How deep is your stash?

I really need to know (with apologies to the BeeGees, I've just been hearing that song all evening as I've been up to my eyebrows in stash).

That wasn't the plan.  I've been working on a long cardigan from the first issue of My Image and I'm close to finished, so I decided to take a break and rummage around to see if I could find an appropriate fabric for the next piece of my 1912 wardrobe, the striped blouse pictured here. 

I didn't need to use a stripe, but I wanted to - I love that the stripes are vertical on the front and horizontal on the side.  And I think, though I'm not sure because I haven't muslined it yet, that because there's no shoulder seam and the piece curves, the stripes might actually go diagonal on the back.  How cool would that be?

But I digress. I had a nice pale gray shirting with narrow white stripes that would make an acceptable blouse, but I wasn't excited by it.  So I decided to dig around and see if I had anything better in the deep stash. 

Deep stash, you'll understand, is the stuff not on the shelves, it's the stuff so old, so obscure, out-of-style, or pretty but without purpose, that it lives in random containers in a wardrobe closet in my workroom.  For those who commented on my recent admirable fabric-rolling and questioned whether that was all my fabric, the answer would be, "no."

This, the fabric closet of doom, is all my fabric.  Except for the fabric that's in 3 vintage trunks also in the workroom, but I'm pretty sure I know what's in them.  This was the mystery fabric.

For those who have really large stashes, or old stashes (or both), you'll understand - digging through deep stash is like excavating your own past.  Every piece I pulled out was a memory, who and where I was when I acquired it.  In some cases it's a memory of my grandmom's or my aunt's stash.

And, no surprise, I found not one, but TWO fabrics that would be much more appropriate for my 1912 blouse than the shirting I had reserved.  They are pictured together here.  One is an ivory textured poly blend that feels like silk.  I know it isn't because I purchased that fabric in 1982 to make into a blouse to wear to my very first job, and I did not have a silk budget at that time.  And here it sits, nearly 30 years later, possibly being made into a very different blouse. 
The second fabric is a bit more recent, I'd say later 80s.  Real silk this time, dupioni without too much texture, a nice warm ivory with a light orange stripe.  I bought it because even though I had no idea what I'd use it for, I loved that it wasn't the usual jewel tones I saw in dupioni, and I thought it might have a purpose.


I haz a bellyache

And at last it might.  Both pieces are 2 yards long, and I believe both are either 54" or 60" wide. The 1912 pattern calls for more yardage than that, but it's also calculated for 45" wide fabrics, so I'm pretty sure I can make either one work.  I'm going to press them tomorrow and stare at them for a while to see if one of them speaks louder than the other.

Also - all you cat people out there, fingers, toes and claws crossed for my little fat man, Archie, who has to take a trip to the vet tomorrow.  It's probably something minor, except that he's 11 years old and 27 pounds, which will complicate anything else that might be going on.