Monday, November 25, 2013

Football Fields of Black Lace

While I was unemployed, I occupied much of my free time with sewing. As I worked my way through my stash of fabric making skirts and dresses, I soon ran out of the lace I like to use to finish hems. I began to build a small mountain of nearly-finished garments waiting for their lace.

Finally I was able to order more lace, which arrived today. Woo-hoo, 250 yards of ruffled black lace!  :D
Now, if I were in a country that uses the metric system (so... pretty much the whole world except the United States of Stubborn), I'd say that's about 228 meters. But since I'm in the US, I am obliged to say that's about two football fields.

Huh? Those of you outside the States may not know this, but Americans are obsessed with measuring things in terms of football fields. Anything and everything can be measured in football fields -- the International Space Station, sinkholes, asteroids, sushi, chicken wings. It's absurd. :P

Anyway...

Why did I buy such an insane quantity of lace? Sold wholesale in 50-yard spools, black ruffled lace is about 30 cents per yard. At retail fabric stores, ruffled black lace sells for $3, $4 or even $5 per yard. Talk about markup! :o  Even with a minimum order of $75, buying wholesale is the better option by far.

I'm sure no one will be surprised to see new lace-trimmed skirts featured in upcoming posts. ;)

14 comments:

  1. Yayyyy, allllll the lace!

    I have a bad habit of getting stuff like that and not using it! I still haven't used even half of the fabric I have bought, although partly because I haven't reached a skill level that allows me to use the nice stuff yet!

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    1. I'd guess that most people who sew end up with a large stash of fabric. It's practically a requirement of the hobby. ;) I have a couple pieces of very special fabric that I've avoided cutting until I know exactly what I want to do with them... and feel confident that I can do it.

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  2. Alright, you guys are indeed obsessed with footballfields...well, for someone, that uses the metric system, 'foot' is already a weird measuring unit because...what, you just measure something by comparing it's lenght to yout foot's?! It just seems to be so random and untrue especially if you see, that a meter equals to 3.2808399, which isn't even a round number...silly! :D

    Anyway, as another hoarder, I belive you made a good deal! :D

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    1. The US units are random. They don't even use the same scale. For length, there are 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, and 1,760 yards in a mile. But for weight, there are 16 ounces in a pound and 2,000 pounds in a ton. That makes for complicated math. It is MUCH easier to have everything scale up or down in units of 10.

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  3. I'm always lack of good black lace :). That was a real bargain!
    I confess that the football field measuring system is very frequent here as well :)

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    1. Football field measuring makes sense in some cases, such as describing the size of a parking lot. But when you start measuring sushi and chicken wings in football fields... well, that's just weird. :P

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  4. That's an insane amount for most people, but I totally understand wanting to trim just about anything with black lace :)

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    1. Most of my sewing projects incorporate black lace in some form. :) It can take 4 or more yards to trim a full skirt, and I have 15 or 20 (!) skirts in the queue, so the lace will get used up remarkably fast.

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  5. My favorite measurements are citrus fruits and "hella."

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    1. In my hometown, "about yay high" and "from here to that (insert distant landmark here)" are quite popular.

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  6. Alright I need to know where did you get your lace whole sale from...

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