Quickie Question: I Saw It In the Window and Just Couldn’t Resist
By Twistie
We’ve all done it. You know how it is. You look at something and it just begs you to buy it and take it home. We’ve done this with shoes, with jewelry, with pets, with gourmet treats, and yes, we’ve done it with crafting equipment and supplies.
Sometimes the impulse buy is as small as a hank of pretty embroidery thread. Sometimes it’s huge, like the floor loom you found at that garage sale. Sometimes it’s as practical as a small magnet to help you gather up pins that have dropped in your shag carpeting, and sometimes it’s as silly as a toy mascot for your kiln.
My biggest crafting impulse buy? Well, it was actually the kit that got me started with bobbin lace. I was leafing through an issue of Threads magazine, one day in the summer of 1990, when an ad at the back caught my eye. It said: Learn to make Bobbin Lace.
As luck would have it, I had just been reading a rather fascinating history on the rise of machine laces in the nineteenth century (yes, my reading tastes have always been a little on the obscure side, why do you ask?), so the idea of learning to make lace by hand struck me as the perfect combination of esoteric and mildly revolutionary.
My check went out with the next morning’s mail, and I’ve been tossing bobbins ever since.
So how about you? What was your best crafting impulse buy? Or your worst? Or simply your least explicable?
July 18th, 2011 at 11:01 am
I bought a spinning wheel in almost working order at an estate sale last year. It was only $30. I keep meaning to get it tuned up and working properly (I don’t spin. Yet.) but it still hasn’t happened. I don’t regret it, tho.
July 18th, 2011 at 3:02 pm
I’ve got both a 35-lb box of plaster gauze and 4 500-count boxes of Day-Glo-colored drinking straws kicking about the attic as remnants from past sculpture work I’ve done. The straws get a surprising amount of use as plant supports/wind breakers for my garden. I’d originally gotten that much of both things to get the biggest bang for my buck, so to speak, but I didn’t realize how much I’d actually use, or rather, not use.
It beats the 2 gallon-sized plastic bags I had full of egg shells, though. At least plaster gauze doesn’t smell when it gets warm, heh.
July 19th, 2011 at 4:32 am
I bought a large embroidery hoop on a stand in a junk shop the other day. In perfect condition. Right now I hang clothes which need to be mended over it, but I swear I’ll use it for embroidery someday!
And then: Kidsilk Haze. In fuchsia and apple green. How could I resist a yarn that soft and beautiful? It lived with me for three years before I started knitting with it (the fuchsia for now). But to see it was to love it and hence to buy it.
Inexplicable? Tatting shuttles. I have three at the moment. And I don’t even particularly like tatted lace. The spindles and bobbins I bought on impulse might at least see some use sometime in the future. Besides, they’re decorative, so I can have bowls of bobbins standing around and hang clusters of spindles on the wall and enjoy them. But tatting shuttles?
July 21st, 2011 at 1:09 am
I once bought a hand made turned wood crochet hook just because it was so beautiful. I didn’t learn to crochet for another 20 years, by which time I’d lost the hook.