BAMBOOZLED

Sometimes when I am shopping for something in a foreign country and it seems like too good a deal, I think buyer beware and reconsider.  Especially when it comes to buying fabric.  I don't think I will be making the same mistake again that I did while I was in Africa.

On every Overseas Adventure Travel trip (www.oattravel.com) that my husband and I have taken the small group of people (16 or less) get to know each other fairly well early on in the tour.  However, the stars must have been lined up right because on our African trip another woman and I were talking and discovered that we were each art quilters.  She showed me some pictures of her quilts and I did the same.  We seemed to click right away and as the days went on we mentioned to our guide that we were hoping to buy some African fabric.

On the day we flew into Livingstone our guide took our group to an area in town with lots of vendor stalls selling all kinds of various souvenirs, etc.  My new friend and her husband took off looking for fabric and so did my husband and I.  When a shopping trip is limited to one half hour you don't have much time to think about you are buying, especially if you want to visit lots of stalls.

When we all met back at our vehicles we showed what we had each bought.  The 2 meter pieces of fabric were bright and colorful, just like we would see all the women walking around wearing called chitenges.  The fabric had a stiff feel to it, not at all soft like cotton, but we both said that probably after it was washed it would soften up.

We didn't have another opportunity to buy more fabric until the end of the trip when we had left all the bush camps and we were staying in a hotel in Victoria Falls.  In the hotel lobby were stacks of beautiful, bright 2 meter pieces of fabric at such an inexpensive price that it was just too hard to resist buying more.  I came home with 2 dozen different pieces of fabric!

By the end of our absolutely incredible trip my husband and I had become good friends with my quilting friend and her husband.  We exchanged information so we could continue keeping in touch once we got home.

About a week after returning home I washed all my African chitenge fabric, threw it in the dryer, and to my surprise it came out of the dryer with not so much as one wrinkle!  That's when I knew it wasn't cotton.  I quickly sent an email to my friend from the trip and she wrote that she had the same experience.  We each decided to burn a corner of one of our pieces and sure enough it was POLYESTER and most likely from China.  We soon learned that almost all the textile mills in Africa had closed and there were only a few left.  My girlfriend said that we were BAMBOOZLED!

So now what to do with 2 dozen 2 meter pieces of polyester fabric!  I quickly found that the top of my dining room table is exactly that size so I am using several different pieces as tableclothes and they are very pretty.  Several other pieces I have cut up and made small art quilts with heavy beading, hand embroidery, and free motion quilting.  I may never use all the chitenges I bought, but after all, isn't that why we quilters buy so much fabric in the first place?  We just love to look at all the beautiful colors and prints, and we certainly don't need to have any immediate plans to use it.