Frustration!

I've known many people that have come into the shop (when we were Calico, Canvas and Colors) with a little teeny swatch of fabric in hand, a desperate look on their face and asked if we had any of a certain fabric that they just needed six inches more of.  I always felt so bad telling them that we were out, or we only had four inches or yes, we have it, but it's in that kit.  For some reason, it has never happened to me.  Whether I was uber-organized or just plain lucky, I have always had enough fabric to finish my projects.  Until today, until this quilt . . .

I quilted this quilt yesterday, and as I was quilting it I realized that I didn't have any binding fabric.  This quilt was put together over the course of this last year with my friends from the shop and we used fabrics from our stash of Civil War fabrics.  We had to buy yardage for the background, inner border and binding.  I forgot to buy enough of anything for the binding.  Duh.  So after I got it together I decided I really wanted the inner border fabric for the binding as well.  I scratched and clawed my way through the bits and pieces in my sewing room trash to come up with the tiny remainders of selvages that had writing on them.  Yippee!  I pieced these together as carefully as I would have pieced a jigsaw puzzle and voila! there were my clues!  I was sure the hard part was over, and I triumphantly went upstairs to search the World Wide Web.

The fabric is Windham Fabrics Civil War IV line (they're on Civil War VI now!) by Nancy Gere and the pattern number is 25309, color 52.  I  checked Ebay. I Googled every possible combination of "Windham", "Civil War IV" and "Nancy Gere" that you can think of.  I found a lot of 25309 in tan and I found a lot of Civil War V waiting out there, but alas, no blue Civil War IV.  The best I could do was a different fabric from the same line in the same color.  It's not great, but it's something.

So . . . I want to thank Doris from Lil Country Shoppe in Middletown, Delaware for helping me find my fabric and for only charging me a couple of bucks for postage.  I guess we can feel lucky that we have the amazing gift of the internet at our fingertips to find our elusive fabrics, but for those of you who have gone into any shop, anywhere, clutching your tiny bit of fabric, I feel your pain.