Friday, July 31, 2020

Dollar store JOY

When my kids were young and money was super tight, Christmas was stressful.  And then a friend introduced me to dollar stores.  Oh, what a find!!!
I could take my kids Christmas shopping for their siblings without breaking the bank.

Fast forward to my youngest child in high school and beyond.  She loves exploring the inner nooks of dollar stores more than most people.  She LOVES to decorate for every holiday imaginable but she's careful with money.  

Enter dollar stores.  To be specific, Dollar Tree.

It's a beautiful thing because everything is exactly $1.  So if you have $5 and change, you can buy 5 items.  (Don't forget some change or you can only buy 4 items and still pay tax.

The addiction is real.  I dropped in for posterboard today.  A big sheet of white posterboard is only 50 cents.  That's right.  50 pennies!  If that's what you've got, they'll take the pennies.  (Be kind to the cashier though and don't bring $5 of pennies!!! Take that to your bank.)

And today, you even get to feel like you helped the economy even more by putting coins back into circulation!

So what kinds of things can you buy?  Everything!  Here's what I picked up:

Lay's Stax. Because I have a canker sore in the back of my throat and Lay's helps clear those up.  I picked up Barbecue ones for other family members because they like them!  $1

Posterboard, but I found a package of 4 that were already cut down to the right size. I could have saved a bit by cutting it myself, but why?  We'll use these in record our ideas of things to do rather than a white board right now. It will be messier, but we'll see what has been crossed off instead of erased!  I already have markers!


A notebook for keeping my lists of things that I still need to get done.  My to-do list, if you will.  Arrow tabs to bookmark to-do, journal, or ideas that I record for easy referencing. Crepe streamers in pink, yellow, and purple to decorate our house as needed.


A pack of 3 small notebooks that will fit in a small pocket on my purse so I can record ideas and impressions whenever they come.  Dollar Tree excels at keeping an excellent variety of stationery items!

Closeup of the designs:

Lined pages inside: 

Finally a cute little bucket to hold pens and pencils!

I love Dollar Tree!



Thursday, July 30, 2020

It's DONE!

Today it's a balmy 77 degrees outside with 70 percent humidity, and I took my dog for a walk.  I had grand designs of going and walking the Rocky Ridge Reservation later today, but THAT's not going to happen now!  It's far too muggy.  I'm beat!

Last night I put the finishing touches on the quilt I started 7 months ago.  It's a throw quilt designed by Angela Walters for a virtual quilt along, Help! How Do I Quilt It?  that she did late 2019. 

The border is not part of Angela's panel.


 I started this in January.  After quilting ferociously for a few months, my hands started yelling at me with arthritis pain so I backed off.  Life intervened, COVID19 happened, and I went to help my parents in another state.  

Coming home, I didn't even want to touch my sewing machine, let along free motion quilt!

After several weeks, I decided I needed to finish the project.  After all, I was almost finished already.  That said, I didn't want to do much intensive free motion quilting so I snapped on my walking foot and broke into it with straight lines.  Ultimately I moved back into the curvier designs that need my FMQ foot, but I kept it to short spurts.


Seven months after beginning this, it's done.



The back is quite colorful and I love the colors!

Close up: 

Full length:

It's happy and colorful!

I ran out of the ombre fabric so I ran by a local quilt shop and found this:


Back and front at once: