Monday, February 6, 2023

Three Moves Equal a Fire

My mother said, "Three moves equal a fire. You need to settle down," to a co-worker that kept hopping from apartment to apartment. I know Mom understood that from having to move repeatedly as a child. Anyway... 

 Later this week, I will be loading a bunch of boxes into a U-Haul trailer and taking them to Burke, Virginia. I am moving out of Wisconsin. Yes, me. Myself. I. Not we or us. Just me. Sigh. Not a fire, but almost as good. I've gotten rid of all sorts of things. Still not quite as much as I would like, but I have sorted out my sewing stash into three different stacks of materials. 

Stack number one is the stack for quilts. I've got one quilt that's an actual kit and another that's a pile of well-chosen fabrics. This is my smallest stack. 

Stack number two is the stack for clothing for me. It's a larger stack than I thought, but the fabric is all stuff that I want to use for items I already have the patterns for. I don't plan on needing to purchase clothing for myself for a long while. 

Stack number three is the stack of stash that I can turn into items for sale that will become cash. This is the largest stack, but since I was able to connect with several women in the throes of their own de-stashing fits, it cost at most, $2/yard. For really nice quality fabric. An entire armload was free. I have been poking my toes back into the craft show scene. Mostly I do domestics as in kitchen towels, bowl cozys, grocery bags, and the like. Even better, I am getting the patterns from YouTube, so I don't pay for them. I've been collecting them into a book so I can grab it and look up the dimensions I need to cut to get sellable product from each piece in the pile. When I have a more permanent address in Virginia, I'll register my business. For now, in Wisconsin, I fall into an exemption class and don't need to do that. 

If the fabric doesn't fit into one of the three stacks, I don't really want to keep it and in most cases, I haven't. However, fabric makes great packing material. Pun intended. I am using fabric instead of paper to cushion my fragile items. I really enjoyed watching my delicate tea set get safely packed away at the same time a heap of fabric got used to protect it. I didn't have to pack the fabric, I used the fabric to pack.

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