Valerean

Last week my small white-only yarn lot arrived; let's see how I made out. I predicted I'd get nine skeins of white yarn; I actually got ten. They're all in like-new condition with no odor. I know the Caron one pound skein retails for $14.00, and I estimated the others would bring the total value up to $38.00. Two of the unused Super Savers retail for $7.48 and $3.77 respectively; the Bernat Baby Sport goes for $9.84. The other skeins are worth about $3.00 resale, so $18.00 for those. Altogether the lot is worth $53.09. I paid $9.99 for everything, and this is the color I most often use, so it was a true bargain.

I'm still going through my photo archives so I can copy pics of the quilts I've made to my online album of the same ; this also keeps me from writing and pre-publishing too many posts for the blog. I'm struggling a bit with the latter, I admit. Having only one week planned stresses me out, but I am sticking to that goal of being (for me, anyway) more spontaneous. In some ways it's good for me to stop writing so many posts in advance; that's given me time to do other things like the photo album. 90% of my pics I took either for my old blogs or just for myself, and no one knows what they are besides me. When I'm gone no one will want to keep them, I know, but there are a lot of beautiful memories in my archive (like that one up there.) I'm not important enough to merit having everything I've done preserved, and I doubt my family will care about things that meant a great deal to me because they don't share my interests. So as I'm looking th...

My sewing room scrap bag is overflowing, so I took a night last week to empty and sort out all the leftover fabrics I've saved. Here are all the scraps from the bag -- about 6 month's worth. I often raid my scrap bag for little projects, but twice a year it gets too packed and I've been dumping it in my scraps bin. Since I've already sorted and bagged the bin, I want to do the same with whatever I add to it. Here's the pile sorted. I put everything in piles of small, medium and large scraps, batting scraps, selvages and strips. I also set aside the Halloween scraps for use in current projects, and the bits that are too small to really use in their own pile. Before I've thrown away all the scraps that are too small to reuse, but this time I'm keeping them. I want to see if I can find a way to recycle them as stuffing for pillows or something like that, as I do save my batting scraps. The latter I cut up to make my own fiber fill stuffin...

Last Saturday my guy and I visited Winter Garden for their weekly farmer's market. It was super crowded, so I wasn't able to take many pictures. When we got home a surprise was waiting on my doorstep: the 6.6 lb. tub lot that was hard to estimate due to the fuzzy pictures on the original auction listing. I guessed there would be 35 skeins, and it turned out there are 37 skeins altogether. Most are unused and in very good condition. That includes 16 skeins of vintage fingering weight Bucilla Wondersheen cotton yarn (discontinued in 1952, so it's at least 73 years old) that are absolutely gorgeous. It's definitely worth at least $185.00; perhaps more with the rare vintage yarn being so hard to find these days. I paid $7.99 for the lot, or about twenty-two cents per skein.

I think every quilter makes coasters (or mug rugs) out of scrap fabric, and I'm no exception. I have an overflowing box of them that it's time I cleaned out. With the exception of the two red ones with belt buckles (gifted to me by a friend) I made all of these, mostly by hand. The majority are stitch practice pieces. I have almost enough to sew together into a quilt now. I use these every day on my tables and home office desk, so I won't be getting rid of any. What I need is a bigger box. :) $1.25 for a bigger box from Dollar Tree!

I added a note to m y post about the end of the world (namely, that it didn't end. Again.) but I'm seeing some alarming things online that made me want to write a bit more about the growing amount of nonsense people in positions of influence use to fear-monger and scare others into doing what they want. Don't fall for it. 99.9% of the time you'll discover you're being exploited for purposes of politics, profit or religion. The other .1% of the time it's simply malicious crap instigated by the twisted who find it entertaining to manipulate and terrify the unwary with a lot of lies. I believe nothing anymore. Someone can tell me an asteroid is going to hit our planet in a couple of years, but I'm still not going to buy the doomsday bunker they want to sell me. Same thing with all these weather news entities that have been screeching about this being the "worst hurricane season to date" in order to sell us protection from the storms, b...

