Nothing planned for today

Today is Wednesday and I have nothing planned other than to do as I please today. The weather is gray and more rain to come. I went to a antique and used furniture store in my home town the other day. I saw many neat ideas and some beautiful used furniture. This store sets the furniture up into small room like settings. There were dolls, pictures and furniture and also piles of fabric. As I looked farther I found eyelet lace. I make doll clothing and also childrens clothing and it comes in handy to have it so when you sew early in the morning you can embellish something without waiting until the stores open. Each of these larger bolts were only $2 and the smaller was $1.50. If I went to the fabric store we would be looking at about $20 of eyelet. Didn't get a chance to look for buttons. A lot of times they are in Mason Jars and it is fun to go through a jar of old buttons. I did that a lot as a kid. My Grandmothers both sewed and they had jar after jar of buttons. We live on a bank of a river and about 6 miles up stream there was a button factory. They used the shells to make buttons that were sold in the stores. Sometimes as a kid you could find a shell with a button shape cut out of it. The shell wasn't right for more buttons so was discarded.

Not far from here about 30 miles was a garment factory in the 50's. I can remember my Grandmother going to this factory and walking in a back door. She would come out with a big box of fabric scraps. The fabric that was cut off of the bolts and the patterns were cut out had scraps they couldn't use. They would cut layers and layers at a time and she would buy the fabric by the pound and use it for quilting. I have a quilt top she used the fabrics in to make the pieces she used in this quilt. It cost her next to nothing to get this fabric and she made quilts for all of us when we were kids. She didn't use garments that were worn for her quilts, but instead went to the garment factory and got scraps from new fabric. This was all when fabric was only 36inches wide when new. When I was going through this resale shop I remembered going to this garment factory and also the button factory I had heard about when I was growing up. Another factory I remembered in this area was a Freeman Shoe Factory. You went by the factory in the hot summer and you smelled the shoe leather and the polish that was put onto the shoes when they were completed. Times gone by and things have changed so much you don't see the sights and sounds of the old days. Chris