Recipe for an AWESOME Weekend!!

What do you get, when you mix a professional knitting/felting instructor (Judy Pascale),

A pile of beautiful merino roving, locks, yarn, and silk hankies,

Some "good clean fun", and a bit of elbow grease...

...with seven amazingly creative women? Well, just look and see for yourself! You get seven beautiful, unique, original works of art!

Dry and filled, here's mine:

Here you can see it a little better. The handles are fully adjustable from the cross-body hip length pictured above, to the clutch length handbag shown here.

With the exception only of the interior frog closure, all parts of the bag were part of the original design. Embellishments were added to the wet wool and felted in. An interior pocket and small tab were built in as well. The tab allowed for application of a magnetic closure.

Here's the full view of the back when opened.

The class ended up being nearly a 12 hour class, but I can easily say that everyone who attended had an amazing time, came away with a GORGEOUS bag, designed to accentuate their own personality to the fullest! Even better, Judy's "sample" bag on which she demonstrated some of the techniques for us will be a beautiful "Florida" inspired bag. We had a hard time convincing her to break out and show her inner color, but once she got going.... I hope we get to eventually see how her bag came out!

After leaving the amazing class, I decided to drop by AC Moore to pick up a magnetic closure for it. Since they are going out of business, everything is on sale at least 30% right now. I picked up a couple of closures, a few miscellaneous bits of this and that, some beading wires... Then I dropped by and was looking at the Clearance section of floss. There were a bunch of different types of flosses thrown together in a bunch of bins. I picked out a skein of each of the different types... linen DMC, cotton DMC, silk DMC, #5 perl cotton, #3 perl cotton, etc, and visited with a clerk who was adding prices to things in the area. He gave me the prices, ranging from $.10 to $.89 per skein. So, I went back to the aisle and pulled all of the silk floss, sorting through it on the floor, trying to figure out how much I could afford. The next thing I knew, another clerk, Kathy, came by, mentioned that I was in her department and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I won't name it here, but if you are in the market for floss, interested in purchasing in quantity, and in the area, drop by and see if Kathy is available. I think you'll be happy you did... I know I was: