Marvelous Marden's

Roughly an hour's drive away, over the state line in Sanford, Maine, there is a discount house known as Marden's. This chain store is only in Maine and has rock bottom prices on odd lots of every kind of household commodity. Some of the stores do have a fabric department and the store nearest to me has a beauty that caters to quilters!

Our sit'n'sew group from the Belknap Mill Quilter'sGuild, (known as the "Sew & Sews") makes a once a year trek to Marden's with a car pool. We are given a group discount of an extra 10% courtesy of the store. Even though Maine has a 5% sales tax compared to zero taxes in New Hampshire, it is a good deal.

This is only one aisle of about 6 to 8 aisles of fabric plus there were pallets with huge cardboard boxes of full bolts, too! I bought over 18 yards of quilt shop quality fabrics and I spent $65, which is roughly $3. 60 per yard. I think their most expensive stuff was $4.49 per yard.  In fact, I recognized some stuff that I had seen for sale in my local quilt shop. I had great fun!

After we left Marden's, we stopped at the Backstreet Bar & Grille cafe in downtown Sanford and enjoyed our respective lobstah rolls and grilled chicken salads.

When I got home, the afternoon sunshine called me to get some of that Marden's loot right out on the prewashed clothesline. Here are the greens and the apricots:

These are the two bagfuls of lovely neutrals I gathered at Marden's. By the way, that one that photographs as a black and white is actually a chocolate brown and white and it was only $2.49 a yard, so I bought 3 yards. God, you'd pay more for shop rags!

And I confess, I was like a little kid in the morning before we left, getting up at 6am to be all ready to go! So then I was too early and decided to settle down and do some more piecing. I got three more evening stars done!

I had more fun all day than if it had been Christmas!