Thrift Store 25 cent Day and Denim Chenille Quilts

There is a thrift store near me that is an outlet location of a large chain of thrift stores. The items are priced based on what day of the week it is, with Thursday being the most expensive at $2.25 per item and Wednesday being the cheapest at 25 cents per item. In Wednesdays, they’re only open from 7:30 am until 11:30 am, so I only go if I’m able to. (If there’s no inventory).  When they close in the afternoon, they get their new shipment from the other locations and discard whatever is left from 25 cent day into the landfills. 

For the last few months, I’ve been making denim chenille quilts in order to practice the technique so I can make several of them for an Etsy shop. I made two for my daughter, one for my mom, and two for myself to keep. Of the two that I kept, one is a rainbow. Denim chenille quilts have denim on the back and regular quilting fabric on the front. The rainbow quilt is denim of all colors of the rainbow on the back with the corresponding colors on the front. Of all five quilts I made for practice, the rainbow was the one I got most compliments on. Here are three pictures of my rainbow denim quilt- one of the denim side,

One of the quilting fabric side, and one to show both sides. 

Because of what a hit it was, I decided that whenever I go to 25 cent day now to buy jeans for these quilts, to get the rainbow colored jeans no matter what- even if the legs are too skinny to get my ruler all the way down, even if they have several tears or are capris so that I can’t get as many squares out of them. This hypothetical Etsy shop needs to have at least a couple rainbow quilts, as well as regular denim chenille quilts made from blue jeans and black jeans with darker black themes on the front. Then I got to 25 cent day today and there were over a dozen pairs of white jeans all grouped together. I threw them all in my cart. A white one would be nice, too- especially since I have over five yards of plain white solid quilting fabric (which I’d alternate with white or off white prints). I didn’t even think of doing one with white denim until I saw them all grouped together like that. 

Below is a picture of my dining room table with all of the 25 cent denim items in colors of the rainbow. There was one purple denim shirt in there!  The rest are all pants. You can see the white jeans under the table. I’ll get to them later. And yes my cat Mitchell is concerned!  

 Another thing I want to learn to do is how to make t-shirt quilts. People charge good money to make these for people out of their old memorable shirts. Memory quilts out of a recently deceased person’s old clothes are a nice thing to do as well, but I would try and do memory quilts as volunteer work. When I told Kevin about t-shirt quilts, he seemed way more stoked about the idea than I ever have been. I told him I would have to do a few practice quilts before I felt comfortable enough either charging someone or volunteering to cut up their deceased loved ones clothing. So he said, just get a bunch of shirts on 25 cent day. And that’s what I did. All of the T-shirts I got were either pink, gray, or tie-dye with warm hues. They’re all in the wash now. 

I also got this skirt:

 

If you can’t tell, those are beads. I can cut those off for my bead stash. 

On the way home, a really old song came on that I had completely forgotten about.  No, I'm not an Eminem "fan" by any means, but I don't dislike him either.  Most of his music all sounds exactly the same to me. However, I have always liked Not Afraid especially the chorus.  

Even more than the chorus, I love the second line in the beginning of the entire song.  

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"I guess I had to go to that place to get to this one."

He says it so matter of fact-  he doesn't say it all dramatically like someone trying to squeeze sympathy out of you.  I suffered panic attacks for ten years: from January of 2014 until about the end of 2022.  I often mention that I do side jobs on apps taking pictures and doing small audits in retail stores.  For a couple of years, that's all I did actually.  I drove my Camry hybrid all over the place and did these jobs in nine states.  Someday, I'll blog more about that.  I would not have done that if not for my severe panic attacks.  Travelling around like that was probably the beginning of my healing.  If I had not done that for those two years or so, I also would not have been working for the inventory service, and if not for working for the inventory service, I would have never met Kevin.  I love living out in "the country" with him.  I love having him as a partner.  We do life so well together.  Four days from now, October 6, will be our one year anniversary.  October 6th is also the day I found out I was pregnant with my daughter in 2006.  I'll blog more about both events on October 6!  But, the second statement in "Not Afraid" is so for real.  "I guess I had to go to that place, to get to this one."  One thing leads to another, leads to another, and leads to another.  Being paralyzed with panic for so long destroyed me.  But in the end, I had to go to that place to get to this one.  When I was a little girl, I used to "know" that when I got to the middle of my life, that I would go through something awful.  I remember being as young as five or six, dreading it, and then quickly putting it out of my head.  I don't know if you believe in the idea of a soul contract, but I understand it a lot more when I look back on that.  I definitely had to go to that place to get to this one.