The apple applique pattern for this quilt top is one from a magazine that I also made into a quilt and gave as a gift 26 years ago. Did I win it for a $9.00 max bid so I can make it again? Nope, I was outbid by a dollar. I still have the pattern for this quilt, so maybe I should get off my lazy butt and make it again. :) Much of the quilting I did early on when I started was in Asian fabrics, so the fabric of this scarf appealed to me. I put in a max bid of $5.00 for it, and won it for $4.99 with no challengers! If I win it for $10.00, this cute Let It Snow mini quilt will remind me of one I gave my friend and the one thing I like about winter (snow!) -- and I did, with no challengers, for $9.99! Two wins and one loss works great for me. :) Image credit: All of the images in this post come from the original auction listings at ShopGoodwill.com.

To get more in the mood for the holidays I'm planning some other projects like the Halloween quilt I'm working on now. I decided to order two fabric bundles from a new-to-me Etsy seller and use them to make a baby quilt and (possibly) a crazy-quilted tote bag. This is the light green fabric bundle I ordered for the baby quilt. It's enough to make one the size of the Halloween quilt, and I love the colors. This bundle was a mystery bag, and I'm really happy with the prints I received. It's a little more than I need for a tote, so I might make some extra gift bags from it. We'll see.

I'm not having a great month. We got sick at the end of August, which lasted for almost three weeks. Once we finally recovered I tried to get on with my late summer/early fall projects, which has not gone as well as I'd hoped. I don't like depending on others when I'm trying to accomplish major goals, and this month illustrates why. I was obliged to depend on someone else for guidance with one large project this month, but instead I got ignored and that derailed everything. Since I was doing all the work for that other person, that stung quite a bit, but I've let it go. In pursuit of the personal happiness I really need after all the drama, I've been working on reading A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat; it's an English translation that is a little clunky in places because the translator didn't correctly interpret the French, but the meaning still comes through. I love learning about the many ways the foods we eat evolved since a...

Calculating the value of three lots of yarn I just won for less than $28.00 altogether before they arrive here is one of the games I play with things I thrift online. The yarn I thrift is for my personal use, not for resale. I also set limits on my bidding, so it's not about what I think the yarn is worth, but rather what I'm willing to pay for that much yarn. I can estimate in advance the total number of skeins, and if they have labels I can usually track down the current price if I'm unsure of the value. If they are unlabeled, I generally assign a resale price of $3.00 to $5.00, depending on condition and size I see. This 6.6 tub lot was a bit hard to estimate due to the fuzzy pictures on the original auction listing, and the way they partially unloaded the tub as they took the pics. I also think the weight is wrong. I guessed about 35 skeins, worth at least $105.00. I paid $7.99. This 3 lb. lot is easy to count: I saw nine skeins of white yarn. Just t...

Today is the end of the world, right? At least according to some religious person from South Africa (there are so many end-times prophecies that I get these confused, sorry if I'm wrong about the source.) Must be the tenth or eleventh time I've gone through the end of the world, and the world kept going. Fingers crossed it's just another bunch of crap being used to bludgeon people with someone else's beliefs. If you're buying this latest nonsense, consider this: 100% of the end of the world predictions before this one were wrong . There was one religious guy who predicted the end times twelve times and was wrong every single time . Even if this one is right, what can you do about it? Nothing. Live your life, that's the thing that is genuinely going to end someday. Anyway, since I don't believe everything will cease to exist today, I'm putting together an album of all the quilts I've made since I began taking pictures of my work. I...

Here's an example of my ongoing struggles as an older person with new technology: Last week my guy called me out to look at this sky. I like to take pictures of beautiful sunsets, but I grabbed my camera from my office rather than use my phone. Why? Actually I do use my phone to take pictures, very beautiful pictures at that as you see here. But then I have to text them to my guy for him to e-mail them to me because I can't get my phone to e-mail them for me. I've tried to set it up a dozen times, but I'm not doing something right. I managed to get the e-mail working on my old phone, which of course after five years got too old and had to be replaced (I barely used it.) I can't type on this phone's tiny keyboard without making a mistake, which annoys the hell out of me. I can't take phone calls because of my hearing loss, so I only use it to text a handful of people. Honestly, hate these phones. Every time I use mine, I want to throw the ...

