The Motherload of Yard Sales

I love yard sales. Today especially. See the stack of goodies I came home with?

Here's a better view of it all. This is the yardage I bought. The lady who was selling it had a huge, long table full of bolts of fabric no longer on their cardboard. This was her personal stash ... the part she was clearing out. She has tons more in her sewing room. This is just some of the stuff she wanted to declutter. I wish I had taken my camera along. The table was stacked about 2 feet high and was one of those really long tables - or maybe even two of them put together. She was asking $3/yard for the good stuff, and $1/yard for cheaper brands. Most of what I got was Moda and other good quality fabrics. When the lady measured out the fabric, she was very generous. Anything under a yard she just said, "Oh, I'll just give you that." And for larger chunks, she just measured whole yards, so if something was 3 7/8 yards, she only charged me for 3 yards. And her yards were very generous too - more like a yard and a half. Now, sitting here at the end of the day, my biggest challenge is NOT running back out there and seeing how much she would take for all the rest of it - ha - like I have the money or the space for that!

Here are some close-ups of some of my favorites ...

This one will work well with my turquoise and red hexagon quilt.

This is a beautiful batik and it measures over 12 yards! She also threw in a "scrap" of this fabric that is over a yard. This one piece alone would have cost almost double what I paid everything I bought if I had purchased it in a quilt shop.

The flower fabric is flannel. I have just the project in mind for it ;)

So many cute, girly fabrics! And I have all boys. Well, all that want stuff made for them anyway. My daughter's a little over that. There were so many more cute girly fabrics that I didn't buy.

This is my favorite find. I had wanted to make a quilt of this set when it came out, but couldn't justify the expense at the time. Now I have several yards of each print. I think the flowers measured 6 yards or so. I don't remember the others.

I didn't get a close up of the red with orange dots, or the purple with stars and moons.

The cowboy print at the top has quite a bit of yardage to it as well. She wasn't cutting anything, so what she had left was what you had to buy. I would have bought a lot of other fabrics if she would have been cutting them, but I didn't need nearly a full bolt of them. Plus, that gets pricey pretty quickly.

This is about 1/2 yard of fleece, which she gave me for free. I think I'll see if it's enough to make the 2 year old a jacket. Otherwise I'll add some solid colored fleece and make a blanket.

I got this over-sized box of scraps for $2. Some of their "scraps" are over a yard long - many are at least an eighth. All are big enough to easily be usable.

There's more than a yard of this purple, which was in the scrap box. It has the best feel of any of the fabrics.

The first thing I did was to dump out the scraps and sort them all. This large pile of scraps will work in the tone-on-tone color scheme of my Farmer's Wife quilt. There is every color of the rainbow in this collection - in several shades, as well as grey, brown and black.

I obsessively organized all the Farmer's Wife scraps into color order :) so I could easily find them. I thought that would be especially useful since I am currently working on that quilt. Or at least I would like to be working on it. I don't seem to be making much progress, having only completed two blocks so far. Having these scraps will enable me to practice paper piecing without feeling guilty about wasting my fabric!

There was a good assortment of white and cream linens in the scrap box - some are pretty big pieces. I can see these being the backdrop for my new obsession - embroidery!

Of course there was a pretty good size pile of ugly fabric too. No offense to those of you who are into tropical flowers and ocean life. It's just not my thing. I'm thinking these will still be usable though if I use them in a very small scale - maybe a postage stamp quilt - or even the small pieces of The Farmer's Wife.

So, it was a very good yard sale day. I also managed to pick up a king size set of vintage sheets. I intended to use that fabric to make more reusable grocery bags, but since they're king size, I might just keep them for the bed. I'll have to look them over and see if they're in good enough condition for that.

We also had our yard sale today - at a friend's house. We didn't do as well as we had hoped, but managed to raise some money for the parsonage windows and siding. Every little bit counts, I guess. And an added bonus is that we have cleared out a lot of stuff. We filled our Ford Excursion twice, and also the back of a truck, so now the garage (and our closets and kitchen) feels really spacious. Our next project is to go through and organize everything we have left. Then I want to get all of my books cataloged into a computer program so I know what I have and where to find it! And some sort of cataloging system needs to be worked up for the sewing room too... I just have more projects than I have time for - as usual. :)