Thrifty Thursday and a few tears

Lately some of my sewing time has been devoted to cutting coupons and searching for good deals.  Like everyone else this rough economy has touched a little closer to home then I would have liked.  I could give you a million things that haven't worked out as I had hoped and heap on the woe is me factor but instead I thought I would start sharing some of the little things I've been doing to try and spruce up our family budget.  I apologize now to my international readers because I know not all of the things I am going to share will be true to your part of the world but maybe it will give you an idea or two as well.  So the first tip I am going to share is about coupon forums.  Did you know just like we have this great quilting community there is a community of individuals out there that devote all of their free time to hunting down coupons and matching them to local sales flyers.  What I love about these sites is that while I don't personally have the time to do all of these matchups myself I can quickly pull up the page and see what hot deals are out there.  One of my favorite websites so far is www.hotcouponworld.com they have the matchups all done for you and there is a community wiki that everyone can update with deals that they find.  Go check them out but be warned that you might get sucked in.  I'll give you my feelings on this "extreme" couponing craze some other time because my opinions on that are almost as long as the debate on dumbed down quilting.

Sorry for the bad Iphone picture but I think you get the point.  It's there and it's ugly.

Now for the tears part of this post.  I finished my Freshcut Square Dance quilt and I can't wait to show you the pictures of the finished quilt but there were some tears shed over this one for sure.  As I was sewing down the binding I noticed this ugly little spot on the back of the quilt.  At first I thought I had gotten something on the quilt but upon further inspect I realized that it was a flaw in the fabric.  The fabric itself is not dyed.  It's like a blank spot (that's the best way I can describe it) luckily the fabric is an off white base and the print is as well so I'm hoping once I wash it that it won't be as noticeable.  The frustrating part is that there is a black circle around the spot.  This leads me to believe that someone in quality control caught the problem and marked it but the fabric was still bolted and sold.  It really bums me out because my mom (she bought this fabric for my birthday last year) got the fabric from a quality quilt store and paid full price for the fabric.  See I love Heather Bailey and her fabrics and like so many times I realized I loved the Freshcut line after it became hard to find.  My good friend L actually sent me fabric from Canada for the quilt top and then my mom purchased the backing fabric for me because I loved it so much.  I put a lot of time in to making the quilt and a lot of love is wrapped up in that quilt to thanks to the generosity of my friends and family.  So it makes me really sad to have all of that hard work done and get to the last step and realize there is a problem.  See there's not just one of these ugly spots on the quilt there are four.  It makes me really sad and admittedly after seeing the second spot I shed a few tears by the time I got to the fourth one I was really upset.  What can you do?  I guess it will just have to be this quilts beauty mark.