This past Wednesday the episode of The Middle aired that used my scarves! Only the blue one with white stripes was used, but hey, at least I got one scarf on a TV show! It was worn by Marianne Muellerleile. The episode was called “Hecking It Up” and it was about the upcoming Super Bowl. Living in Indiana and working in Indy, I can say the episode was pretty darn funny! You can watch it on ABC’s website and I recommend it.
7 Comments
Posted in Sewing
As I mentioned yesterday 2012 is going to be a life changing year! How you may ask, well let me start by explaining a few things that happened last year and even before that. I hated my previous job, and by hated I mean I broke my hair brush in half and busted out a few kitchen cabinet doors due to frustrations. I do not want to go into any details as I do not believe in focusing on the negatives. This past July I was at my breaking point and started a new job where I get to sew all day long. I absolutely love it. I have so much less stress in my life and am very grateful for the opportunity I had been presented with. But before all this happened Eric and I had attended a meeting for couples interested in doing open adoption back in May. We have been trying very unsuccessfully to get pregnant for just over 4 years now. That is a lot of negative pregnancy tests. At this time the doctors aren’t sure why I cannot get pregnant and so we were faced with a tough decision. We could either spend the money out of pocket for infertility treatments with no guarantee it will work or we could spend the money out of pocket for adoption and be guaranteed we would become parents. The choice was an easy one for us. Adoption had always been something we talked about doing at some point, we just did not realize it would happen so soon. So here comes the hard part, paying for the adoption! The agency we are choosing to go through is Independent Adoption Center (IAC). They are absolutely amazing! Everything we could have ever thought about was answered in our meeting back in May, including a full breakdown of all the costs. Depending on where we adopt from can greatly change the cost. For us to do a domestic adoption it can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $26,000. However, $9,000 of that money is to be paid over a 6 month period, but if you are matched with a birthmother before the end of that 6 month period it is all due then. Now, I don’t know about you but I do not have that much extra money just in case we are matched quickly, let alone enough to cover the total. We are also going to do a few different fundraiser activities to help out with adoption costs, but the easiest way to get some money is by changing my Jo-Ann’s shopping habits. This is where some different New Year’s resolutions come into play.
Throughout the year, I have been throwing all of my receipts from Jo-Ann’s into a fish bowl. About halfway through the year I decided it would be interesting to see what my total spent there for the year is. I think that will help me make some changes. First, the total for all those receipts is $1395.67, and I cannot say if this is entirely every receipt as in the beginning I was not making sure to do this. This also doesn’t include any of my shopping at Hobby Lobby, The French Seam, Mood or Fabric Mart! My point is that most of that money was spent on things I have not gotten around to making. Projects I want to do but haven’t found the time. As of right now I have more sewing, knitting, crafting and scrapbooking projects than I will ever get to finish in my lifetime and I currently have no children to pass on my crafting stash too. This money could have gone to our adoption, but instead I choose to go shopping. This has to change now!
In all that money spent at Jo-Ann’s, I purchased 114 new patterns. Granted I never paid more than $1.99 per pattern, but I only sewed 32 garments this year and some were even repeats of the same pattern. Do I really need to purchase another 114 patterns this year? The answer is a resounding NO! Lately, I have been finding that I am not as impressed with what the big 4 are releasing and that is hopefully going to be a good thing. I cannot promise to eliminate all pattern buying this year, but I am going to limit myself to 1 new pattern per month. I think that is a very reasonable resolution for myself. So at max that would be 12 new patterns this year. It will also force me to do some editing when picking out which pattern I want. Right now I continually go through my stash and find doubles of some patterns or wonder what I was thinking when I picked certain patterns out.
Fabric shopping has been my weakness this past year! I purchased 194 yards of fabric and only used 114 yards. My grand total of fabric in my stash is 440 yards. That is crazy! I do not need to keep buying random project-less fabric pieces, no matter how fantastic they are. This year I am only going to buy fabrics for projects I am working on at that time. I do want to make a dent in my fabric stash this year. However I am not going to make the resolution to use 50% off it. I am just going to keep a tracker on my blog with the total amount of fabric in my collection and what I have used thus far. Maybe seeing the larger number will help me to see that I do not need to buy anymore fabric.
This same thing goes for yarn buying! In December, I did purchase/receive as gifts somewhere around 25 skeins of yarn. I have quite a few knitting projects in mind for this year but I know I will not get to all of them. With that reasoning I know that I do not have time to buy anymore yarn to add to my stash!
So overall, I guess my real resolution this year is to reduce what I am bringing in and increase my output.
