What a fun day this has been. Today was the annual meeting of the Houston Chapter of the American Sewing Guild. Sounds boring right? The boring stuff lasted maybe 10 minutes... and that was the annual election of officers. Yours truly will continue as the Treasurer for another year. This will be my fourth year in a row at this job and, in an effort to drum up interest in this job, I gave a brief overview of our chapter's finances. They laughed at my lame jokes and I hope someone will be interested in taking this job over next year.
The rest of our four hour allottment was made up of a very nice lunch, drawings for door prizes, a trunk show by a local fiber artist plus fabric and button shopping. The local fiber artist is Carol Watson. This is a woman, who has been known to haunt the one dollar a yard shelves at WalMart, purchases fabric by the bolt and creates complete wardrobes. All the garments she showed have been worn many times by Carol and each set includes all sorts of creative embellishments. Her husband is a sports executive and travels extensively. Carol joins him on many of his trips so her clothing gets a real workout. Most of the wardrobes shown included a coat, jacket, dress, skirt, pants and tops. One of the dresses became a short sleeved jacket with the extra fabric removed by snaps. Some of the garments were reversible and all had unique embellishments. It was sobering for me to see a set of garments made from some fabric I have been mulling over how to use for at least six months.
The shopping was from a trunk show from Leandro Fabrics. Their web site does not do their inventory justice. I picked up some lovely peach and tan dupioni silk that was on sale and some incredible buttons. This is an Arizona company so they had a lot of hard to find warm weather fabrics like tropical weight wools and dotted swiss cottons. I understand that I may see some more of these fabrics later on this week and I think I need to pick up at least one linen or wool offering. One unique piece of fabic was a double sided linen that was blue on one side and lavender on the other. I wonder what Carol would do with something like that?
After the meeting I stopped by at Sunflower Quilts (http://www.sunflower-quilts.com/) to check in with them on their efforts for the Quilt Teal project to support Overian Cancer research. There was a sew-in a couple of Sundays ago that I could not attend, due to illness, and I was impressed that they had 75 volunteers from nine quilt stores putting quilt tops together. By the end of the evening all of the donated blocks (over 300 at last count) were set into over 30 quilt tops. I picked up two that had already been pinbasted to machine quilt. I have until early February to get the quilting done and then someone else will do the binding. Jill, the owner, gave me some wonderful variegated thread from YLI to use for the quilting and I will definitly post pictures once I have completed my quilting.
I also found out that there are still some Quilt Pink quilts, to support Breast Cancer research, left on EBay from last year's charity quilting through Sunflower Quilts. If you know someone who would appreciate a pink themed quilt you might want to check them out.
This shop is always invovled in unique charity sewing work. For Christmas they are gathering 'One Yard Hugs' for a local hospital. One of their customers makes these on an on-going basis and Sunflower supports her efforts at this time of year by gathering these little blankets from its customers. Essentially the hugs are one yard of infant themed flannel with the edges finished. I made a few last year with fabric from a Jo-Ann's flannel sale and finished the edges with my serger threaded with pink and blue wooly nylon I had picked up and never used previously. Simple concept but I know the mothers and new borns appreciate the effort.
One last thing - I picked up the girls yesterday as my son has to work most of the weekend and he felt they needed some running around time in my yard. He also gave me some huge rice bags that his girlfriend's father had been saving for me. The goal is to see if I can recyle these into totes or other bags for donating to various craft fairs I have promised to supply so they can raise money for various causes. I hope this works out because they have wonderful graphics and the fabric is very strong. I have seen similar bags sold for anywhere from $20.00 for 3 small zipper pouches to $75.00 for a yoga mat carrier. I'll let you know how they turn out.
That's all the news that's fit to print. Hope your weekend is going as well as mine.
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