Week in Review

The past two weeks have kind of been a blur. We leave on our big 4-week Europe trip in exactly one week, so we've been busy making lists, flushing out our itinerary and dealing with last-minute curve balls. I can't seem to keep my hands off of fabric for more than 24 hours, though, so I fit in some sewing here and there around the trip planning. And since I wasn't able to post my week in review last week, today you get a double dose! Woo!

First things first: I started my next quilt. The design for this one will be a little more complicated, with three strips forming a block and then joining the blocks in a zig zag pattern. I got the idea from this pattern by beffie48 that I saw on Etsy.

There wasn't nearly enough pink in my fabric stash for a girly quilt. At least that's what I told myself. So I picked up a few more yards from Fabricland. Sewing with pink is a rare treat.

Needlework was also having a sale this weekend, so I picked up some yardage there too. Because I don't have enough fabric (ahem).

Here is the quilt all laid out. I ended up adding another row of blocks before sewing it together and it is now perched on the end of my couch, waiting to be hand quilted. Even though I love hand sewing, I'm nervous to start. Do you have any tips for me? Just do it? Ok.

Holiday craft show application time. If I am accepted, I will be exhibiting for three weeks in a row right before Christmas. Fingers crossed.

 Last Friday our little Canon S100 decided to up and quit on us.  It caught the dreaded "lens error" that plagues many a point-and-shoot.  Since we're going on vacation in a week, we don't exactly have the kind of time to send it back to Canon to fix. So on Thursday night we headed out camera shopping. And we bought one! We have been talking about stepping up our camera for awhile and, after suffering extreme sticker shock over the price of lenses, we decided to compromise with something in between, the Fuji X10. We've been playing with it for the past few days and are pretty impressed so far. We'll give it the Dear Edna product shoot test this weekend before we give it our final verdict. But I will tell you this, I've never been so excited about a camera before. My gut tells me we're going to be friends.

The majority of sewing this week was taken up with my Wiksten tank. The original pattern only took a few hours to sew, so while I sewed, I was imagining a closet full of Wikstens. Then I tried it on. Ugh. It was not flattering on me at all! Think boxy tent. I could live with the roominess, but the 45 degree angle out from my boobs, I could not. After a lot of fiddling, and reading sewing blogs, I figured out that it needed darts to get the front to lay flat. But for the life of me I couldn't get them to look right. I basically have the entire thing ripped apart now and I am going to sew it a size smaller. Wish me luck. If you don't hear from my next week, I may have scratched my eyes out with straight pins.

Don't forget about LBU. The course I'm taking is in it's second-last week and the lessons aren't getting any less extensive. The unit video this week was 2.5 hours! Here I am ripping out the seams on my tank, nursing a glass of red wine, watching the video and taking notes. Multitask or die.