Now I know that vacation time is drawing nigh - I have printed a list of fabric shops in San Francisco, where I will be spending a couple of days after visiting my family in the Midwest US. No matter where I travel (and I love to travel!) I always google for fabric shops before I leave home. Fabric is the ultimate souvenir - unbreakable, neither heavy nor bulky. And I can use it - it doesn't collect dust nor waste space.

Why does it not surprise me that there's a shop called "Far Out Fabrics" on Haight?! I shall have to tear myself away to see the other sights of the city.

Creative energy is at a low point right now - I have a cold, thag you very buch. I'm trying to do low-energy things, such as cleaning my sewing room. While picking up pins from the floor (lucky me, haven't had to use the barefoot method to find them so far!) and placing them in the receptacle in my sewing table, I realized that uninformed watchers could wonder about that - it's a red frisbee. Now why would anyone think to place a frisbee on a sewing table?!

Well, the shape and material are appropriate for the purpose - unbreakable, flat, with edges high enough to keep things in it (it is, of course, upside down, sillies!) yet not so high that extracting them is a problem. And since it is an object that was lying around (one of those advertising gadgets we were given once upon a time), it could just as well be used for something sensible. It houses spools of thread that are about to be used though a different color is in the machine right now, needles and pins (so they don't get onto my cutting mat and ruin the edge of my rotary cutter), buttons that will be sewed on soon - yes, I'll do it tomorrow.

Besides, I'm a patchworker - we're used to keeping scraps and bits and pieces because we think we can use them some day - and we do! So putting the frisbee to use was quite logical, Captain. It used to be called "thrifty" - now it's "ecological". Patchworkers are on the cutting edge of recycling!