Guild Tag Sale etc.

Yesterday was the Southern CT Polymer Clay Guild’s annual “Tag Sale”. Tag Sale is a misnomer. It’s really more of a rummage or white elephant sale. Basically, members bring in items (books, tools, supplies etc.) that are at least loosely polymer clay related, and they’re offered up for sale to benefit the guild. We load everything onto a big table and members each draw a number. Then we go shopping in numerical order. The first pass you can take one item for one dollar. We do that a couple of times, and then go to two items for a dollar and so on until the remainders are free. Usually the table gets cleared out. The big items are offered for raffle separately. It’s truly hard to spend more than five dollars. And you can stop “shopping” at any time. I only made two passes through, picking up a box of Super Sculpey and a giant t-shirt from our retreat. Not bad for two bucks. Since I am in the mode of trying to clear things out instead of acquiring new things, I think I showed great restraint. Actually it isn’t THAT hard to show restraint, many of the items were, hmmm, let’s just say unusual.

It always feels great to clear stuff out of my studio for this. I managed to unload: a Makin’s pasta machine I’ll never use, an extra plastic gun cartridge box, a couple of typewriter balls, extra glass ornaments, various craft books and extra magazines, an empty scrapbook I’ve had laying around forever and a load of beads from my early beading days (read Michaels or Jo-Anns purchases) or from my kid crafting classes. I love recycling things to other people.

The most charming part of the whole event is our lovely grande dame guild member Genevieve. She doesn’t come to meetings much anymore, but it’s always a pleasure to see her. She’ll be 94 in a couple of months. She’s still crafting. She brought a lovely blue fuzzy corkscrew crocheted scarf as a donation. Soft and silly, it was definitely the most popular raffle item. We always give her number one, and it’s a hoot to see her enthusiasm for the “goodies” on that table. I hope I am that zippy when I am her age.

On the home front, the girls were both sick last week, but seem recovered now. The main source of my stress has been the dogs, specifically Woofie. This is the dog who was supposedly near death last summer. Well, she is still with us and the bane of my existence. Despite medication she doesn’t have great bladder control, so I spend a lot of time running after her and soaking up pee puddles. ick! And for some unknown reason, she has been on a roll of destructive chewing. She’s 9 years old folks! In the past few months she’s chewed up several pens and pencils, my seam ripper (fortunately just the plastic handle and not the nasty metal part or she’d be in doggie heaven now) as well as numerous papers and catalogs (my favorite’s being: a poster board E was supposed to use for a school project and the transcript of my online chat with Dell Tech Support).

Last week she started in on one of my latest knitting projects! This was a tubuar stockinette scarf in a lovely variegated laceweight yarn. grrrr… I had finished about 12 inches of it. double grr… It’s salvageable. E caught her pretty early with the stolen booty in her paws. All I need to do is frog it back a couple of rows and tie in the yarn. I know I should be glad she didn’t completely ruin it. And I should be especially thankful she didn’t destroy my Denise circs, but I am still so ticked off I can’t look at the piece. Lord only knows what she’ll chew up this holiday season. We really do try to remove all possible temptation, but we’ve got kids and they leave stuff around, and she’s really good at getting things off of high places. I’ve been known to leave things around too. (horrors!) And you can’t always guess what she’ll find appealing. Paper? Knitting? Those are new ones.

So, anybody want an elderly sable and white smooth collie? She’s mostly well behaved and sweet. That is, when she’s not peeing on things, barking like a banshee at the world around her or chewing up anything she can snitch. Any takers? *sigh* I thought not.