Coming Up for Air

Okay, the last few days have been a bit of a frenzy.  It's my aunt's fault really.  She shared a link to the Moda Bake Shop's Framed in Quilt, which I loved, because of course I love scrappy quilts.  This quilt was designed by Little Miss Shabby, whose site I also visited and loved.  So I put both in my blogreader to follow (you can do that when you have a blog, it's very fun.  I think you can do it even without a blog, but I haven't figured out how yet).  That was how I found out about the "Giveaway Day" at Sew Mama Sew, which is when hundreds of blogs get together to have a big blog party and give stuff away.  I have spent every last free moment of my time for the last two days visiting blogs to see what they're giving away and putting "pick me pick me!" type comments to try to win some of their fabulous loot.  It's inspiring to see how many other fun blogs there are out there.  I'll be excitedly watching my inbox to see if I won anything.

Of course, what I was supposed to be doing for the last few days was not trying to win new stuff, but to slim down my old stuff.  The stack of craft stuff to clean and organize has moved away from the wall and is now spread out through the family room.  Yarn is organized, some quilt projects are organized, but I just discovered a moth infestation in some of my older spinning fiber and a stack of cards and letters from my wedding (19th anniversary is later this year).  I have numerous plastic bins but some are missing lids, and I have some random lids with no bins.  I keep getting sidetracked with archeological finds like my rug hooking and that triangle rag rug I was knitting at least 3 years ago.  I'm going to finish it, by gum! And of course, the kids need my attention every few minutes and I have to teach school every morning.

Now that I know about it, the Sew Mama Sew giveaway day will be something I want to participate in next time around.  Too bad that I wasn't ready for it this time, because I could make up several nice prize packages - scraps that I'm not in love with anymore, leftover cuts of fabric from quilts, some vintage things I've picked up here and there, extra balls of yarn, quilting magazines and books.  It will be fun!  I'll have to figure out how to run the "random number generator" thingy they talk about to choose winning comments, and I'll probably have to recruit tech help to set it up, but I can do it.  And now, I'm off to do more cleaning.  Steve is coming back from business travel tomorrow and it would be nice if he could walk through the family room.