Couldn't resist sharing this...

A Light Bulb Moment in Target!

A friend and I went on a road trip yesterday to the nearest JoAnne's and hit Target while we were in the neighborhood.  We weren't 20 feet inside the store when I noticed a display of picnic/cook-out items including this wire thing... the likes of which I've not seen before.

 It's a picnic or cookout caddy....  says so right on the tag!

The display had red, blue, and green caddies and I resisted....   until I made my way to the outdoor section of Target and saw the white version.   I had to have one..   you see, I already have a picnic caddy on the back of my cutting table, which I've been using to store stuff related to cutting fabrics.

However, the blue caddy is much smaller and the heavy scissors fall out when I bump the table... the back section (for napkins) is really too small for the templates I've accumulated.   The blue caddy has almost slid off the cutting table when I accidentally nudged it.  I clearly need a larger/ heavier one, yes?

The front and back sections, which are for napkins and plates, did not have the wire mesh bottoms like the utensil sections but I cut some white cardboard to fit....  and now, small stuff won't fall through.

I didn't have any small plastic "glasses".... the small ones that I used with my kids when they were learning to hold and drink from a glass for the first time...  that would fit in the napkin section to use as "pencil holders" but I did find two toilet paper rolls ready to go to the recycle bin.

I covered those with one of those nice bags you get at gift shops sometimes that are printed with old-fashioned florals.

The tubes are a bit small so I will look for small plastic "glasses" to take their place since they will be heavier and less likely to move around/tip over.

It was fun loading up my new cutting table caddy... so much room!   Stuff fits!  Stuff doesn't fall out!   Wooo hooo!

There's even a bit of room for a few more templates.... which is a good thing because there are a couple under piles of fabric on the cutting table that I need to find...

A Favor for a Friend

As some of you may know, if you sew... everyone thinks you can do N-E-thing at all!   So, my friend Lea, who won a quilt at a Red Cross fund-raising auction, brought it to me to figure out how to hang it on the wall in her living room.   I pondered on how best to do this and toured the local home improvement emporium for ideas.

I picked up a package of Command Strips (which I had used to hang the Mary Engelbreit wall hanging in the psych office) with Velcro-like stuff to put on the wall and the hanger strip.

The wood/board strips that were long enough were thicker than I wanted them to be but then... I stumbled on to yardsticks in the paint department...   for 69 cents each!   Instead of cutting one of the yardsticks and then trying to figure out how to connect them....

 

...I put two Command Strips on the yard stick and stuck them together with the Velcro-stuff, overlapping the yard sticks in the middle.

I made four "sleeves" and pinned them to the back of the quilt...  since I was too lazy to unsew the binding and attach the sleeves in the traditional way.   The spaces are where the Command Strips will be stuck to the exposed yardsticks.

On the front of the quilt, I stitched in the ditch to sew on the sleeves.

I inserted the yardsticks and pinned the bottom of the sleeves to the quilt before sewing down the sleeves.  This way, I was sure the yardsticks would fit in the sleeves when I was done!   

The yardsticks DID indeed fit and I rolled up the quilt before taking it over to Lea's house.  Presentation is everything, don't you know?

Once we got the quilt up, we sat for a while and admired it...  it looks perfect in its new home!

 

We adjourned to Panera's for an early dinner and returned to find the quilt was still(!) hanging on the wall just where we put it!

Another task crossed off my "to do" list!