Pals Fall Fling Part 1 – Arrival and M Designs Classes

Oh, woe is me!!!! The 2007 Pals Fall Fling is over!!! Oh whaily whaily whaily!!!!! I had so much fun. And I do mean big-time, grandiose fun, not some menial, average, every-day fun.

Chris NC carried me off to her local shop, The Lazy Daisy, and I jumped in with both feet.

Here’s a shot of Chris and Sarah, Lazy Daisy’s proud owner.

As you can see, she has much to be proud of. $470+ after entering the doors I’d dropped off 6 items from my friend Judy for framing and gathered a little bag of stash for myself and others (Janaina and Judy to be precise). Sarah had some of the new Belle Soie silks from Crescent Colors and some of them ***had*** to come home with me. I also picked up a couple Kreinik Silk Moris which came in very handy when signing all those Pals Signature RRs over the weekend.

As I recollect we fiddled and played with stash for the day and rounded out the evening at the rehearsal of Chris’ bluegrass group, The Blue Notes. If you’re in the Raleigh area and need an upbeat band for an event, give the Blue Notes a call, they really are wonderful. I can hardly wait for the first CD which should be out this year.

Wednesday dawned to a fine morning of car packing as we headed off to meet with the other far-flung Pals at Myrtle Beach. We had a car packed with stash, gifts, cake (for Baby Joshua who you will meet shortly), and good will….. after all, we were ON VACATION!!!!!!!!!!!! The scenery was grand—with the trees just starting to turn colors. I can’t help that the trees of the Mid-Atlantic fascinate me; CA freeways are lined with ice plant and 10-foot walls not pines and oaks.

Classes with Mary of M Designs were wonderful as usual. This is Mary’s second year trying to teach Pals a thing or two and she handles us quite well. This year we had three class offerings: a purse, a bourse/stitcher’s pouch, and ornament finishing. I, of course, had to do all 3.

Here’s a look at the purse –


We have options for a Halloween or a Fall insert. Mary showed us how to make a really cool and very-dimensional spider for the Halloween piece. I opted to work on the Fall insert because the Halloween one featured a ghost (and a really, really, really cool pumpkin) and I’m only interested in witch’s hats and pumpkins for Halloween. I’ll adjust the pattern to fit and then I’ll have 2 purse inserts. Now if only I could manage to carry so few things around that they’d fit in the bag. lol I owe you a picture of how far I got.

And here’s the bourse that Mary did the finishing on while we were starting ours as well as out pile of goodies for the project--


We got to choose the linen/aida and the backing fabric before we started so everyone’s is a little different. In the pic below you can see with little pit of progress I'd made along with all the course goodies:


Finally, here’s the bundle we got in Mary’s ornament finishing class.

For me the class was really useful. The focus was on looking beyond stitching for inspiration and cool stuff. Mary’s apparently recently discovered the scrapbook aisle so we had lots of ideas for using stuff for scrapping – gift tags as ornies, boxes for ornie bases or shadow boxes, cards as the basis for an ornie, etc. Ohhhhh how useful this is for me!!!!!!! A thousand blessings on Mary for her inspiration.


More on the adventure tomorrow.....