I'm back home for a month or so on winter break, and am glad to be back at The Tin Thimble. When I am not working, my time is used doing non-useful things, like sewing projects for myself, and homework, and watching Dexter...lots of Dexter. But now that I'm home, I am reminded of just how nice it is to work and be depended on, and do useful things.

I spend a lot of time doing housekeeping things around the shop, a lot of filing, and organizing, and cleaning, on top of the fun stuff (like teaching lessons). Upon reorganizing some of our quilting fat quarters, I took a look around our little store and saw it in a new light. To some people who walk into The Tin Thimble for the first time, they might experience...sensory overload. It is impossible to shove the Thimble into any sort of category, for it contains, quite literally, a little bit of everything. Bolts of fabric stand proudly on any available shelf, hand felted works of art are draped over nearly half of the shop, wool rovings burst with a thousand colors along the studio wall, vintage patterns push out of their over-packed drawers, my sister's jewelry case glitters in the light, hand dyed flat wools are stacked in wobbly piles according to color, 5 foot rolls of silk teeter at the end of the cutting table, stacks of trim zig-zag within their fruit crates, and hand made gifts occupy any left-over space. To some, our store might appear like a jumble of colorful, mis-matched, items, however, the longer you look, the more it becomes apparent that everything is, in fact, just exactly where it belongs.