Fabric and pattern big news

First of all the fabric:

On the way here we had a necessary detour at Fabricmartfabrics in Sinking Springs Pennsylvania. It's a small store front on an older partially residential street that disguises a large and highly organized inventory in the warehouse rooms in back and upstairs.

In the main store part there were racks and tables of ends at super prices. Some $1 a yard silks, and I kid you not.

To avoid losing my mind I decided to focus on knits and what you see here are 24 yards of mostly rayon/lycra with a few yards of cotton/lycra thrown in. Nice quality and this whole pile cost me $100 which, as I explained to my husband, is another example of how sewing saves me money.

I definitely will be putting Fabricmart on the permanent itinerary along with that great Thai place with the vegetable spring rolls, the world's best, in Freeport Maine of all non-Thaiwanese places. A must stop.

Now onto exciting pattern news. In my travels I had some time to think and it occurred to me that sewing really was my core business, despite all the other things I do with my time, some of it for a salary.

My mind is going with the sewing all the time.

So to cut a long drive, and a think, short as soon as I was in a place with a table where I could write I emailed off Stylearc and said you know those Linda pants are great but a slimmer leg version would be nice.

And they emailed right back and said, well that's exactly what we are releasing this very minute, and now well we are going to call it Barb.

This completely thrills me, you have no idea. This means more to me that any of those prizes I won in university, by far, and more to me than all the elections I helped to win (sorry about that senior members of government).

I mean this is a pattern.

With my name on it.

A pants pattern.

I couldn't be happier if I had negotiated world peace. Sorry about that.

I can hardly wait to sew it:

Isn't life exciting?