Wander project Greenwood IN (and burning fabric)!

In the best sense of fairness, I have to start today’s story with the other side. My mother, who is the greatest quilter did not like this science experiment. (A like to my mother’s Etsy site is here). The twins wanted to enter the science fair one year. I entered the science fair a couple of times as a kid, actually doing well one year with a partner. The project the twins and I decided to do was to test the reliability of fireproof fabrics. In part, this was inspired by watching a special on television about how bad it was that most fireproof fabrics were more likely fire resistant. Fireproof technically means that the fabric doesn’t ignite and burst into flames. Fire resistant means the same thing, the primary difference being the temperature of ignition.

We spent a couple of weekends burning fabric bits in the garage. We cut them all into roughly the same size. My mother objected to the fire and fabric combination. My wife objected to firing and twins combination. There were supervision rules (apparently I am not adequate supervision, so my wife stopped watch over the project). It is not like I am the real-life incarnation of Beavis and Butthead. (Let’s burn stuff). I just wanted to show the twins the difference between fire resistant, fire retardant and fireproof. By the way, we didn’t find a single fabric that was more than fire resistant. It means that every single fabric we had, some of which were advertised as fireproof, caught on fire.

So that is why today, the crazy person has shared bits of burned fabric on paper. Just the pre-fire fabric today. I will share the burned bits at some future point. We did take the burned fabric and in honor of my mother buried it in the backyard with a full service. I have so many memories of my mother and fabric over the years. Over the course of my childhood I never willingly went into a fabric store. Well, that isn’t true, I went into a sewing machine/fabric store one time by choice. It was the only store in the area we were that had air conditing. We were in Bangkok, and it was a very hot day. We were out wandering around, and the sewing shop was the only air-conditioned store in the area, so I went into that one willingly. Otherwise, I do not set foot in fabric stores!