On my way to 100

I hate it when so much time passes between blog posts. I feel like you all will think I'm just lazing around, doing nothing. But that's not the case. I've been busy at work getting the kids back into their school routines, starting horsebackriding lessons, and dealing with our regulator at my "day job".

But I've also been making more ConkerrCancer pillowcases. I'm up to 15, and literally have 10 waiting to be sewn up.

I'm finally getting to the end of the donated fabric. Some of it was really had to find a match for, but I dug through my stash and came up with some bright colors. It's interesting, we did seem to get a good mixture of boys and girls fabrics.





This fantastic sock monkey fabric came from Above All Fabric. My son loves sock monkeys and his favorite color these days is lime green, so he got one just like this, and the other got added to my pile for donating.



During the day, I work for a very large insurance company. They had a great volunteer day a few weeks ago, and a co-worker set up a table for us to try to get some help sewing up pillowcases. You can find Peggy's blog here. She did an amazing job setting up an appealing table, and we got 25 volunteers! We're really looking forward to seeing how many cases we can collect, and the goal is 100 for the first drop off scheduled in later October.



Next up...a she-werewolf costume. My daughter has convinced me to try to make her costume this year. I found a vintage pattern, that will have to be altered (because I could only find an 8-10 and she needs a 6), so it's quite an undertaking. I'm cutting pattern pieces this weekend, so wish me luck!

What the heck I've been up to

So I finally got to go on that vacation that I've been whining about. I took the kids and we went to visit my cousin, his wife and newly adopted son in Virginia. It was my daughter's first plane trip, and my son's second. He said he was too little to remember the first one, so he felt like this was his first too. We had a FANTASTIC time.

Our first day we spent at the National Zoo. It was close to 90 and just downright steamy. The kids are wet from the water sprays they have along the walkways to keep cool.



All that they cared about was seeing the pandas, which we did. From far away, but they were live pandas nonetheless.

The next day we spent at the Museum of Natural History and walking the National Mall. It was a wonderful day, but LONG for little legs.

The true excitement was being in a terminal at Dulles when the EARTHQUAKE hit. The whole terminal sort of slid side to side. Some pieces of tile fell from the ceiling. After a brief "huh, what was that?" my kids went right back to reading their books. Really. They are tough to impress apparently.



Now that we're home, I've been working on this blanket for a co-worker. I've made so many of these "a la Betz White Warm Fuzzies" style blankets now. They are really loved. I try to put some of my salvaged trims on each one. The blue on this one is one of my favorite and almost gone.



I usually put flannel on the back and they are just super soft and cuddly.





Last but not least, I am still on my two-per-week pace of making pillowcases for Conkerr Cancer. So far I've got nine. My goal is to donate a cool 100 over the course of the year. I'm hoping to find time to branch out and use different patterns as the year goes on. This one is just so easy and sews up so quickly, I've stuck to it for now.



What are you working on these last few days of summer??

Pillowcases for Charity - Conkerr Cancer

One of my jobs for the weekend was to sew pillowcases for Conkerr Cancer. A co-worker of mine got people at our company to donate fabric, and got a few of us signed up to sew the pillowcases. I used a great, super simple, quick to sew up pattern from the 1 Million Pillowcase Challenge website called "Roll it Up". There are loads of great free patterns there.

The first two I made are exactly the same...



Now all the rest have been washed, just need to start cutting.



The challenge with donated fabric is that you don't always have stuff that goes well together. And this charity is specifically for children, so we want as bright and cheery fabric as possible.



Conkerr Cancer commits to keep the donated cases in the local community where the donations came from. Unfortunately, we don't get to see them actually go directly to the hospital, but for what we sew, they will likely end up at CT Children's Medical Center. It makes a huge difference to me to know that the sewing will go to kids in my own community.

I'll show you the rest as soon as I get them done!