I'm a genius!

Well not really.  I finally cracked open the manual that came with my Bernina that my grandma gave me for my high school graduation in 2000.  That means I've had the machine for 9 years without ever reading the manual.  And wow was I impressed!  I learned what some of the random things that were included with my machine were for.  But more importantly I learned what some of the stitches were for.  I was especially excited to discover that I have a stitch specifically for knits that stretches with the knit.  AMAZING! I'm using it on a sweater jumper I'm making for Ellie out of an old sweater vest of mine.  I found a tutorial here that I got the idea from (but I've made a lot of changes).  I'll post pictures later.  In the meantime, I recommend that you bust out your machine manual and see if you learn something new.  I sure as heck did!

Thanksgiving Centerpiece

My wonderful mother-in-law put me in charge of makin the centerpiece for our thanksgiving dinner.  I'll be honest, I've never been a huge fan on centerpieces.  I guess the word conjures up images of oversized things that don't allow you to see the person sitting across from you, something stuffy, or toll-painted (which may be worse).  But I was excited to try my hand at it.  And I came across this great tutorial on making these things called yo-yo's, so I had to try it out.  I liked the result.  We'll put an amber-colored glass bowl in the middle with autumn stuff (acorns, etc.), in the middle.

I also picked up a remnant of this red/green/gold striped fabric at Walmart.  I cut out four squares and sewed them together to make a nice square (the real table is square, so I wanted it to fitI didn't like the gold part of it, so I cut it off and sewed on a border of the same gold fabric as the yo-yo's.  I really like how it all turned out.

Tutorial: Lattice Smocking

I made my first tutorial.  But I was silly and published it to my other blog.  So click here if you want to learn more about how to do lattice smocking.