Measured In Miles

Day 327: Let's do the math. There are 1760 yards in a mile (1093 yards in a kilometer), and there are 400 yards per spool of thread. I've used almost all of the first dozen I bought late this spring, so that means I've gone through roughly 12 x 400 = 4800 yards (2.7 miles/4.3 Km) in sewing and hand-quilting over the last six months alone. Since I seem to be showing no signs of winding down from this present obsession, I bought twelve more spools. That, dear readers, is a whopping lot of thread.

Many long years ago, my husband gave me a Christmas gift of stunning proportion. He had gone down the thread aisle at Joann Fabric, and gathered up a 150-yard spool of almost every colour (even a range of pinks). The box was enormous! I went through the blues and greens rather quickly and had to supplement them with further purchases and (although it shames me to admit it) I gave away most of the pinks, but even today when I pull open the thread drawer, I see a few of those original spools still waiting to match up with a project. At times like this, I wonder just how many miles I've stitched by machine and by hand. It must be over a hundred. And to think that I know people who have only a few dusty spools in their sewing baskets, people who have never sewn a hundred yards, let alone a hundred miles.