Meet Lark:

Lark took Re-Create it with Sharon, and after lots of sewing, seam ripping, and sewing some more, she re-created her dress!

Here she is with the before dress:

Leanne came by to show the Miss Dolly she made, along with an adorable dress to match:

What's being made......

Lorraine brought in dresses she's been making for her little girls......

The Oliver + S Birthday Party dress.

Camila took the Re-Create it class w/Sharon, and made these:

....fabulous high-waisted, wide leg trousers.

And I know this is KNITTING, but Trish made this little "pea in a pod" for her granddaughter, Isabella:

....who's just perfectly perfect!

Last night the store was HOPPING:

with hookers.....(RUGHOOKERS, PEOPLE) 

 and quilters

doing their free-motion thing:

which was really cool to watch!

and I have to add this adorable picture of our Valentine baby, in a t-shirt appliqued by mom:

and this happened again.....I can't rotate the picture!!

and finally:

Goodbye, Uncle Jim......1929-2012

A quick getaway....and saying goodbye

Nashville, TN, was our destination - my mom and I.  A 3 hr. delay in Chicago had us HUNGRY - and we found a mouth-watering Reuben sandwich here:

I texted my Aunt Debbie, jokingly telling her to have a bottle of red wine ready when we arrived.  I got back this cryptic text: "have jac/honey 2".  I keep reading and re-reading it, thinking it must be one of those Mad Gab - like messages, where you have to pronounce it a certain way to get the message.  But alas, it was a local favorite: 

And so we spent 4 days in Tennessee, visiting with Uncle Jim,  Aunt Debbie & cousins, and laughed and cried and looked through old pictures, and talked about the past and the future and the life he led, and the legacy he leaves behind.  We toured a bit around Nashville......

.....took a sail w/Debbie 

(thank goodness she didn't quiz me like she threatened me she would, on all the part of the sailboat)

.....wandered around the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, where there was a cattleman's convention going on, so there were signs like this all about:

I did get to visit THIS fabric store, and picked up some jersey knit to make another dress.

....and then said our final goodbyes to Uncle Jim, and headed back west.

Goodies from Alexander Henry

A great shipment arrived Friday, including these:

We had to say goodbye to the Amy Butler Trunk Show.....

...this little beauty spent some time at the store Saturday - only 11 days old!

....a sneak peak at upcoming classes:

And finally, I'm off to Nashville for a few days - leaving on an early flight Wednesday with my mom.....we're going to spend some time with my uncle/her brother, who has terminal cancer.  Back on Saturday, it's a quick visit, but one that we wouldn't miss - time for saying goodbye.

Friday night in the lounge we celebrated an early Chinese New Year, with food from Rising Star (2 doors down from Hip Stitch), and sewing fabric fortune cookies:

I had found some fortunes to download from the computer, but they just didn't have the pizzazz I was looking for.  A gift from my friend Carla came to the rescue - THIS book.  Ah yes, the edgy-ness and sharp wit I was looking for in a fortune:

I wanted to share some quilts in progress....first, Julie's mom (Julie is the Thursday gal at Hip Stitch) came to visit from Ohio, and shared a quilt top she completed, from 2" scraps from her past quilts:

A close-up of this beauty:

Natalie came in to work on her quilt in the lounge last week - she's using one of Amy Butler free patterns on her website:

and here's the back:

She was short 2 light grey strips (the shade at the top), and I didn't have that color in my solids.  We experimented with adding medium and then darker gray to substitute, and it ended up looking great!  It's a graduated darkness/depth, and looks like she intended to do it - yay for serendipity!

What a fabulous Saturday at Hip Stitch.....if you didn't make it by for Open House, you missed a fun time! (but maybe you had soccer games or birthday parties or grocery shopping or napping or other essentials to life)

We ate, we drank, we shared class ideas and looked at displays and bought fabric and patterns and discussed Gees Bend Quilters and the Modern Quilt Guild and debated modern vs. traditional quilting (I insist it doesn't have to be one or the other, for pete's sake), and talked patterns and what we liked and didn't, and it was just a great day of creativity and I was EXHAUSTED at 5:00 but it was all good.

We looked through the pages of the new Stitch magazine, and found this:

just as Marcia was teaching her Sashiko embroidery class.  So cool!  So, I snapped a few pics of the designs drawn onto fabric, but alas, didn't get any of the embroidery:

Lisa stopped in, wearing her Peasant Dress - she's made 4 of them, I think (she's beat me - I have only 3!)

then Cheryl stopped in wearing her Schoolhouse Tunic, made of Tina Given's Haven's Edge voile:

a close-up 

a blurry and -ugh- doesn't want to rotate picture.  I love love love this tunic!  It was just fabulous on her, too.

And I didn't yet snap a picture of Bralia's 3 Patch Quilt, which she made with Heather Bailey's Pop Garden....it's beautiful!  Her class starts Sunday, Jan. 29 - a 3 part....are you signed up yet?!