.what a disaster.

While we were at the lake, I asked Melissa to go to the craft room to grab some things to bring with her when she came. Thank God I always forget things because if Melissa hadn’t of gone to the craft room we really would’ve had a di-sa-ster.

This is what she found when she got into the craft room….

Apparently our hot water heater had been slowly leaking and finally had saturated the ceiling tile, which then fell onto my crafting space along with a bunch of water. YUCK.

That was about 10 days ago. Mom wiped down the walls, counter, and floor today and I surveyed the damage. The majority of the damage was to my pattern binders. I have two 3-ring binders with quilt, table runner, apron, bag, misc patterns in individual page protectors (one pattern in one protector). I have an unnatural obsession with these patterns and I am very proud of my collection. I almost cried when I saw that many of my patterns were saturated beyond repair. Like this:

The ones that were only slightly damaged and wet on the corners, I took out of the page protector and laid them out on my counter. I’ll have to put them into new page protectors tomorrow.  Oh – and of course, the majority of the patterns that fell into this category are my Thimble Blossoms patterns which are my VERY favorite. VERY. FAVORITE.

The ones that were completely ruined like the one above – I’ll have to replace. Luckily the majority of the ones that were ruined the worst were free tutorials that I’d printed from the internet. I replaced most of those this afternoon. There are just a few that I’d gotten from quilt shops that I might just have to re-type.

AH! What an awful thing to come home to. As my Mom keeps saying, it could’ve been worse…and it could’ve been MUCH worse. I have lots of fabric around the room that is not in containers and even some quilt sandwiches that need to be quilted on a chair. This is just annoying and time consuming to fix – but it isn’t devastating.

I guess.

If you only knew how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE my pattern collection…you’d cry big crocodile tears with me.