Rayen

I subscribe to a quilting website newsletter that is always sending me pics of award-winning quilts. First place this, Judge's Choice that. I'm not terribly impressed with these award winners; most look like they were factory made. Yes, they're intricate and flawless, but they're all starting to blend together now. They all look alike. I preferr to see something that is flawed, weird or just bizarre enough to stand out. Why? I don't know. Maybe for me, perfection is overrated. :) I have come across a lot of strange quilts since I started collecting them. This double wedding ring here, which I've yet to finish quilting, is probably the weirdest -- who would choose these colors for this pattern? But I like it because it is so strange. If I was giving out awards, this one would definitely win first place in Bizarrely Beautiful. Thrifting a bundle of small quilts that I intended to cut up brought me a strange little art quilt. It's beauti...

Let's sort through the embroidery thread that I thrifted as part of a very cheap bundle of yarn, tools and notions, and see exactly what I got. There is a small group of 6-strand floss and a larger bunch of perle thread (looks like #5 to me); both are cotton and marked made in Mexico (I think the DN brand stands for for Designs for Needles.) All of them probably came from those jumbo economy rainbow packs they sell at the craft stores, but that's fine with me. There are 31 skeins of floss, and nearly all of them are unused. The colors are basic, but I can make them work. I counted 91 skeins of perle thread, which is what I most often use with my embroidery. There's a little more color variety with this group, and they're also mostly brand new. So 122 skeins total. Mixed in with the thread I found a plastic holly leaf, which makes me think someone bought this thread for a holiday project and then donated what they didn't use to our local Goodw...

Back In February my guy and I spent a day wandering, and stopped at an antique mall and my favorite junk shop. I ended up with three bags of lovely old things. This cast iron napkin holder from the junk shop was something I've been wanting due to my hand problems, which have made adding napkins to my old one awkward. This one, way easier (and super cheap.) I also got two more bunnies made from old linens at the junk shop, along with some lovely vintage linens for a quilt project. At the antique mall I found this mystery bag of linens, which at $5.00 I couldn't resist (I love a good cheap mystery). Mystery solved: a lovely shabby old apron, two handpainted pillow cases, and a bunch of burlap ribbon.

Back in February my guy and I went down by the lake to watch the sunset, which turned out to be spectacular. For a few minutes the world turned all gold, orange and pink. As I watched it I thought that light truly is what sets the world on fire, and yet no one burns. Darkness can't do this. Neither can hatred. Only light.

I started watching When the Camellia Blooms a few years ago but only made it through a couple of episodes before I gave up on it; I'm not a fan of bar movies, and it was painful to watch what the lead female had to put up with (very similar to my own experiences way back when I was a bartender.) I always wondered how it would end, though, so I decided to give it another try. Warning, there are spoilers ahead! It's an odd series to say the least. It tells the story of Oh Dong-baek (Gong Hyo-jin), a single mother who after giving birth to her child moved to a semi-rural town and opened a back street bar named Camellia. Let me solve one mystery here: Dong-baek means camellia in Korean, so she named the bar after herself. In flashbacks we learn Dong-baek has a pretty hard time with the locals and running her business; she's also the witness to a serial killing. Six years later, Dong-baek meets Yong-sik (the very exhuberant Kang Ha-neul), a cop who basically falls i...

This was a lot of embroidery threads that I bid on, but quickly fell out of the competition as the bids skyrocketed, ending with a winning bid of $68.77. That, in my opinion, is too much money for partially used and blemished perle threads (that's how they were described in the listing), even if you do get the rainbow of colors. The same day I dropped out of the bidding we stopped by our local brick and mortar Goodwill, where I found a bundle of yarn, crochet hooks, knitting needles, notions, sewing thread and yes, two nice-size bags of perle and embroidery floss in a rainbow of colors -- probably twice what was being auctioned online. This kind of thing happens to me so frequently I sometimes think the universe is rewarding me for being frugal. Anyway, I paid $5.99 for the whole bundle. My locally thrifted thread is colorful, pretty, and exactly what I wanted -- for a whole lot less than I thought I'd have to pay (and it came with all the other stuff, too.) S...

How much will three t-shirts, a tablecloth, two napkins and a container of paperclips cost you? If you're a smart shopper who is willing to thrift, not much. Thrift stores regularly have sales on clothes; I got these three -shirts for 50 % off, which made them $2.37 total, or .79 each. New t-shirts run anywhere from $15.00 to $25.00 retail. A pack of paperclips runs about $6.99 retail on average. I got these for .25. Cloth napkins retail for about $2.50 each new; these two cost .75 total. The plaid fabric under everything is actually a tablecloth that new would retail for $20.00. I paid $3.00 for it. Here's my receipt showing the prices and the discount. I paid less than seven dollars for these seven items, and I defy anyone to beat that price for the same quality goods by paying retail for similar items. Even if you shopped exclusively at a dollar store, it would cost you $8.75 (and you wouldn't find t-shirts there, or the other items with...