Where to start?

It's been a while. A busy while. And posts have been written in my head but never on my 'puter

I know you all are just bursting to know all about the Puyallup Expo. Well, I just say it was a blast. For the Seattle weather in March, the weather was ok. A little chilly, a little rainy, a little sunny, a little breezy. Yep, Seattle in [insert your favorite month here]. I "only" attended on Thursday and Friday, took a few classes, and did a boat load of shopping. For whatever reason (I refuse to blame myself for this) my camera battery was completely dead - so I have NO, NOT ONE, photo of the Expo!

My best class was a serger class: "Getting to know your serger" I believe it was called. We got to use the Babylock Imagine which was awesome. NAYY, I have a Bernina which is a fantastic machine, but that air threader was like magic! Like an automatic garage door opener or a self timer on a coffee pot. Probably good I DON'T have one, I'd spend all my sewing time rethreading it just to watch it do it. And the wave stitch is pretty cool, though not a deal maker like the threading. **ahem**, sorry, I wandered off for a threading second. The class was great, we got a nice book with nice directions, fabric samples to try out the technique, hands on help. It was a great intro to the real capabilities of a serger. Most of what we learned is available on any serger - only the wave is BL or high-end model only.

My other classes were all lecture format. Interesting but not really blogworthy. The notions class was fun though. Just a little, tiny bit enabling. Just a **ahem** little. Funny thing was that I'd already bought about 1/2 the stuff she showed us, on my first booth stop on Thursday. Great minds and all that.....

Karen took many more classes than I did, so that meant I had lots of **yea!** shopping time. I did take some photos when I got home and played around in my sewing room. Zippers were a big item this year. Fun and fancy and not available at JoAnn's. So I picked up a couple, including a pack from Vogue for $7 for the bag of them. I bought long ones, for the most part because they're much easier to shorten than to lengthen. And fun fun fun notions: Notions that photographed very poorly. But include binder makers, a threaded needle keeper (at 6 o'clock), some markers from the Japanese notions shop, some glass head pins, an aqua Grabbit, double hole machine needles (who knew they made these?), and so on. Back to closures are buttons, buttons, who's got the buttons? I got the buttons: That also didn't photo well - but are fun and lovely. The two cards are old glass buttons. And finally I went a bit overboard with folder elastic. But I'll get over it, I'm sure. And a couple of panels to quilt. Don't yet know how I'm going to do them - but I'm sure it will be fun and interesting some rainy weekend. That's the last of the shopping.

We did a little driving around, had a bit of wine, a bit of food and some catching up. Then I flew over to the Richland area for a couple of days.