New stuff on the blog & a little randomness

If you follow me on a reader, you might want to stop by the blog, I've added a few new tabs up at the top. Plus, you may not have seen the pretty new makeover I did a month or so ago. I'm loving the color, but think I may be time for some more fall colors. We'll see. :)

The first new tab is my Project To-Do List. The more I think about this, the more I realize I should probably rename it as my Project Wish List since my actual to-do list at home includes none of these projects! :( Over time I've been e-mailing myself all kinds of patterns & tutorials, but then they get buried in my e-mail, and I seem to have completely lost a few, so I thought this might be a better way to keep things organized. I'll add links to my versions when I complete a project, and I've been adding more to the list, so check back occasionally. Definitely let me know if you've done one of these projects, I'd love to see how yours turned out! And let me know what you think should be added to the list, I always love finding new ideas!

The other new tab is for the October Photo Hunt Challenge, but I'm still kind of up in the air about participating. If I do, I'll add the pictures over there to keep track of them for now. We'll see how the month goes.

As a side note, thank you for all your kind words after my last post. Like I said before, the kindness of so many people I've never met is amazing. A CaringBridge website has been set up by the family if any of you would like to be updated on how Romayne is doing. Although he has a very long road of recovery ahead of him, it sounds as though he's doing better than the doctors expected of someone with his severity of injuries.

I've started work on the muslin for the new pattern I hope to make for my bag swap partner. I decided to use actual muslin instead of digging into my stash since I have no idea how this first go-round will turn out. I'm doing a few things I've never tried before, so it should be an interesting weekend. Last night I did a little embroidering on what will be the front side of it, just in case it's nice enough to use. I actually kind of like the look of the plain muslin, so if it goes well it'll be my new purse. :) Hopefully I can get it finished up this weekend & post a few teaser pictures. I don't want to give away too much since the entire bag will be somewhat of a surprise to my swap partner & I'm not certain whether she reads the blog or not. I don't want to take any chances, so you'll have to wait for full pictures until November.

I used the freezer paper pattern trick for the first time when I made the pattern pieces for this purse & I think I'm a convert. It's soooooo much easier than pinning pieces! Nick was watching as I made them & was pretty impressed when I explained why I was using freezer paper. I did find that if I ironed on all my pieces, then went to cut them out, some of the pieces were starting to lift off as I got to the last few. Maybe I wasn't using a hot enough iron? I wasn't sure what to set it at & didn't know if I could damage the iron, paper, or fabric by using too hot of an iron. If you've used this method, how hot do you set your iron? I did remember to turn off the steam, and had it set around Synthetics. I'm thinking I probably could have turned it up a little bit.

Until next time...