Estate Sale

We popped into the Windsor Quilt Guild show yesterday. What great timing that we could deliver the stuff for Celeste AND visit the quilt show in the same weekend.

I won't post any pictures from the show - well I might later, but I'm up super early this morning and on my way downtown Toronto to drive a truck with water station supplies for the Toronto Marathon. It's a volunteer job I got pulled into years ago. Not many people want to drive the truck and well, I just can't seem to say NO to the organizer. I WANT to say NO.  I'm going to tell him in an e-mail tomorrow that this was my last time.

It's a long day of physically moving stuff around and picking up garbage and I have NO desire to spend one Sunday each year doing that. And it's supposed to be a beautiful day on top of it!!!  At least, I'll be outside and I'm giving them unto 2 PM of my time!

Anyway, we saw this sign on the door outside the quilt show.

Estate sale

This is something that can happen to us all! I just can't imagine all my stuff being sold off for a song to a flock of hungry quilters. But I know that will happen. Unless in an ideal world that I start to downsize as I get older. But how does one downsize one's hobby?

I suppose that you could start with fabric, or patterns, or books? At this stage of my life, I'm still actively using all my stuff so I'm not interested. So I'm going to reevaluate the situation in 10 years.

At some point, also I want to retire from the deadline pressures (but that won't be tomorrow by any means) and then I can totally focus on my own stuff. I know I won't get nearly as much done because there won't be any deadlines so it looks like I'll have to host UFO groups forever in order to get all this stuff caught up!  The deadline for the purchase of F+W Media is rapidly approaching (sometime in June) and no one has stepped up to buy them .... yet. That could be the demise of a lot of printed material for the quilt world.

Anyway, the quilt show was amazing! I saw a number of quilts that I'm currently working on or that are ones that I've partially completed. Yes - would be nice to get those done. All in due time.

After walking the show and looking at the quilts, three things came to mind.

The predominant color: PURPLE. Without a doubt, purple seemed to be huge. There just seemed to be a lot of purple quilts. Yet when I mentioned it to Ronda who loves purple, actually I didn't mention it to her, I asked her if she thought there was a recurring color and she said green! That's too funny. Shows that we look at and interpret quilt shows in different ways.

My second observation was - most common quilt pattern? Bargello by a mile. They weren't all the same bargello, but there were a LOT of bargello quilts.

The third observation was there were a lot of BRIGHT happy quilts.

That normally doesn't happen when I visit a quilt show, but I felt those three things stood out for me. They had some great challenges, some very cute ribbons and a few other things that I thought were well done from a quilt show perspective.

I visited the huge number of vendors and spoke to one or two, but I didn't buy a thing. I guess it's come down to that. I see things that I'm interested in, but I look at the price and then realize that I have two huge shelves of kits that are untouched so I'm going to add to that pile because????  Nope - my brain just won't let me purchase any new stuff unless it's needed.

The fabric type that I was looking for was only available in 1-meter pieces and I don't need that much of any one of this type of fabric, so that killed that idea.

BUT - I do have a weakness for a good bargain. There was this huge table of magazines and books. I don't need more so I didn't look, but I got drawn in and then realized that you bought a plastic grocery bag for $1. Then you could fill it with whatever would fit inside. They must have started with boxes and boxes of stuff. By the time we left and I went back to get my bag, the pile had diminished quite a bit and I swear that everyone looking said, "I don't need more stuff!"  That's a HUGE issue in our hobby industry. We're all aging and all the fabric companies and pattern designers want a HUGE piece of our spending money which we don't really want to spend, but we do. Now, why is that?

Well, I quickly found MUCH to fill my bag. Some, I may already have, most I probably don't. It was too good of a deal to pass up and I do have the room to store the books so I was good. No magazines - just a "few" books. I don't have time to share with you this morning, but I will.

On our way home, we stopped at the used book store in Chatham. It's a HUGE place. I popped in with my list and oh boy - while the books are filed by author, they have not been filed alphabetically within the last initial of the author's name. So all the M's are neatly placed on the shelves, but you have to search through all the M's if you're looking for something in particular which I was.

Needless to say, that slowed my search down by quite a bit. Surprising, I found TWO books that were on my list. One of them has been on my list for a long, long time. I found it!!!  Well, after I found that that book, I was too excited to spend a whole of time searching. I ended up coming home with three books for $8. Two were on my list, one was not. A super deal!!!

OK - time to go. 

Have a great day!!!!


Ciao!!!