Wool, Glorious Wool!

We had a brand new Spotlight open recently!  Horray!  Tauranga was meant to get one years ago, but for some reason it never happened.  Well, finally it is here.  I headed off to the opening sale with a list of items, mostly for the birthday party this coming weekend.  I came home with 12 zips.  Each a different colour.  I'm so excited!  The plan is to make some little fabric money bags that are zipped.  As I don't have the fabric yet, I thought I'd start with the zips.  It seemed a good idea to have each bag a different colour or pattern to help differentiate between them.  I'm not sure when this project will actually commence.  I do have a chook cage to build and a birthday party to organise first, after all!  But just knowing I have a stash of beautiful zips in my sewing drawer gives me happy wiggles inside.

Small hands wanting to help look after my new stash!

Another source of happy wiggles was the wool I found!  I came away with the equivalent of 19 x 50g balls.  There were a few pricing disasters.  Namely: I picked up the wrong ball of wool - duh - not on special - grrrrrrrr, silly girl, and it was the LAST one I picked up after carefully checking each and every other ball of wool first, then they gave me a 12.5% discount instead of the advertised 25% off one lot of wool, which I have tried to call the store about, but being opening weekend didn't get through and with it costing us as much in petrol to go back and have the issue remedied I have decided to leave it be and grumble in peace, after all I DID read the docket before exiting the store and didn't notice so I can't really take at least some of the blame off myself for it all!  But even with all the fluff over wrong prices, I still came out having paid $55 for all that wool.  We worked out that makes it about $2.89 per 50g.  That's better than anything I've bought in ages.  It's sad, I used to be able to get wool at around $3 a ball, but the past few years the average price seems to be more like $5.20.  I also got a bit smart before I put it all away.  At least I thought I was.  I fished out the kitchen scales and weighed 8 knitted squares and worked out they are 30g each.  So in theory, that should mean it will take 35 x 50g of wool to knit one blanket.  The thing is, I'm so sure I use more than that!  Ah well, I will have to keep better records on my next blanket.  I am really chuffed with this lot of wool.  I stuck with blues, purples, greys, black and white as I want to do something that is kind of colour coordinated, while still being able to make random squares.  I'd love a decent orange or yellow to go with it but they didn't have any.  I'm adding a bit of multi coloured mohair and some purple cotton to the mix too, just as narrow highlights for some different texture.  I had them lying around so thought they may as well be used!  Of course, now I want to start on the new blanket right away.  Never mind that I still have about a quarter on the current one left to finish!  Hehe.  The idea discussed with Boyo is that this wool will probably be my birthday present.  Unless of course I can come up with some other way to pay for it between now and September!  Grin.