Stash Enhancement

I've done a lot of stash enhancement the past couple of weeks so thought I'd share my booty with all of you.  I didn't plan to get all of these things at once.  It just sort of happened to work out that way.  Really!

A couple of days before my last quilting day at Dawn's I finally received my Schnibbles times two book that I had pre-ordered from Amazon.  When I got home that day I found not one, but two more packages waiting for me.  One of the packages held the other Miss Rosie book I'd pre-ordered, Spice of Life Quilts.  I've read the Schnibbles book cover to cover and it's excellent.  I've flipped through the Spice of Life book and it looks good too.  The Schnibbles book has much more of a "Carrie Nelson" feel than the other, but I think that's typical of books published by Leisure Arts.  They seem to be more standardized and don't have as much room devoted to narrative by the designers.  But, the quilts are still great in that book as well.

The second package contained the beautiful fat quarters that I purchased from Linda.  They are absolutely wonderful and check out the great quilty card she sent with them.

You may also recall that I mentioned in my Binding Party post that Dawn and I had made a quilt shop run that day.  I hadn't intended to purchase anything, but I found some great bargains and then drew an additional 15% discount at the register.  They were having a celebration for the new Janome sewing machine that came out so each customer got to draw for an additional 5 - 15% discount at the register.  And no, I wasn't even tempted by the new machine!!!  The additional features that the new machine has that my machines don't aren't important to me and certainly aren't worth double the cost. 

But I digress.  My point was to show you the bargains that I got that day.  I got these 10 fat quarters for $1.25 each, before the additional 15%, and the thread was marked down to $3.50/spool because they are closing out their YLI thread inventory.  I got two remnants, but only have the wrapper left for one of them because I had already cut it up for a binding, which I've actually changed my mind about, but that's a story for another day.  They even took the 15% off of the sales tax, so all of this was less than $20, including tax.  Can't beat that.

And now for the very best part - free stash!  As part of the celebration, the shop had a jar of bobbins and each customer could put in a guess as to how many were in the jar.  I filled out my little paper, dropped it in, and promptly forgot all about it.  Which was why I was completely lost when the shop called several days later to tell me that I had won the bobbin contest.  I'm thinking "what bobbin contest?"  I finally got with the program and got up to speed in time to find out that I had won a $25 Gift Certificate for guessing the closest.  I almost guessed exactly.  How cool is that.  The actual total was 225 and I guessed 228. 

So of course I had to make another trip back to the shop to get my GC.  I went up last Friday and during that trip I picked up 8 more spools of the YLI thread and a couple of new batiks, which I don't think were even out the previous Saturday when we were there.  Oh, and the most important purchase - a pair of long tweezers.  I decided this was priority purchase #1 after deep cleaning my sewing machine the Sunday before without such a tool and realizing that it would have been quite handy. 

I was pretty darn happy to find these. 

Until I found an even longer pair on Saturday that I apparently already had, buried in a basket at home.  In my defense, I did not purchase the first pair, nor had I ever used them, or I would have remembered that I had them.  They came with the house we purchased in Texas a couple of years ago, which is a great story, but one that will have to wait for another time. 

Anyway, here is my loot from the second trip to the shop.  Oh, and the GC itself was in that turquoise envelope in the middle of the picture.  Isn't it great?

Oh, and for those of you with laptops and cats, please make a note that a cat laying behind the laptop is not necessarily a good thing.  As I was typing this post, the fan on the laptop suddenly started running so loudly that I could hear it above the TV.  As I picked up the laptop to investigate, I realized that Tyrone was not just laying behind the laptop.  He was laying flat against it and had been blocking the vents, which had become very, very hot.  Yikes.  Of course he slept through the entire thing and didn't even lift his head to see why his backrest had moved.