When I first started knitting and quilting I read stories about how stash, sometimes lots of it, just fell into people's laps. Even after Alex and I were given a nice pile of yarn that had come from my great-aunt's dentist's wife's dead mother, I still had my doubts that so much yarn and fabric was just floating around in search of a home.

I'm starting to believe it.

Thursday, I called a quilting friend to see how she was doing. Turned out she was on her way home with a few bags of scraps in the trunk of her car that someone had called to see if she could use, but she didn't have the heart to bring them into her own sewing room and deal with them herself. Did I want her to drop them off at my place?

Personally, I'm still at the stage where the answer to offers of free quilting cotton is always yes. I can find plenty to do with two large white trash bags of strings and crumbs. Not sure what that'll be yet, since I'm focused on finding three inch strips for the Bento Box quilt and 225 different calicos for the curved one, but knowing that it's there waiting for me makes me very happy.

There will be quilt tops in my future, whatever other stupid crap may happen. If it seems like my priorities are skewed here, I've got confidence that we'll buy groceries and pay the mortgage and everything else, but fabric and yarn, which aren't a necessary part of the budget, might be severely limited for a while.

If I was buying my supplies one project at a time, I'd be very worried, but I've got crumbs and strings and scraps, not to mention a whole bunch of UFOs.

Yesterday, my best friend talked me into going shop hopping with her. She was seriously after fabric, but I was just along for the ride. I was kind of hoping to find another Moda scrap bag with dark colors, which would make finishing my Bento Box much easier.

At the first shop, I found a bunch of nice fat-sixteenths that should be perfect.

The second shop had scraps for fifty cents and ounce. A little rich for my blood right now, but I dug through the big basket to see if there were any good dark florals for the Bento Box. No luck with that, but there was a huge bag of scraps sitting on a shelf with a piece of paper taped to it.

$4.00

It didn't seem like that could possibly be the price. From the outside, it looked like mostly little pieces. I had those two brand new bags of scraps in the sewing room, not to mention the big box of calicos I got at the yard sale last week.

I walked away from the bag. I followed my two preschoolers around while my friend picked out fabric for an entire quilt shop. The differences between her fabric shopping style and my fabric shopping style are endlessly entertaining.

I decided that if I didn't ask if that was actually the price, I'd regret it. There was a little handful of novelty prints from the scrap basket that were too neat to leave behind, so I went up to the cash register feeling stupid -- four bucks was just too good to be true. Grandma usually spends more than that for the scrap bags she finds at the thrift store, which are about the same size.

It was four bucks -- and she threw in the handful of expensive scraps! I haven't had a chance to spread it all out yet and see what's actually there, but there are some fairly big pieces in there including a bunch of black wool felt. I'm not sure what I need that for, but I'm sure it has something to do with birds.