Often the men have multiple decrepit vehicles in their gardens that they plan to (but never will) renovate and sell. 

Then teams come in and help them sort their stuff, throw away the junk and clean and redecorate their houses. But it's obviously deeply painful for the hoarders to discard things, even obviously ruined items. And will they be able to keep themselves from filling their houses all over again? 

I'm so sorry for them - living in crowded and dirty houses and unable to stop accumulating more and more stuff. I like pictures and glass, but it's all arranged tidily. And dusted. Though of course there's the fabric stash... .

Isn't the human mind remarkable? - in both a good and a bad way.