SUNDAY NIGHT

Good Evening, everyone,

Sunday night and it's sooo quiet tonight. I love Sundays, not only because it's church day for 
most people, there's always been something so
special about Sunday for me since I was little.
The mister is home for the day finally. It was a
long day for him at the job site. The doctor wants
so many awesome things done to the house, it
never seems to end for Mr. Glen Oaks. He doesn't
have time anymore to make furniture for me here
at home; I really miss that. My wish list has cob-
webs it's been so long.
I did a little of this and a little of that today. Some
sewing, some clay work and some enlarging and
tracing of patterns. I forgot all about my enlarging
machine. Mr. Glen Oaks came home and saw me
working with the one square to one inch enlarging
and he asked me why I wasn't using the machine.
Duh, I don't know, I had completely forgotten about
it. Do you girls/guys ever do that, have soo much
stuff you don't remember some of it?
The new survey on Patternmart is out. The free
pattern is a snowman called "Long John" by Michelle Allen of Raggedy Pants pattern design.
It's cute. I downloaded mine. I have about 3 years'
worth of free downloads that I've never touched!
That's ok, good to have variety, right?
It's still not very cold here yet. I suppose that's a
good thing. Saving oil and all. The first snow  is
always exciting, though. My mother and sister are
still wearing shorts! It gets cold in the part of
South Carolina where they are, but I don't believe it ever snows.
I bought some more paint and fabric at JoAnn's on
Friday for my Izannah Walker project. I'm making one for Sis, too, so I wanted to have a lot of choices of small prints. Don't forget, there's a sale going on
there, Christmas prints 50% off. I bought muslin and tiny calicos from the quilting fabrics.
I love the ones I bought from Brenda Gervais at
With Thy Needle and Thread off of her website.
They are the teeniest little prints, so sweet. They are from Windham Fabrics and some are from 
The Coverlet Collection, 1820-1850.  So Sweet!
I just started using Fray Check on all of my cut ends of fabric and cross stitch linens. What a huge
helper it is.
On Saturday, I found the tiniest, old crochet lace and it's going to be perfect for the Izannah dresses.
I'm trying to use old fabrics as much as I can. The
dress material, unfortunately, will be new but I
can't find any old dress fabrics. My antiquing gel
from Gail Wilson will do the trick making it look
very vintage. She has a marvelous supply of all
things for your doll making. Especially if you like to make old looking dollies.
I hope everyone enjoys their Sunday nite and I hope you also have a wonderful week.
Take care of yourselves,
Susan

Matchbook Sewing Kit Tutorial

This is another adorably easy creation from the Brag Monday entries on The Graphics Fairy blog submitted by Sue at Creative Try"Als.
If you need a quick and unique gift or little bonus to a customer's order, this would be perfect.

Here's the link to the tutorial:
Creative "Try"als: Matchbook Sewing Kit Tutorial
I'm off to make some!
Warm Regards,
Susan

Stormy Friday

Goodmorning!
It's about to pour buckets here in Western Mass. That's a frequent occurrence here in June. I found some great "old" patterns in my stash last night. Dolls, bears you name it, I have it. Some go back to 1993
when I was doing home parties with my friend Vanessa. She painted folk art primitive style and I did
dried flower wreaths and arrangements and dolls, snowmen, angels, santas. Do you remember the vacuum cleaner covers? I was laughing at some of the things that were "hot" in the eighties and nineties. I
remember candlewicking was popular. I did pillows and a marriage sampler. I have a floorcloth that I did in a class. Wow, the classes I went to. Tinpunching, basket weaving, pierced lampshades, painting and I can't remember anything else right now but I know there was more. Surprising to me was that I really didn't start making bears right away. I was a little intimidated I guess. I have the ones that I bought from 1989-on. I took a really cute bear into the birthing room I had when I has having Ashley. He was my "focal point" from Lamaze classes. It worked, too. Having her was really a breeze and I remember the midwife asking me "see you next year" and I told her "I'll be here". Unfortunately, I couldn't have any more children. But I could have birthed lots more babies! Anyway, I digress...
I said in an earlier post that I was uploading pictures to the blog. I haven't found the cord I need
and the memory chip is missing from the camera, otherwise I could just pop the clip in my laptop. I'm going to take pictures of some of the old bears, too. I have quite a few vintage composition Patsy dolls but they are all undressed except for one. I have some vintage baby clothes that I hope will fit at least 1 or 2 dolls. The dresses are the common white batiste type with exquisite sewing details. I'm really getting into the hand sewn needlework techniques. Google eBooks has tons of old needlework books that are all in the public domain. I love reading these books. They range in date from the late 1700's to the 1920's. After that, you take a chance that they are still copyrighted. I see lots of ideas and things to make. The instructions are very limited. They were written at a time when ladies knew how to sew and it is assumed that you know what to do. The terminology is sometimes
unknown in today's time. So I use Wikipedia and most of the time I find the word.
I've been concentrating on learning HTML and code so that I can do additions to my blog myself. I like it so much that I'm going to school online to learn web design.
Well, this is quite enough for today I think. I'll feed the birds and change their water, pick more peony blossoms (they have exploded on this plant) before it really rains. If I come across any good
items from other blogs, I'll post them here as I usually do when I think you might like them.
Warm Regards,
Susan