The mother lode

A while back I wrote about fabric I found at a garage sale. Well if I was pleased then, I'm thrilled now. But more about this later.

Yesterday was an errand day. We went to Penina's to drop off the gift. Ended staying for breakfast (that was our second breakfast because we're early risers).
From there we went to my friend, Judith's. Carmit forgot the charger for her camera when she left here and Judith is going to Israel today so we took it down to her.

Judith is a friend I met at university. She is very outgoing and while playing Jewish geography, we found out that her first cousin is married to someone I was with in the tnua (youth movement). So we hit it off right away and have been friends ever since. Judith loves shopping but not at stores -- garage sales, rummage sales, etc.
We often do this together but we haven't physically seen each other in almost half a year, if not longer. During the summer, I'm away weekends. During the week, we both work. And weekends since September, we've both been busy -- she with her grandchildren, me with my needlework and both of us with the holidays. So it was really nice to see her.

And then we popped in at my mother's for a short visit.

OK, now the story I referred to earlier. Judith bought some fabric for me at the Designer's Walk (google Toronto Designer's Walk) sidewalk sale several months ago. Books of fabric samples. In short, the mother lode. I spent the afternoon taking the books apart and sorting the fabrics. The only drawback is that some of the fabrics have glue on them. I washed one piece in the machine at high temperature to see if the glue was water soluble -- it wasn't. I guess I could have ironed the glue onto craft paper but I couldn't be bothered. So this morning, I trimmed off all of the glue-y bits and now I will wash all of it, see how it holds up to water (it's all cotton or synthetic, except for one book of "dry-clean only" which I have set aside in the meantime), then iron it and get started.

Yesterday, I also sewed the borders onto the two smaller Auf Simchas pieces. They're both ready to embroider/embellish.

I finished the challah cover centre piece. Now I just have to quilt it.

I also tried an experiment to engrave a small piece of metal with my initials and the date. It didn't turn out too badly but I'm not convinced yet. I'm also going to try printer printing on ribbon and see how that goes.

Anyways, off to work shortly.