There's a piece of indigo cotton in my scrap basket, maybe four inches by seven, out of a dress my mother wore to my cousin's wedding back in 1971. It's faded in a stripe across the middle where the sun got it hanging on the line, and the seam allowance is still turned under by her hand, not mine. Different stitch than I make. Tighter.

It's been sitting in that basket eleven years. Every quilt I start, I pick it up, hold it against the layout, and put it back. Too precious to cut, and too precious to leave out, so it just rides along in the basket doing nothing.

Here's what I finally said to myself last night: a scrap in a basket is not saving anything. It's just resting. If I use it wrong, it's still in a quilt and somebody's grandchild can look at it in fifty years. If I keep it in the basket, it goes in a trash bag when I'm gone and nobody even knows what it was.

But I still haven't cut it. So I'm not asking y'all to tell me to cut it. I'm asking the ones who work with old cloth, the inherited stuff, the piece you can't replace. What did you finally do with yours, and did you regret it? Not looking for permission so much as I want to hear how somebody else got their hands to move.