Travel looks glamorous for the first thirty seconds, especially when it's work travel. New places! New things! The implication of being skilled enough that you need to take your skills to the people who need them!
Except it isn't really like that. It's looking at your cats and saying, "Shit, honey, I'm so sorry. Please don't bite the cat-sitter. I have to go to the airport again…"
I wised up with my book purchases some time ago. I realized I liked looking at craft books more than I liked owning them; I have a small-but-growing stack, and a realization that I don't actually need to keep many books. Keeping books leads them to eventually be part of cataloging and Keeping Up With and then sadly part of Clean ALL The Things. Those just aren't as fun.
My rationale: save my book-purchase money for the books that I just can't get through interlibrary loan, or books where $book->value > $cleanALLthethings->time.
Lily is a short-timer. I started learning a new sewing skill (English paper piecing) without a clear project in mind, and decided I'd figure it out as I went along. I took a bag of little paper hexagons with me to my vacation in Minnesota, figuring I'd do a few flowers.
Delft Punk has had a placeholder on my site for a long time, because I haven't known what to do with it, and I haven't known who it was for. I know that this project has been my travel project for a couple of years, and only recently have I started working on it with any degree of fervor.
I know that I initially bought fabric for it in Minnesota, because I saw a set of Delft blue fabrics I liked. I put them aside for ages, and then something made me decide to tackle it using English paper piecing.
This layout came from Denver, where I was attending a conference a year ago:
