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?!

Conversation early this morning....

at about 6:45, between my (almost) 12 yr. old and 14 yr. old girls:
"My flannel shirt is 2 points."
"My Converse high tops are 3 points"
"My striped shirt is 2 points, because it's newer"

Genius!  They're now sharing clothes, as many teenage sisters do.  And to keep track, they're assigning points to them, because, you know, everything has to be fair & square.  Can't have an unbalanced borrowing system!

I posted this on facebook yesterday:

I made a simple, super-easy dress out of our new jersey knits.  I didn't want to take it off at the end of the day, it was THAT comfy.
A word on understitching:  DON'T skip this step!  Understitching is where you stitch down the seam allowance to the facing - in the case of this dress, it was all along the neckline.  Your stitching doesn't show on the outside, because the facing is on the inside.  It really really helps to get the facing to lay down INSIDE the garment, and not flip up, as it wants to do.  Alas, I took no pictures during the construction of the garment  (I was sewing, the girls were homeworking, and we were listening to a downloaded audio Nancy Drew book).  But HERE's a great explanation/visual of understitching.

Dolls and Daydreams

Last week, during the winter break, 7 little girls gathered in the lounge for the Miss Dolly class.  The pattern comes from Sarah, of Dolls and Daydreams.  I love her patterns, and she now has a variety of adorable animal doll patterns in her Etsy shop.

After 2 days, 4 hrs., and lots of chatting and giggling, here they are with their finished dolls:

It was a fun time for all!  Thank you, Trish, who led the class!