Far Flung LQS

I've been out and about the last couple of days, and here's my modest haul of new goodies. 

From Bay Quilts, five pieces of Carolyn Friedlander prints and a spool of red Spagetti (yes it's misspelled on purpose, sigh) 12wt cotton hand-sewing threads. I now have a good collection of the very distinctive Friedlander prints and am looking for a quilt project to utilize them. I like a lot of her patterns, but I think I want to design my own. Bay Quilts is such a great store, they display their fabrics in collections, so it's easy to find if you're looking for something specific from a certain designer's collection. 

And one pack of beautiful Rifle Paper file folders from The Container Store. I hadn't been in one of those stores in ages, so I could have bought a million zillion things there, but I was admittedly overwhelmed by the choices. Of the many many things I was drawn to, I either don't need, already have working versions of, or would need to measure to make sure they fit a certain space. But it was super fun to see all the new-fangled solutions to storage. In QuiltMavs we had arrived at the realization that at the beginning of every new year a whole lot of us would go out and buy a new group of POTs (Plastic Organizer Thingies). I always thought that'd be a very fun name for a business that sold thad kind of stuff.

And just to memorialize it, a vintage card I gave to friend Jaye for her birthday. I'm pretty sure I bought this in the 80's or 90's and just thought she needed it this year. The image is from photographer Nick Koudis (on Instagram) and printed by the card company Palm Press. They're still in business since 1980, and they're on Instagram too, cool!

 

Quantity Issues

 

I've been trying very hard lately to cut back on buying excess office supplies. It's been a thing for me for many years. Usually it's pens that I tend to "oversupply" but sometimes it's other stuff. When we had the Metro Twist presentation at Sew Day, the idea of using the tag style post-it notes to mark on your ruler was raised. So I ordered some on Amazon, a "24 Pack" which I pictured as 24 of the 1"x3" tags. Seemed like a lot, but it was the smallest quantity that I could find.

Upon receipt I realized my error, this wasn't 24 of the tag sized post-its. It is basically 24 pads of normal 3x3" post-its that have been cut up into thirds. I now have more than a lifetime's worth of these things. They're useful, for sure absolutely. But am I ever going to use them all up? Not a chance. Good thing they were cheap. My DH is thrilled, apparently he loves this size of post-it, so maybe together we will use up some reasonable percentage of these things. 

The other two things I ordered were for the dyeing class I'm taking in October with Jane Dunnewold. We're going to be labeling the samples that we dye, she suggested little tags and safety pins. Got them! But OY the quantities involved. Luckily they don't take up much room to store.

I think they'll work really well. I can write this small if I really need/want to.

The bigger safety pin is one of the ones I use for quilt basting, this is for size comparison. They really are quite petite these safety pins. And now I have 500 of them. Sigh. Again, this was the smallest quantity I could find. Same with the labels, also 500, so at least that matches up right? I probably needed at most 50, but instead I now have 10X as many. 

Obviously this is all a 100% silly 1st world problems kind of complaint. Not earth-shaking or really all that important of course. I'm calling this the Old Lady Complaint Department now. Still it's annoying to realize that the massive consumer culture I'm participating in has no end of options, except as to quantity. More and more and more is always better or expected. This means all this excess has to get stored somehow, in containers or furniture, which ends up meaning a bigger living space is needed, and on and on. Unless I just throw away the ones I don't use. It's all so wasteful. That's what gets to me the most I guess. At least the containers I'm using for the dyeing class are all recycled glass or plastic containers from food. 

My Home Office

When it's not raining, I'm lucky enough to be able to say that this is my home office:

1. Comfy cushions - ✅
2. Charged up laptop (that is gets a better wifi connection outside than in for some reason?)✅
3. Cut up Cara Cara Orange- ✅
4. Nail Polish because I need some color on my toenails -✅
5. A beautiful day ✅✅✅✅✅✅

Will I get anything done? Well...that's a topic for another blog post I suppose.