Sac à Bandoulière...

Click! to enlarge...

Mais oui, a shoulder bag in French, 'naturellement'.  And I finished it today! {smile}

It was rather nerve wracking when I had to pull the whole bag through the opening in the lining (everybody who has sewn a bag before knows what I'm talking about), but in the end there was (thank goodness) that 'tadaa' feeling when everything turned the right way out...

So this bag is meant to be sold at the school's auction with the 'Parisian' theme. I have never actually sold anything that I have made before and that has definitely added to that nerve wracking feeling while sewing this bag. Let's hope it will go for a considerable amount of money...

I managed to find five minutes of time when it was not raining today to take photographs of the bag. I thought I might as well do a quick walk-through of the yard with camera in hand. Fall is in full swing now!

100%...

One hundred percent rain that is and not only for today, but also for the next two days after! Bleeeeegh....

All this rain does help to keep Mr. Procrastinator at bay so I guess it is not all bad. As you might have noticed I've been playing with the layout of this blog again. I no longer use Blogger's templates, but have been able to do some tinkering with the HTML (coding) and have added dots around the blog posts and in the side bar, eliminated the shadow boxes around the pictures etc. It is all rather tedious work, and it takes hours and hours, but the feeling of fulfillment is just great when it finally looks the way you had imagined!  (for now)  <wink>

Anyway, I've also been doing some sewing and look how nicely my bag is coming along!

Me likey! {smile} The next step will be to finish the lining and then to attach it all. I will keep you posted!

Mr. Procrastinator...

Yes, I've noticed in blog-land that I am not the only one who has had the visit of  'Mr. Procrastinator'! Things are just not happening over here, or if they are, they are moving very slow indeed. I've been working on a shirt dress/ coat from that Japanese sewing book that I bought last month, and it just isn't happening. 

So earlier this week I decided to start a new project all together and to put the Japanese coat on the back burner for now as it was blocking all my creativity. 

Click! to enlarge...

Our school has a yearly fundraiser in the form of an auction. People donate trips and wine and just basically stuff and then all the money they make on that goes back to the school. This year the auction's theme is 'Paris'.

Since I am still receiving lots of compliments on my 'Day Tripper' bag that I made over Christmas, I thought I might as well make one for the auction and see if it will make some money. I decided to  reduce the pattern to 85% so that it will become a little bit smaller than the original one. Also I decided not to work with the laminated cotton since that is a rather difficult material to work with. I found this lovely French themed fabric at Joann's and off I went...

The first step was to do some free motion quilting with my sewing machine on the front pocket. You can only see it when you're up close, (see the red arrows pointing to the stitching), but I thought it looked rather snazzy. <wink>

And here is the finished front panel of the bag:

This bag has a lot of interfacing and batting layers, which makes it a bit of a pain to sew together, sometimes sewing through 6 to 8 layers at a time. I will be sewing very slowly today as not to break the needle!

PS: Miss M. had  another visit to the shoulder surgeon yesterday: more physical therapy for another month or so....

A Day On The Town...

We're spending the weekend without the kids. Master C. is off at college of course and Miss M. is in Eastern Washington supporting her friend who actually won the Half Ironman competition over there! Now for those of you who don't know what this entails (I was one of them) this is what her friend did yesterday: 1.2 mile/ 1.9 km swim, 56 mile/ 90 km bike and 13.1 mile/ 21 km run! And he won!!! Did I mention he is only 17 years old? Man, what dedication!

Anyway, we are spending the weekend without the kids and that seems to happen more often these days. I guess we're preparing for the time when neither of the kids will be living with us anymore, only two more years to go. When I grew up we were all so ready to leave the house and the parents seem to think likewise. I don't have that feeling at all towards my children. Although of course I know that it is best for them to leave the fold and stand in their own shoes etc, I just love having them around! {smile}

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Anyway, we're spending the weekend without the kids and yesterday we spent it in Seattle. First we visited the large Value Village (2nd hand store) in Ballard and after that we continued on to see the exhibition called "Dressing Swedish: from Hazelius to Salander" at the Nordic Heritage Museum also in Ballard. The exhibition was really small, but I saw some very interesting designs there. Some traditional costumes of course (see above) and some less so. I loved this wool felted coat inspired by birch trees!

