Well, I'm poorer but...

THIS is now mine:

From Amazon, with love.

I've wanted this book since before the only people who cared about the "Kardashians" were folks who just couldn't let the O.J. Simpson trial go.

It's been on my Amazon wish list for a while in the original hardcover printing. Back when I added it, the book was selling used for about $160.00 on a GOOD day. I work at a book store and appreciate the value of the printed word well enough, but $160 for a single book is a major life event for me. (For me and my neighbors. As it turns out, I live in one of the top 10 most impoverished states in America. The statistic also reflects obesity rates and education ranking. So we're winning at being poor, fat AND stupid. But it's nice to be in a top-10 list of any kind when you're from South Carolina.) I started saving money to buy one, then noticed the price dropping on the hard backs last year and fortuitously found out that a paperback reprint was due out this year! The official release date is February 28th, 2012, but apparently the publisher didn't get the memo because I'm holding my copy right now. 

Final price? Under $30. This is good for a lot of reasons, but namely because it's a fantastic source and now it will be readily available for a new generation of collectors, seamstresses, reenactors and historians. And people who have a fetish for large books with waistcoats on the cover.

Second Boo-Yah of the day concerns the purchase of fabric. Tax season is a good time to buy fabric, if you've got the capital laying around. Great sales abound in-store and online. I love Fabric.c*m for the variety and general value, but it's like a giant flea market over there sometimes. You never really know what you're going to find.  It's been admittedly dry lately, and I had half a heart to disregard the pleas of the petulant nymph pimping a pile of cotton novelty prints in their recent email advertisement. I'm glad I didn't. They currently have a remarkably good selection of wools (some blends in there, but a lot of 100% too) including some great olive green wool melton for under $4 a yard, and several lovely twills and merinos for under $7 a yard. 

So yes, there shall be wool via FedEx as well as some necessary osnaburg. I am in the last leg of the Dreaded Jehossee project and I ran out of osnaburg a few weeks ago as the direct result of making "rustic goat pillows" for unsuspecting friends and family for Christmas. I got yer Christmas present right here...

Upcoming: I will attempt to post some pictures and notes regarding the construction and patterning of my 18th century leather stays in the upcoming week. A fellow blogger is making a pair of her own and lamented that nobody has documented leather stays as of yet. Surely more people have made them? Anyway, that's all the news that's fit to print for now.