Shirt buttons make a happy little plink when they're dropped into an old glass jar.

I've got fantasies about making so many utility quilts from old shirts that I fill up the entire jar and have to start on another one. Might be more realistic if I used one of the smaller jars, but this is the one that was in the front room when I started to tear up my first batch of shirts.

I stopped in at the thrift store again Saturday to drop off some old baby clothes and found two more shirts on sale for fifty-cents each. Neither is yellow, but they're both nice. And the owner had an unsalable shirt set aside for me -- wide blue and pink stripes. Unless I'm missing something really obvious, the "stain" is a teeny tiny dot of what looks like ink.

Those three are tumbling in the dryer with the rest of my laundry, and I found a red shirt this afternoon that's going in the next load.

I drove up to Good Will in Albany this afternoon to see if I could find some cheap tennis shoes for the kids to wear out in the mud. There were no little shoes, cheap or otherwise, and the men's shirts were running eight and nine dollars each. Which reminds me why I don't go into Good Will much anymore.

So we went to two other thrift stores. One has had really cheap sale racks sitting out front, so I thought it was worth a try. Sadly, all of the fifty cent clothing was t-shirts. Where was that rack when I was all excited to try the patterns in the Mason Dixon book?

The shirts inside were running about three bucks each, which is fine for shirts that you plan to wear, but more than my budget. They did have super cheap children's books, which seem to be getting harder to find, so we happily left with a stack of those.

The second store had 90% off of all pink tagged clothing. There were hardly any pink tags to be found, but I got my red shirt for forty cents and a Hawaiian shirt for Heath for thirty cents. By then the two little guys were getting ornery, so we had to leave before I could check for sweaters or fabric scraps. But I'm stopping back in there as soon as I can manage it.

I can't wait for the weather to warm up and garage sale season to start!

Last night, I finished piecing blocks for Mountain Majesties and played with the disappearing nine patch blocks some more. I do like the way it creates whirly-gig-thingies when I lay them out together:



I'm fairly sure I have enough squares to make a baby blanket, and I've got some ideas for a pieced border.