Boxing Day Sales! What was I thinking?

I had my first experience of Boxing Day sales on Saturday!!! Mind you, it was all accidental. My daughter, the girls and I went to Spotlight during the week and I showed one of my granddaughters some fabric with cute dogs on it and asked her if she would like a skirt made with it and her older sister pointed out some fabric she would like as well. I told my daughter I would wait until the next sale and then buy a metre or so as it was quilting fabric and reasonably expensive.

As we were busy for much of the week I didn't watch TV very much but I did happen to see an advertisement for 40% off at Spotlight on Boxing Day so thought I would take advantage of the sale after the family left for the beach. I had briefly seen an ad for a sale at Harvey Norman which is in the same complex but as they advertise so much I didn't take any notice of it.

 

 So I went on my merry way out to the Harvey Norman Centre just to buy a couple of metres of fabric but when I got to the parking lot I couldn't believe my eyes! People were driving round and round looking for parks. I have NEVER seen the centre so busy and all of a sudden it twigged that I had turned up in the middle of the famous Boxing Day Sales which I have always avoided like the plague. LOL! Unbelievable!

 

Thankfully Spotlight was fairly quiet and I bought my fabric then decided I would walk up to Harvey Norman and see what all the fuss was about. When I stepped inside it looked like hundreds of party poppers had been let off and the floor was just covered in shredded paper. Then I saw the line up of customers waiting to go through the check out. I then decided that it was a bad move to visit that store and promptly turned around and retreated to the comfort of my car...far away from the madness I had just been exposed to ;-) Too much stress for me! I always thought the big sales were at the major shopping centres and it never occurred to me that these smaller centres attracted such huge crowds. 

 

 

 

 However, I did get 40% off the fabric I wanted and plan to make a skirt with the animal fabric plus a pair of shorts for the baby who is now really a toddler I guess. I bought a pattern for shorts from MADE by Dana some time back and have never used it so this will be a good opportunity. Dana now has a video on How to make a pair of shorts or pants for any age.

 

 

 

 While the children were here I finally got the chance to take them to Laurel Bank Park to see Thomas the Tank which I usually take photos of during the Carnival of Flowers. 

 While the flowers aren't blooming like they were back in September during the Carnival of  Flowers we still had a lot of fun checking out the various gardens including the scented gardens. The playground was also a great attraction. The weather was quite cool last week so it was nice to be able to stay outdoors without getting sunburnt.

 

 

 With the family gone again it is back to normal here so the Christmas decorations came down today and the angels were packed up in their box for another year...

 

...and the Christmas cards were also taken down and will be kept until I decide how I am going to repurpose them. There are so many ideas on this Pinterest page that it will be hard to choose where to start. The young girl on this blog Junk Mail Gems makes recycled Christmas placemats by cutting cards, gift wrap etc. into 1.5 inch squares which are glued onto placemat sized paper then laminated. Just one idea of the many that come up with a Pinterest search.

I hope that everyone had a nice Christmas with their family and didn't overeat! Oops! There have been some recent catastrophic weather events in Australia with the bushfires in Victoria, flooding in England and tornadoes in the US to name a few that I know of. I hope all my readers are safe as the weather is so unpredictable these days.