School supplies for quilting
 

I was shopping today and noticed all the school supplies featured. As a retired special education teacher, I still love shopping for them (I used to stock my classroom with them for my students.). It started me thinking; what school supplies do you use in quilting. I bought three ring binders to hold quilting pattern directions such as Bonnie Hunter mysteries. Also got some sheet protectors, mechanical pencils for applique tracing and binder clips to use when sandwiching small quilts.
So tell us. What do you stock up on this time of year?
Terry

For me it was the glue sticks - Staples/Office Depot had them 8 for $1.00 a week ago. And I bought a set of the Crayola Washable markers to try for marking a quilt.
I also bought a composition book $.50 to start using for the quilts I personally design - hope I can remember to take a picture of the quilt when it is done. Usually I think of the picture after it has been given away.

Luckily my DD is an elementary teacher and I get to go with her to buy school supplies. Usually there is a sale on the Elmer's liquid white school glue, but this year it was the stick glue. Not a big deal because I didn't need it but my DD found it was much cheaper to buy it by the gallon from Walmart. The school supply hunt seems to run in my blood, once I was telling my mom how I loved the shopping for school supplies and she said she still loved it even though she had no one to shop for anymore. She said she didn't know what a junky she was until we had all left home and she found a drawer with 10 packages of paper, a couple boxes of pencils and a few pechees. She said she couldn't resist looking at the adds and letting my sister know where the best sales were.

Mechanical pencils. White gum erasers. Crayola Ultra Clean markers & crayons (for marking quilts). Drawing pads for quilt designs. Envelopes and/or sandwich bags to store applique pattern pieces. Sharpies so I can darken any patterns enough to see through to trace applique design onto my background fabric for needle turn. Also, this year I'm getting some binder rings because I saw a tutorial online by Heather Thomas, National Quilter's Circle, where she made a sampler "book" of different quilting fillers & motifs to refer to herself or share with clients. She punched grommets in the fabric & then attached the different "pages" of the quilted fabric together with binder rings. So clever! Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnAriXmGjPA

Plus, sometimes I just get a few fun things either to work on my designs or to use for fun in my Fiber Research journal. I like making it kinda like a scrapbook type style so sometimes I find fun cardstock, stickers, stencils, stamps or whatnot just to play.

Thanks for posting this thread! I'm sure we'll get all kinds of great ideas from it!

Glue sticks and sheet protectors.

I told daughter to get me my yearly glue stick stash and she said dont bother, her hubby has 60 of them and will share before they dry up. woo hoo, I got 10 for free this year....such a deal

I can't say I stock up, but some of the school supplies I do use include:
3 ring binders
Sheet protectors
Spiral notebooks
Graph Paper - lots of graph paper
Pencils
Glue Sticks
Washable markers
Permanent markers
Plastic Pencil Boxes

Sheet protectors, glue sticks, and paper to copy free patterns.

I love the grid composition books that WM carries. For some reason they don't seem to be very popular with students, so I stock up at the end of the season. Even at full price, they are less than $1

I love index cards. The lines are a scant 1/4" apart on the ones that I find in the local office supply stores. Following are some of the ways that I use them:

1. check needle placement against the 1/4" seam mark on my sewing machine
2. check 1/4" seam allowance--particularly if I'm doing a technique that requires ironing a 1/4" seam allowance.
3. use as a straight edge to mark the diagonal on a square for making 1/2 square triangles.
4. use to mark the diagonal when joining binding strips--they're thin enough and flexible enough that you can pin the binding pieces together using those flower pins, lay your index card over them and then use whatever marking tool you prefer (I like a sliver of soap for darks and the purple air-disappearing ink for lights). The card doesn't wobble over the pins like a ruler will, and its edge is sturdy enough to make a nice straight line when marking.
5. cut them into smaller pieces to use as labels

Rob

I always buy a new pencil box - this year I put all my different types of pins in the pencil box. (Each kind is in a different pill bottle). Last year I gathered all my thimbles and put them in a box. I love pencil boxes!