Thursday, October 25, 2012

Exhaustion has set in...

I am sorry for the short post tonight but I am so exhausted. We all have made amazing progress on our projects but it has been so intense that we are all very tired. So I just want to encourage you all to have a wonderful day and get as much out of it as you can. I am going to bed. Now.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Throw her in the basement and lock the door...

I was feeling a little threatened today. I made a good amount of progress and got excited when I had an idea of how I want to do the background of my project and then ladies in the group began to get a little hostile. There were threats of me being thrown into the basement and locked in. There were other threats of being held down so the others could whoop on me. LOL. I can't help it if I was smart and chose a project that didn't have eyes and ears and noses and hands and all those time consuming things. I certainly did not double my work by doing one that had 2 sets of eyes and noses and ears, etc., etc., etc. Here is me while I was cutting out one of my pieces.
I know you can't really see what I am working on but remember that I mentioned that it was a surprise. So I don't want to give it away. I am taking photos of the process so later I can share that with you.
This is Tina's work.
She made a lot of progress too so I don't know why she was doing the threatening that I mentioned earlier on. She is the one doing 2 people so she has 4 eyes, 2 noses, only 2 ears, 2 mouths. The eyes are the hard part. Olivia, another one of the students, spent all day doing her 2 eyes but remember how I said that you have 5 fabrics all converging in a space of about 1 square inch, well her's was more like 1/2 square inchof space. Very tiny and very difficult. She has them done now and tomorrow will be a better day.

At lunch time 4 of us took a walk up to a little diner about 1 mile up the road. It was very good and the walk did us a lot of good. I took several photos along the way. Isn't this little tree gorgeous in it autumn splendor?
Just a little further up the road was a little pond
and the ducks seemed to be enjoying it.
We felt so good after our walk that we thought we would be able to eat a full piece of dessert without a problem but when supper rolled around I know that I was still pretty full and although I ate my dinner I feel stuffed to the gills right now. When will I ever learn? Maybe I need to be locked in the basement during meal times so I don't overstuff myself. LOL.

Well, have a great day and remember to be kind to those who out pace you in the productivity department cause they just can't help it and don't harass those who are not as productive because sometimes they just need a little more time to get those eyes right.



Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Eye, eye, eye, eye....

The word for today was eye, eye, eye. We learned how to stitch eyes today and so we tried to turn every eye word into a joke or play on words. The tricky part of creating and stitching an eye is that you are adding 5 different pieces of fabric, not counting your beginning flesh tone fabric in an area no larger than let's say your thumbprint. The stitching part is pretty quick as you only have to take a half a dozen or so stitches most times but you are doing this all in this space of like 1 square inch. So I felt very proud of myself that my project didn't require any eyes in it and Tina chose a project that required 4 eyes. Do the "eyes" have it for Tina? HaHa. I did do a practice eye just so that I knew if I ever needed to make any eyes I would be able to do it. Here is Tina working away on her project. "Eye" would say she looks pretty intense.
This is were she left off for the evening.


And this is part of my project. I can't show you too many pictures as this is a surprise for someone special and I don't want to give it away. I think this looks like bear claws. I am much further along than this but like "eye" said you won't see many photos of my project.

We laughed so hard at dinner. I thought the chef was going to ask us to take it outside and we were the only ones having dinner.

Tina and I had prepared little gift packets for the students and staff and we handed them out tonight. Each packet had 2 ice dyed fat quarters and a pair of dyed socks in them. For the hostess/retreat coordinator we also included a hand dyed and upcycled apron made out of a man's dress shirt donated by DH. Everyone was very appreciative.

We laugh some more and ate till we had to waddle out of the dining room. Now we are relaxing and preparing for tomorrow.

I hope you have a wonderful day and remember to laugh out loud, dance like no one is watching and sing like no one is listening. Be true to yourself and enjoy life.



Monday, October 22, 2012

First day of workshop...

Our first day of the workshop has been quite a learning experience. First of all, we started off our day with a wonderful breakfast. The breakfast special was poached eggs on english muffins topped with artichoke/cheese sauce and bacon or sausage. Wonderful. This put us in good shape to start our learning/work day. We headed over to the studio and had the beginning lecture on composition. We then got to see examples of what works and what doesn't, next we got out our photos and began to work on breaking down the different areas into the lights and shadows. Learning the process.

Lunch time rolled around before we knew it and Tina and I decided to take a short walk instead of eating a big lunch.
The foliage is just beautiful. We did stop at the area's famous hot dog truck and had a hot dog and shared some french fries.
After that we walked up another street and visited The Sewing Shop which was more a reupholstery shop although they do offer children's sewing lessons, and a pharmacy. I bought a new toy for hubby, I can't wait to give it to him as I don't think he has ever seen this one, I can't go into more detail about that right now. We then headed back to the studio and work again. We began playing with our fabrics at this time and the fun started. I don't have any photos of this step so far but I am sure that I will get some tomorrow.