Everyone has a different way of budgeting for food, I think. I decide on what we can purchase by a per-person/meal/plate entree budget (or what one person can eat per meal or plate), which used to be $3.00 maximum. Since prices have doubled and tripled on meat, I've had to raise that max to $5.00. The veggies and side dishes I make are all pretty cheap (we grow a lot of our veggies now) so I don't worry about budgeting those. My entree limit pretty much puts beef off my shopping list, as in if the beef I want to buy is more than $10.00, and will only serve the two of us for one meal, I can't buy it. Exceptions: 1. Ground beef, which averages about $8.00 per lb. on sale here. I can stretch a pound to two to four meals (if I make pasta sauce with it, six.) One pound also makes two mini meat loaves, for example. I buy three or four pounds at a time and freeze it. 2. Flank steak, if I can find it for under $10.00 per pound, makes two meals of London Br...

I pieced the top for my Halloween quilt. I should mention another reason I use Atkinson Design's Yellow Brick Road pattern so often for quilts: it's all straight sewing rectangles and squares. After you've made it a few times, it's very fast to put together. For this variation I cut all the pieces in one night (it took a couple hours), pieced the blocks in one night (about the same amount of time), and sewed them together into a top in one night (ditto.) So about six hours from start to top for the baby quilt size. I went out thrifting to find backing fabric, and found this three-yard piece of novelty fabric that seemed like the thing (finding Halloween novelty print fabric in thrift shops is very hit-or-miss this time of year.) I then batted, backed and pinned the quilt top. The cotton batting I used was one small amount that I got in a thrifted lot, and was just the right size for the quilt. I mulled over which quilting thread to use for a bit; I ...

What you see here is what took the past two days to accomplish: our annual cleaning of our carpets before the holidays, which has always been a half-day job. Why? Because I am cursed, that's why. Backstory first: we have very old carpeting in our house, circa 1997, which I work hard to keep in good shape. Twice a year we clean it ourselves with a rental carpet cleaning machine. We're pretty clean people, and keep our dogs clean, but even vaccuuming every week doesn't get up all the dirt. Sidebar on the curse: I have very bad luck during the holidays. Usually I'm not cursed during the preparation for the festivities; the bad luck happens on Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve or Day. Occasionally it will start just after Halloween. Usually. Also, you know how they say "Someday you will laugh about this" whenever disasters happen? Right. No. Never. Wednesday morning we got up early to pick up from our local home improvement store the renta...

While I was out walking the dogs last week I noticed what appeared to be sawdust scattered among the dead leaves on the side of the road. Since it's not a place where anyone would cut wood, I stopped to take a pic to show my guy. Occasionally one of the neighbors will cut down a dead tree in danger of falling across the only road in and out of our neighborhood. I was going to ask him if he knew who'd done the work. Alas, my eyesight isn't as great as it was before my cataract surgery. As I leaned down to focus my phone on the spot I realized the sawdust wasn't sawdust. Yep, it's actually a ton of tiny mushrooms, of a variety I've never before noticed here. I was completely charmed (and fooled!)

Yes, I'm doubling up on posts again to stop myself from pre-publishing ahead of my one-week limit for the blog. I am trying not to be so OCD! Ha. I saw this unfinished quilt top at the thrift auction, and the apple applique pattern is one from a magazine that I made in the past (26 years ago, in fact.) I gave my quilt as a gift to a kindergarten teacher, but I've always wanted one for myself. If I win this for my $9.00 max bid I can make it again with a lovely head start. :) Something about this Asian scarf caught my attention. It looks like an import, and the fabric appear to be cheap synthetics, but the colors are beautiful. Much of the quilting I did early on when I started was in Asian fabrics, but again I gave everything away. I put in a bid of $5.00 for it in fond remembrance of the quilter I once was. I made a Let It Snow mini quilt out of Fabscrap scraps a few years back and gave it to a friend. I'd like to have one for myself, because if I can ...

Since my last two rounds of wannabuts failed I'm now bidding on what I absolutely need for my winter projects, namely yarn. New yarn is insanely expensive these days (starting around $7 per skein), so I'm thrifting what I need exclusively. Resellers are making it difficult to get lots at low prices, however, so I changed my strategy and bid on lots that were less than perfect looking. This 6.6 lb. lot has the brown yarns I want (they're the bottom layer in the tub), so I bid at $8.00 max. All the pics of the lot were fuzzy, so I definitely rolled the dice with bidding on this one. I won it with no challengers for $7.99 -- thirty or more skeins for what I'd pay for one. This lot is nothing but white yarns, the other color I need. White is the hardest yarn to thrift, so I was fine bidding $9.99 for it (and I won it for that price with no challengers!) I've already used up half a bin of white yarn this year so I know I'll go through this in no time. ...