It happens every year. I start by warming up my typing fingers and staying up later each night until I’m ready for the 12:01 am cyber deals. It begins the week of Thanksgiving with spurts of deals here and there, followed by the double whammy of Black Friday followed by Cyber Monday.

As a sewist, online shopping is my friend (especially during a pandemic). Sometimes I feel like I struck gold (BOGO thread!). Are these deals too good to be true? I admit I fall victim to the excitement of getting a new notion and have been known to get a bit carried away. So this year, the year of… well, how shall I say this, the year unlike the others, I expected more. I kind of felt like sewists deserved more this year. Bring on the unbelievable sales! Bring on the pennies-on-the-dollar deals! Give me the “act now before this closes” line with the deal of the sewing century! Was that too much to ask?

For some reason, I’ve been taken off the Willy Wonka golden ticket list at JoAnn’s and stopped receiving their Black Friday (let’s call it Black Week) flyer in the mail. Some of you will think, “why not just use the coupons online,” and you’d be right. There are coupons online. But the BEST coupons go to the people on the Wonka list. I received them for years and poof, off the list. From their website, I did purchase a few notions, and while I didn’t NEED any of them, I know I will enjoy them. I wanted more spray starch by the gallon, and they really did have a good deal on that. Later, I convinced my husband to accompany me to our nearest JoAnn’s (about an hour away) on a very rainy Sunday. I felt the call of discount patterns. Sure enough, there weren’t many people willing to brave a thunderstorm with buckets of rain for the sake of a few bucks off their sewing needs. And we didn’t remember an umbrella, so we stayed cold and wet for most of this adventure. We joked and said maybe going during the Iron Bowl might have been a better time. (Next year!)

The discount for patterns helped a lot, but what in the world happened to pattern prices? One of the Vogue patterns was originally $33! Depending on what you are making, the pattern is as much as if you bought a ready-made garment. When the nice, masked lady at the plexiglass-shielded register rang me up, she said with confidence that I’d saved more than I’d spent. Between us, I think she was just trying to make me feel better. Or maybe she was trying to make my husband feel better since he was standing behind me umbrella-less at the register.

The end result was three patterns, some trim, and a few yards of boucle fabric. Boucle, I found out, is pronounced boo-clay. I won’t even begin to tell you how I Southern butchered the pronunciation. Let’s just say I was thankful I didn’t ask for the fabric by name at JoAnn’s. They might have thrown me out and taken away my coupons.