Dinner was scrumptous, starting off with a wonderful spinach salad with almonds, cranberries, perhaps feta cheese, not sure about the type, and a very light and tasty lemon dressing. The main course was braised beef with gravy, tiny whole pototoes, and asparagus with a creamy sauce, dessert was carrot cake. So delicious. The average weight gain we have been told for a week long workshop here is 7 pounds. Last year I know I gained 10 pounds and never lost it and Tina said she gained 6, so this year we are trying to be careful about how much we splurge.

We are now trying to unwind a bit and get ourselves prepared for tomorrow, as I finish up this blog post Tina is hand stitching binding on a baby quilt. I also brought the t-shirt quilt to do the binding on. That is is for us this evening so have a great day and continue to learn new ways of doing old things so that you can add a little spice to your life. PS. Since the mornings are very hectic, this week I will be writing my daily blog post in the evening instead of the morning after. This will help me unwind before bedtime. I hope you enjoy.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Traveling adventures...

We have made it to the Greenville Arms 1889 Inn for the week long workshop. We spent yesterday and today traveling and doing some unusual sightseeing things. Yesterday, our first stop was as Penns Cave and we took the boat ride/tour of the cave. It was really fascinating.
We stopped at Joanne's Fabrics in State College, bought a few important things, while checking out there, we asked the cashier to recommend a good restaurant that wasn't one of the run of the mill chain fast food places. She told us about Green Bowl and gave us very good directions on how to get there. You go in and get a bowl and go through a salad bar type set up and choose all the items you want, add the type of sauce you want, choose your meat and then they cook if for you and bring it to you cooked in your green bowl. Very interesting and fun. Tina got the seafood medley for her meat choice and I stayed safe with chicken. As she was eating away, she found a squid, a muscle, shrimp, and tofu along with other chewy seafood delicacies that we couldn't identify. The squid was a first for her, she said "it was chewy like a gummy bear but not" Lots of laughs. I told her I would never try the squid and her response was "but you would jump out of a perfectly good airplane." I said, "Yes I would." After lunch as we were finding our way back to the interstate, we came up over this hill and there in front of us was Penn State University. It was beautiful. So we continued on and stopped at another Joann's in Scranton. Scranton is not a fun city to drive in. We had many an adventure trying to find Joanne's and a hotel. Needless to say, I am not really interested in going back to Scranton. All I could think of while driving around Scranton Pennsylvania was Harry Chapin singing the song 30,000 Pounds of Bananas. LOL. I looked up the song and it is on YouTube. Check it out if you want a good laugh. After several false starts we finally found a hotel. This first one was in a rather shady location and was not giving us good vibes regarding our safety. We chose another one and it ended up being inside the airport grounds and so we figured it would be much too expensive for us, we had to drive through the airport to get back out. Very strange set up. This morning as we were leaving Scranton, we found our way back to the airport completely by accident. There wasn't even a single sign on that road saying the airport was ahead. I pulled a U'y before we were sucked back in. Scranton gave us some good laughs. After that we headed out of Scranton about 15 miles to the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tours and we descended into the pitch back of earth again for the second time in less than 24 hours.
It was a very interesting tour and we really did get a good appreciation for the hard work and danger that the coal miners faced back in the day. Really fascinating. We continued on our journey and headed to Poughkeepsie and walked over the tallest walking bridge that was created from an old railroad tressle bridge.
There were literally thousands of people on the bridge. People with babies, people on bikes and people with children on bikes, people with dogs, we even saw a lady walking her cat on a leash. One gentleman had brought his lawn chair with him and was seated along the side of the walkway reading a book. It was very entertaining and such a beautiful day. The trees were glorious, the sky was rather gray when we arrived but it cleared up quickly. We finally left there and finished our trek to the inn. It was about 1 hour and 20 minutes further.

Once we got here we had a wonderful social hour with the other ladies in the class. I even came to realise that I had been in correspondence with the lady from Hawaii when I was considering going there in March to see Kate. It is indeed a small world. We had a wonderful dinner, food was fabulous, got the orientation on when and how things work and were sent on our way to get rested up for tomorrow's class. This is going to be an exciting week and I am so eager to get started on our class projects and see what everyone else is going to be working on.

So have a great day and keep doing some of those things that are or aren't on your bucket list and have a great time doing them. Our bucket list has just gotten quite a bit shorter this weekend (even if these adventures weren't even on our lists to start with). We have had a great time.