This afternoon I dug through the pile of treasures I’d set aside as possible items to sell on Etsy.   A couple of feet, workbooks, Kwik Sew Book, notions and a pile of chalkboard iron on transfers made the cut.  Setting an appropriate price point was a little trickier than I thought.  Most of my items are unused and still in their original packaging.  They came to me via a neighbor who used to own a custom sewing business.  I think she bought out the existing inventory of a shop that was closing a few years ago.

A little time spent researching similar items on the web yielded  the information I needed to set my prices and establish appropriate shipping fees.  I dutifully took my pictures, but realized when I went to list the items that I’d left the camera cord and card reader at work.  Oh well, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.  No big deal.

Stash (noun) – an assortment of fabric collected with every intention of using it in a project *someday*.

With that bit of background knowledge shared, may I proceed?

De-stashing (verb) – (1) the fine art of culling one’s personal fabric collection; (noun) (2) the stage of fabric acquisition where one refuses to make additional purchases until existing inventory stores are depleted.

BTW – Can you tell I’ve been reviewing dictionary skills and parts of speech with the fifth graders?

I am officially on a fabric diet.  My stash runneth over and the projects I bought to do “someday” are taking up too much valuable real estate in my stash closet.  So except for the balance on my Joann’s card and the $40 Groupon to Intown Quilters, I have no more funds allotted to fabric until the UGA throw quilt, Christmas throw quilt and one of the baby quilt kits are completed. Completed means quilted, bound and ready to use.

My Etsy store is set up.  I need to get five items photographed and listed.  Like Nike says – just do it!   These items were all gifted to me by a former neighbor.  I helped her clean out 30 years worth of sewing stuff.  The bulk of it was donated, but I kept the notions, vintage patterns and cool fabric I thought I could sell to raise funds for our reading dog work.  While I gladly volunteer my time to do my therapy dog work, it does require some cash to buy the books, prizes, treats, supplies, uniforms and liability insurance required by the program. Guess I will do a little comparative shopping to see what to list my items for and then guesstimate the shipping costs.  Hope to have the items listed by week’s end.

While on vacation, I picked up a pretty, throw-size quilt kit @ Quilter’s Way for about $30.00.  The shop had marked down various unsold kits and offered an extra discount on sale items that day.  Staff had modified the “Just Can’t Cut It” pattern that I already had at home for a 9″ block.  The price was certainly right as I was looking for inexpensive, easy tops to make so I could practice free motion quilting.  My thinking was I could either donate the finished quilt or give it away as a gift.

Well, I’m to the point where I can start assembling the quilt top.  Tonight, I went on a mission to get all of the parts to the project together and put it in one of my ArtBin containers.  I couldn’t find all of the pattern instructions.  I turned my sewing room inside out looking for that instruction sheet.

To make a long story short, yes I eventually found the missing page.  However, my sewing room looked like a war zone by the time I’d finished.

It took three hours to clean up the mess.

But it’s clean, everything is in its place and I am READY to sew tomorrow.