No CAMs, but hey ! Fabric !

Current Mood : Relieved, now that I've had some 'me' time. 

At least today’s mail was mostly ads. No new cards of banking doom, but no good surprises either. I’m OK with that.

We’d had an intense storm all night, with lightning so close and bright, it was like watching white silver chains being flung from cloud to cloud. We also got about three minutes of pea-sized hail about 6am. So much for getting back to sleep ! Oliver-kitty showed up at our bedroom windowsill, looking bedraggled and upset when it ended. I wondered what hail must seem like to a cat. ‘Wet cold rocks from the sky’ is probably a fair guess. Everything was soaked, so Beloved Hubby was home all day. He and Dearest Son played various Lego games for hours on the Wii.

I was restless and jittery all morning, so I volunteered to run some errands Beloved kept putting off. He knew – ‘cause I told him ! – that I’d look for those Create A Monster guy dolls while I was out, and he was OK with it. I hoped I’d find ‘em because I really wanted them, but hoped I didn’t, as that cash is needed at least six other places, too.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a real concern. Two months after taking down all the ‘Sweet 1600’ shelf talkers and other signage, our stores are literally swimming in the dolls. Well, the girl dolls, at least. Not a single Clawd, and only one or two Clawdeens to be seen. There’s also a full complement of ‘Skull Shores’ dolls, minus the Frankies in any color and Gil. Lots more Cleo vanities and dress-up bits, but few doll clothing sets or other dolls. Like I saw at another store a couple weeks back, Mal-Wart evidently got all the remaining one-torso CAM sets available. I must’ve seen a round dozen Dragon/Werewolf sets. I’ll bite if they go on markdown, but no way otherwise.

Instead, I got to spend some time in the new fabric section ! Most Mal-Warts dumped their fabric and notions sections a couple years back, citing low returns on the square footage, but most sewists know that we may come in for cheap thread, but leave with some new fabric, something for dinner, the new notebooks Junior needs for school, a soda…half of any retail outlet’s biggest job is just getting foot traffic in the door. Fabric sections help bring a lot of crafty folk in, and once they’re in, they usually find something to buy ! Plus, it all started vanishing back when it looked like M-W was trying way too hard to be a low-rent Target. In any case, the fabric is back, and while the cutting table and pattern sections may be smaller, if anything, the material choice got bigger ! I saw so many new designs that aren’t at Hancock Fabrics or Hobby Lobby. No dollar a yard fabrics, but it may be early yet.

I really enjoyed the 99c fat quarters ! They had several pretty prints in a mostly-empty rack, but the red musical notes on black really caught my eyes. It may still be ridiculous to pay a buck for a quarter-yard of fabric, but the ones I’ve seen lately elsewhere are inching towards $3. ! On the bolt shelves, a glittery cat-and-butterfly stripe shimmered with potential. I got a quarter yard of it, because more would be too much ! It really is kinda gaudy. There’s a matching bolt of just the black cats scattered on bright pink glittered fabric, but the cats were too big for doll scale, and the print was too visually overwhelming for me-scale ! That was a truly hot pink !  

Also, Target’s got a good sale going for you Barbie fans ! Everything is ‘buy one, get the next one 50% off’ now. I asked, and that does extend to doll clothes, and even the Stardolls our local one had on markdown for $14.99. So tempting…but I decided to hold out for the CAM guys. Here’s hoping they show up when we got money !

Not sure yet if we’ll have to sell her, but I got Starlight’s tag renewed anyway. After the fiasco with FIL and the blue truck, I take no chances with plate renewal anymore. Also paid the ridiculously overdue cutoff notice electric bill, which ranked. Especially after we got a call from our apartment complex yesterday, telling us they’d have several more available units in two or three days. So tempting, to let the overdue bills here go, and move already. Only reason we didn’t is because there was no way MIL would be ready to leave it all Friday or Saturday. And it would be sort of unfair to ask her. Heck, we just last week got her to agree to come with us next month ! She doesn’t know about the latest round of bounced checks yet, but we’ll have to tell her today. That’s one task Beloved Hubby will have to do himself.