I Saved a Bazillion Dollars!

I have hit the jackpot the past week with excellent sales, and I thought I would share them.

First, and there are no pictures of this, I picked through the racks at Fashion Exchange, a consignment boutique in WLR that I visit once a month or so. Their clothes are always in great shape and I have often bought items with the original tags. This time, I scored a super cute Ann Taylor brown and white striped cardigan with green trim, a coral flowy tank from Express, a green and white striped knit knee-length dress with a cute blue sash, and the best--a brown ruffly floral dress with a high-low hem from Anthropologie, for $40! I happened to go on a day when all summer items were 50% off, plus another 20% off two items that had been in the store for more than 30 days, besides the already great consignment prices.

I also placed an order recently with fabric.com, and all the lovelies came in yesterday. The fuschia knit is going to become a flouncy circle skirt, and the lilac a flowy tank.

This fantastic "Mosaic Blue" fabric is a linen/flax blend, with the most beautiful drape. There is nothing more comfortable for Arkansas summers than linen or flax drawstring capris, and now I can make another pair in a beautiful opaque blue.

This teal and grey striped jersey will become a lined dress that I can wear now for comfort while giving tours outside at work, and well into the fall with a cardigan and pantyhose while teaching freshmen why art matters.

Now, to the yarn. Boy, did I hit the motherlode at Yarn Mart, a beloved little shop in the Heights we might have lost recently, had three employees of the store not shouted "Oh no you don't!" to this bully of a small-business economy.

I picked out two big hanks of undyed deep grey baby alpaca for a project for a certain someone to whom I am married. I also grabbed a few balls of coral yarn from the clearance section. When I went to the register, I was told that, during that very hour, all clearance yarn was buy one, get one free.

Then, things got crazy.

I grabbed a bucket and started stuffing yarn into it until I couldn't carry any more. I knocked out almost all my purchases for Christmas crocheting and knitting for less than $100.

Here are some of my favorites:

This soft, greyed-out aqua is a 16-ply cotton from Pennsylvania, and is already on its way to becoming a soft, squishy basketweave scarf. It's a little bluer and a little greener than this sunny photo.

This Italian yarn is probably my favorite of all I got. It's a plied roving made of two colors of undyed wool, and is going to become an extra warm neckwarmer.

These three tweed yarns are merino wool and silk blends with little bits of darker fluff plied in with the pale laceweight silk and fingerweight wool. The coral, which started the clearance madness, is for a ric-rac pattern cowl for my mommy, while the blue and green are going to become a Brioche Cowl, a Purl Bee pattern I've been meaning to try.

This chunky wool/acrylic blend, which is slightly darker than in this photo, has three strands of charcoal, light grey, and mauve, and is for a project for my mother-in-law.

I also bought myself some Elizabeth Lavold Calm Wool, a blend of wool, camel, and alpaca, which has long been a favorite of mine for it's loft. It's soft against my skin without being slippery, so it's perfect for another snuggly giant rib cowl like this pink one.

I spend a little time this morning cataloguing my stash on Ravelry. If only finding a place to store them in my office were as easy and tidy as uploading a link.

All together, I would have spent:

Clothing at original price: $315

Fabric at original price: $104

Yarn at original price: $291

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$710

Instead, I spent $180!

Sometimes, it pays to give a store your email address and deal with the few extra seconds of scanning "spam" emails, to see that there are huge savings on something you needed to buy anyway.