Mirroring Suzy Bee Sews - Life So Strange It Should Be Fiction

Well, our visit to Fabric Mart was a roaring success!  In addition to me and Cidell, 5 people were able to join our spur-of-the-moment trip.  The group photo shows Layla, Mary, Claudine , Cidell , Lisette , me, and Diane thoroughly dazed and sated after our 3(!!!) hour visit to the store.  We really felt like we'd been in there for only an hour. The drive from Baltimore took about two hours and Fabric Mart was easy to spot once we got into town.  The parking lot isn't large, but they don't get too much in-person business and we had no trouble finding a place. You can enter through the front of the store (didn't get a picture, sorry) or the back, from the parking lot.  We came in through the back.  Here I am about to enter the store for the first time.  Can you feel the anticipation? We were greeted by Sharon, with whom many of us have had email correspondence.  She was incredibly nice and patient with us and gave us a tour of the palace grounds...

Thank you all for the lovely comments on my photos from Portugal!  It really is a wonderful place to visit.  I highly recommend it. Since making my biking/travel wardrobe for The Netherlands , I've pretty much been set on travel clothes.  For that trip, I made 6 tops out of solid-colored wicking fabric and added 3 print skirts to my already broad repertoire.  Throw in a dress or two and you've got two weeks worth of outfits that you might not even get sick of.  However, for Portugal the weather was likely to be a little cooler than my sleeveless tops and summer skirts would work for, and plus I always need an excuse to do some sewing! I made four new items and in writing about them I realized that all of them are TNTs, or at least based on a TNT.  Am I getting boring?  I hope not.  I think it's that with 275 pattern reviews (plus all the patterns sewn before I discovered PR and those I haven't gotten around to reviewing), I've got a lot of bases c...

Back from vacation, back to real life.  Le sigh.  I have been back for more than a week but you know how it is to readjust (and the inevitable cold from flying).  Portugal was beautiful and easy to get around.  The people were all lovely and kindly spoke English.  I speak passable tourist-level French and Spanish and figured Portuguese wouldn't be too much of a stretch but, boy, was I wrong!  The spelling and grammar are similar, so I could read things well enough to get the gist, but the pronunciation is so different that I couldn't understand a word. We visited Lisbon, Porto, and Guimaraes, a small city about an hour from Porto.  Guimaraes was named European City of Culture for 2012, so it was a great year to visit.  A lot of money had been poured into it and has a lot of interesting history.  The button sculpture at the top is the Guimaraes 2012 logo, a G turned on its side so looks a bit like a heart. I managed to encounter some interesti...

I am home safely from my wonderful trip to Ecuador. There was a lot of hiking, some ziplining, and even some horseback riding, which was truly comical. An equestrienne I am not (Betty Draper makes it look so easy...). You'll recognize the tops from my bike trip to the Netherlands . For hiking I figured I should break down and actually wear shorts and pants, rather than my usual skirts. I took my machine in for service a few weeks before the trip but *needed* just a few new things for the suitcase. First up were my Adventure Shorts. I will review them eventually. Suffice it to say that the sewing machine that was graciously loaned to me did not enjoy sewing them and I actually busted out the treadle. They are not my most well-made item ever (the treadle has incredibly heavy pressure on the presser foot that caused pulling and wrinkling on the waistband topstitching) but they were Adventure Shorts in more ways than one! These got the seal of approval from my travel companio...