Busy weekend

aven’t had much time to work on my quilt, because the weekend has been so full of other stuff.  I’ve got about a quarter of it sewn together though, so that’s a start.
Yesterday’s outing was to Ashburton with Lytteltonwitch.  She’d heard there was a “Stash Re-hash” market being held, which promised lots of cheap fabric and craft supplies.  We got slightly lost getting there (no, not to Ashburton – it would be very hard to get lost getting there!) because Lytteltonwitch had somehow managed to combine “Sinclair Centre” and “Park Street” into the non-existent “Spencer Street”, which we spent a long time looking for before giving up and Googling the event.  Once we got the right address it was a lot easier to find 🙂
I was reasonably restrained in my purchases – I was tempted to buy a lot more, but the fabrics that had attracted my attention were all in huge quantities (like 2m lengths) which I’d never use all of, so it wouldn’t have worked out any cheaper to buy them than to just buy smaller quantities new.
On the way to Ashburton we stopped off at the Book Barn in Chertsey.  I’d never been there before, so it was a bit of surprise.  It’s in an actual barn, packed solid with bookshelves and boxes of second-hand books with narrow aisles between giving just enough room for you to move around and browse the books, and even more boxes of books stacked up behind waiting to be unpacked.  I didn’t end up buying anything, because it was so huge and overwhelming it was a bit of a “where do I start?”  Think I’ll need to make myself a list of books to search for next time we visit.
Then today we had a bookcrossing meetup, at Beat Street Cafe.  It was very well attended – Chuckacraft brought along a couple of friends (one of whom joined Bookcrossing on the spot), plus Alkaline-Kiwi was down from Auckland for the weekend so came along, and Rarsberry and her kids turned up too.  It was quite a crowd round the table! (And a crowd of books on the table – as usual, I promised myself I’d only bring home one or two, and ended up with half a dozen in my bag).
After the meetup, Alkaline-Kiwi, Lytteltonwitch and I gathered up the left-over books and took them along to the Gapfiller book fridge, which is only a couple of blocks from the cafe.  The fridge is obviously still getting a lot of use – there was someone there browsing the shelves when we arrived, and as we were leaving I saw someone else heading for the fridge.  Not many of the books are actually bookcrossing books any more, of course, but it’s still working great as a community book exchange, so who cares if they’re not all registered.