The plan for right now is to embrace my stash and see what I can make with my "good stuff." Doesn't that sound far more productive than sulking and pouting about trying to stay mostly no-buy for the indefinite future?

I've decided to take it thirty days at a time, with very few exceptions. I'm allowed to spend on 90% off thrift store shirts and fabulously cheap estate sale fabric, or batting for quilts that I'm about to load into the longarm, because my access to it is so limited. If I make it the whole month, I'll buy one small thing off of my wish list -- that's batting, backings, patterns, books.

I can do this. I've done it before, but I've got a habit of rewarding myself with fabric and yarn for dealing with stressful crap, and there's far too much stressful crap going on in my life lately. Stuff that'll be resolved quickly won't actually kill any of us, but it's enough to mess up my days and keep me up at night. Add the no-buy thing to that, and I'm getting seriously annoyed.

On the bright side, I've put my foot down and absolutely refuse to speak to Pat the insurance adjuster ever again. And the phone is working for the moment.

I misplaced the notebook with my list of quilts in progress and it seems like I've also misplaced the quilts. I know where they should be, I'm just a little bit hazy on exactly what I'd be looking for. And I'm having too much fun with the new quilts to scroll black through blog posts and remind myself.



The Bento Box is FUN. I could have had it done in a day or two if I'd started with enough lights and darks. As it is, I'm glad I plunged in without counting, and I keep making a few blocks at a time as I unearth suitable prints from my stash.



All of the pieces for Weed Whacker are cut and there are a ton of them. I stitch them together in batches and as long as I keep slogging away at it I guess I'll have a quilt top soon. This is the first time I've laid out what I've got and I really do like it.



I've been reading lots of blog posts about string quilts. I've got a book from the library about string quilts (Not to mention five blocks of that string quilt I started ages ago!) A quilt I saw at the show last weekend finally pushed me over the edge, so I dug through my strings and pulled out all of the gardeny pastels and cut some foundation squares out of the ugliest color of not-cotton I could find.

I wonder if I've got enough fabric to make Alex a cute summery top like this one. I wonder if she'd wear it if I did. Do I remember how to make a ruffle?