SewFlakes!

One the local quilt shops, Sew Flakes, is having a Great Sewing Room Tour, and I (as Pieceful Stitches Designs) am a sponsor. I've donated two copies of each of my patterns as well as a gift certificate for $25 off machine quilting.

Go check them out!

Speaking of quilting, a while back I made a slideshow function of the customers' quilts I've done this year, which you can see here.


Every so often I get the urge to dye my hair and I did it again yesterday:


You can also see the blue pearl necklace that I made yesterday. It's a single strand, knotted between each pearl, and long enough that I can wrap it around as a choker. I see more like that in my future.

I think this hair color looks more natural than my natural color with my skin. The really funny thing is that the kids didn't notice until Greg said something. LOL! [This stuff is supposed to wash out after a month or so.]


Speaking of Greg, he's started building a bed for Gillian and she's been helping.


Greg has developed an allergy to sawdust, and I'm thrilled that they're wearing masks and safety glasses. YAY!


I'm terribly behind on my blogging, and so I'm going to continue with some catch-up stuff.

Last week was the annual scrapbooking convention, and I took two classes. The first one is called "Boxerpalooza" and is where they give you lots of scrapbooking stuff from their company (Boxer Scrapbook Productions) and show you ideas to use it. I got a lot of excellent tips as well as cool scrapbook supplies. One of the owners is a quilter so we chatted about fabric after class.

The other class I took was "Four Pages, A Bazillion Photos" and it was neat--they had some good ideas for putting lots of pictures on a page. Here are two of the four pages (without pics--I haven't gotten that far yet):



I also did a Make and Take from the Tattered Angels booth, using Glimmer Mist:



It was really cool, and I now understand more of the appeal of Glimmer Mist.

I also did some shopping. I couldn't resist a bunch of clear stamps, especially since the big ones I got were $3!!!


Now I just need to *use* them. LOL!

On the knitting front, I finished a pair of socks:




The yarn is some that my wonderful Aunt Louise sent a couple of years ago (I don't use sock yarn all that quickly, but I sure enjoy making socks!).

I also made a headband to use up some of my leftover sock yarn:

That's Mountain Colors sock yarn and it bleeds read like nobody's business, which is why I didn't send it to my Mom to use in her sock yarn blanket.

And I finally found a project that would successfully use the Disco yarn that started to be two different pairs of socks:

That's the Lacy Baktus, with an edging I stole from something else (I think a stitch dictionary--I'd have to look to be sure).

And last up on my catching-up list, this basket that we made in spinning guild at the August meeting:


It was fun to make! The teacher had the bottom and first round one for us or we would've been there all day. :-)

I think that's about it for the moment. I've been doing customer quilts but you can see those in the link at the top of this post.

I hope you're all having a great weekend!

First Day of School

The kids are now back in school! Ryan is starting first grade and Gillian is starting fourth grade. (How the heck did that happen?)

They've been *so* excited about going back to school and seeing their friends. It's wonderful!

I had to make them get back out of the car so I could take these pictures—they were already in and waiting to go!

Ryan got his hair wet and spiked it a little:

And Gillian did her own ponytail. (I had to really persuade her to hold still and get the picture-taking over with so that we could get back into the car and GO. LOL!)

They're just a bit excited.


They practically jumped out of the car as soon as I told them they could unbuckle, and they never once looked back:


Happy first day of school! :-)

Fiber Christmas

I still need to blog about our fabulous trip to Idaho, but first I'm going to post about Fiber Christmas in July that was this Friday and Saturday.

I ended up teaching three classes (Magic Loop Socks, Common Knitting Mistakes and How To Fix Them, and Designing Your Own Socks), and I got really good reviews about all of them.

Of course I turned right around and spent almost all of the money I got from the classes. :-) This is my big fiber purchasing opportunity for the year, and as usual I might have gone a bit overboard.

This is alpaca, bamboo, and merino:


They were clearing it out so it was $2 an ounce. I got four ounces of each of the browns, and three ounces of this gorgeous 60% merino/40% bamboo fiber:

These next two I got in a Dirty Santa swap. I've never worked with pencil roving before so it'll be neat!



I fell deeply in love with this fingering-weight yarn, and it'll probably become a double-knit cowl. I just need to decide what other color to put with it, although I'm leaning toward a cream or off-white. We'll see!

I'm not sure what breed this is, but I got it from Kate at Lowder Colors Farm's stand. It's 4 ounces and really soft. It looks fairly long-stapled so it'll be interesting to spin up.


This is something I snatched out of Bridgette's hands as she was going to give it away as a door prize. It's 100% silk and luscious.


I kept wandering by one of the booths and this particular braid yelled my name:

It's merino with "sparkle" although the sparkle didn't show up in the picture. It's not like Angelina or glitz, and it's going to be another interesting spin because I haven't worked with it before.
This braid yelled at me, too, and it's merino and silk. I'm way into browns this year, if you haven't noticed. They're just pulling me. :-)

I bought a few other things but I'm not going to photograph them right now (maybe after Christmas!).

I also want to post some of the websites for some of the vendors, but that'll have to wait until I'm a bit more organized. I'm still recovering from two really, really busy days right after coming home from a busy week in Idaho. :-)