Hello all, Mary Ellen here.

We all have some. Yoogly fabric I mean.What is it? Say it out loud a couple of times and I think you’ll get it. I have quite a bit of it actually–yoogly by other people’s standards especially. For a while after I retired I made custom eye spy quilts. They each had pictures to correspond to every letter in the alphabet. In order to do that, and be able to make “boy” eye spies and “girl” eye spies, I collected novelty fabrics galore. Some of which, when standing alone, are darn yoogly. But I think “yoogly” is in the eye of the beholder. Most of them I prefer to call quirky. This post  (click here) from Quiltmaker talks about a yoogly fabric swap. That might be a fun thing to do if the limits were kind of free and easy. There is a quilt made by one of our former seminar instructors, Anita Grossman Solomon, featured in the post. Her quilt made of  yooglies isn’t very yoogly at all.

Let me share an anecdote from very early in my membership in the guild. A workshop was to be presented by the folks of The Quilt Bus on how to use your ugly fabrics. I signed up and very busily went about gathered the supplies required. This was going to be my very first workshop given by the guild and I wanted to be well prepared. We were to bring a supply of ugly fabrics and I definitely fulfilled the requirements. I had cow fabric, flamingo fabric and some god-awful plaids. On the day of the workshop I was astounded. I was the only one who brought ugly fabric I thought. I began to wonder how I could have misunderstood the directions so badly. Well as the day went on, and I listened in on conversations among the other members of the class, I discovered they thought they had brought ugly fabric too, but our definitions were very different. The definition that most of them were working from was that ugly means fabric out of your usual palette—like pink floral when you usually buy Civil War repros, or Jinny Beyer fabrics when you really prefer Kaffe Fassett. I thought ugly meant UGLY! I wish the instructor had held an informal contest for the absolute ugliest fabrics in the room. I know mine would have won the grand prize by anyone’s standard. It’s too bad those blocks made that day are long gone, or I would share a photo or two just for the fun.

What’s the ugliest fabric you own?