Dust bunnies

I have listed my first ever (two first ever) auctions on Ebay. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. More ambivalence than anything else.

I'm not attempting to make a career out of this or anything silly, just clean out some closets. I have nearly 6 years worth of a sewing magazine called Burda sitting in my office/sewing room/blackhole that I am hoping to find a good home for. The magazine is really neat--published in Germany (they print it in a bunch of languages, mine are in English), it's a fashion magazine that includes the patterns for dozens of items featured in the magazine. The clothes are always a bit fashion forward and the pictures are georgous, and the magazine is full of neat articles on travel and various people in the fashion industry (not necessarily the ones we'd hear about on our side of the pond either). A subscription costs something like $60 a year, but each magazne has 30-50 different sewing patterns in it.

I loved reading these things every month when they would come, but only attempted a small handfull of items from them. Mostly they were full of beautiful designs that were horribly impractical for my lifestyle--lots and lots of tailored jackets and trousers and dressy separates that would have looked comical in several of my jobsites (which are generally full of frumpy men in jeans or ancient khaki pants, one of them where we all wore shorts and sandals).

Anyway, enough of the sales pitch. I do still like to sew, but have found precious little time for it since Charlotte was born (in fact, my last magazine is dated 5/04..3 months before she was born). It doesn't help that sewing machines make noise, and my sewing area shares a wall with her headboard, so basically I can't sew whenever she's asleep. There's no time in the day when she's awake that I can find more than about 30 seconds to do something childfree, and inviting small children to "help" in a hobby that involves tiny pins, needles, rotary cutters, tissue paper, and scissors is, shall we say, unadvisable. My sewing tables are currently the landing zone for whatever junk has been tossed in the office to be put away "later".

Long story short (too late!), I'm attempting to clean up my junk. I tossed my 10 year old dressmaker dummy (formed to my body out of duct tape, and displaying a waistline and bust that I won't see again in quite the same proportion without surgery) into this week's trash. I sorted all my magazines, and have listed '98 and '04 (both partial years...I only have 5 months of each) on Ebay. I hope they sell. I'm not expecting a positive return on my investment, but if I make $5 on each batch, I'll be ecstatic. I will list the other years once I see how this goes. I have a rickety chest of drawers crammed full of fabric that is going next--I intend to ask at daycare if they want any of it for crafts, otherwise I'll load the large pieces up and head them for goodwill (if they chuck it, I'll never know).

If anyone is crafty and wants any of this stuff, it's yours. I am certainly not getting rid of my machines or anything like that, just fabric and magazines that are collecting dust and reminding me of projects I never made.

For the curious, here are the links to my two auctions:

1998 Burda World of Fashion

2004 Burda World of Fashion