Surprise!

The craft and sewing Gods have been smiling on me lately. When I returned from Florida I found that Teri and many special helpers turned the back garage into my craft studio. The change is nothing short of miraculous. When I left the room was hot, dirty and filled with piles of my stuff. Now it is insulated, air conditioned, and dry walled not to mention the transformed furniture.
I cannot begin to imagine how much work and time it took to pull this off. I am so grateful to all those who helped and I can’t wait to have all the girls (and Jeffrey) over for a sewing bee! My wife ROCKS!

So what was the first thing I did after discovering I had my own work space? I scored two fantastic fabric deals at garage and estate sales.
The first was a HUGE bag of “scraps” that are awesome. I really didn’t know what I was going to get when I bought the bag for $5 but discovered lots of large remnants and trims. The woman who owned this had expensive fabric taste, and much of it is Ralph Lauren and high quality pieces. The weird thing is that she liked to cut in the middle. Obviously she had no regard for cost or future use, but I am glad to have her left overs.

Lastly, I ran into an estate sale where the lady was really proud of her stuff, aka the prices were crazy expensive. I saw a set of drapes, they were the old fashioned kind with the hooks on the back side and they looked custom made from ages ago. I liked the fabric, they matched my living room and would look great on the glass doors to help block out the heat, but they were priced at $125 a set.
Then yesterday afternoon Wendy and I were digging in the recycle bin across the street from my house. We found a current issue of House Beautiful (Wendy actually got into the dumpster to retrieve it). Inside the issue were the drapes from the estate sale! Isn’t that crazy! I went back today and they were 75% off so I picked them up for $31.25 Yea!!

Here is the picture from House Beautiful and a close up of the fabric.
I think that Teri took lots of before, during and after pictures of the craft room redo but I haven’t got those to post. Coming soon…