They had a video (in Swedish!) about a young designer who was very inspired by the old folk costumes, their materials and all the elaborate embroidery on them. Apparently there was also a competition in Sweden on how to design new clothes inspired by the traditional costumes from each province in Sweden. Fun! (see below)

After all this art we were pretty hungry so we stopped by our favorite Taco Food Truck and then on we went to visit a small fabric store on Ballard Avenue called Dry Goods Design. I didn't buy anything (a tad bit too expensive for my wallet), but so nice to actually touch the fabrics that I have seen online so much...

We ended the day at another fine Micro Brewery called Reuben's Brews and sampled several of their delicious brews. (small samples of course!  <wink>)

The weather turned out so much better than forecast and I even had to shed my cardigan and I walked around in my tank top: how absolutely wonderful!

Today all that is gone though, it rained all night and it will rain the rest of the day also. There is even some windy weather in the forecast! I took this blurry picture of the flowering Mint at 7am this morning when it was just so dark outside. Wonderful Fall smells though all around and I heard all the drips of the raindrops on the leaves in the trees: aaaah, breathe in, breathe out....

PS: I forgot to show you this beautiful door with a Swedish mail box attached: Love it!  {smile}

6:45 am...

The Dawning of a New Day...

Monochrome...

I found a new setting on my camera: Monochrome...

(I did use the lowest setting of 'cross-processing' while editing these pictures, just to add a tad bit of warmth to them...)

--  **  --  **  --

There is just a small bit of sewing going on. That sewing mojo is missing a bit these days, but I'm plotting along...

A Little Stroll...

As I had a couple of items to bring to the post office, I decided to, with the nice fall weather and all, to take a stroll there. When you have your camera eyes open and focused you see a lot more details then you normally do...

What a lovely day it has turned out to be. First a British friend came over for breakfast and afterwards we took her black lab for a walk along the Tolt River and along the Snoqualmie Trail. We had some tea and coffee after and a bit  more chatting was going on. (never get enough of that!) Then I took that aforementioned stroll to the post office and now I think I'm going to sit outside (with a thin jacket on) and do a bit of reading. 

Not bad at all for an ordinary Wednesday in the middle of September!  {smile}

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Summer's Last Hurrah!

After those two or three very Fall-like days last week, we have now returned to high Summer! (I guess they call this an Indian Summer?) Temperatures are expected to rise to 90F/ 32 Celsius this Wednesday: woot woot!

And lots of spiders around as well...

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We spoke to Master C. over the weekend and he is doing great. The classes aren't hard (yet) but interesting (some more than other obviously) and tons of homework. He has gone out for a few runs around campus and is meeting lots of new people: couldn't ask for more!  {smile}  (plus he has done his first laundry!) (or wasn't I supposed to say that out loud?)  <wink>

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Look at what we found at Costco the other day: very yummy indeed! It almost tasted like a fine Dutch 'Jenever'...

Adam Ant...

Waaaaay back in the early eighties (1981-82), my friend D. and I were HUGE fans of Adam and the Ants! Unfortunately we never got to see him live...until two days ago! (at least I did, my friend D. still lives in The Netherlands and so couldn't join me for this epic event)

Even though I was rather hesitant at first, my lovely husband purchased tickets for us some time back in the spring. Last Saturday was the day.

I must admit I felt a bit giddy upon seeing the old familiar t-shirts, canvas bags and buttons for sale. Lots of memories came flooding back of the so new (for us) clothing and hairstyles of the days. 

Lower right picture of what he looks like these days at age 58...

Anyway, the good points of being at the concert, beside seeing Mr. Adam Ant himself live on stage (shorter than I remembered him!) were that he sang lots of songs from his really old repertoire, the 'Dirk wears white sox' era which personally was my favorite! ("Cartrouble", "Cleopatra", "Never trust a man (with egg on his face)") Other favorites were "Antinvasion" and "Kings of the wild frontier". Funny how after 31 years I can still sing along with all the lyrics!  {smile}

The bad part was that he of course also sang songs of his solo career: "Strip", "Vive Le Rock" and "Goody Two Shoes". Oh how I loath those songs! It got so bad that just towards the end of the concert I was seriously asking myself what on earth I was doing there?! And so we left before the end of the show, something I have never done before... 

Still, I'm glad I went to finally see him live and this is now something I can check off my bucket list.

"Stand and deliver, your money or your life!"

Focus On Color....

Wow, Fall is only just around the corner! Pictures taken right after a heavy rainstorm, early in the morning...