Kate's 15 Minute Challenge for September 20, 2011

It's been a long week, but it ended with 1.25 glorious inches of rain Sunday night. I'm feeling tons better and have even done some sewing this week with the shopping bags, so I'm posting my 15 Minute Challenge Report again. I've continued measuring my stash too and am on the home stretch there I think.


Last Tuesday, Brownie called and asked if she could move back home until she could find a job here, so Saturday I rented a trailer and we drove to Oklahoma to pick up her stuff. It was dry and yellow from here to Okmulgee, Oklahoma where it suddenly changed to green everywhere. So for those of you who have been wondering where the rain is, it stayed north of there behind their invisible wall.

Back in sewing related news, my little portable machine is on the fritz. The bigger machine has had tension problems for awhile, and now the serger is messed up too. So we've been discussing trading it all in on another machine. Maybe I can spend this week checking that out.

Check out Kate's blog, Life in Pieces to see how others have been using their 15 minutes a day.

More Shopping Bags

After I started feeling better, I got tired of watching tv and reading all day. My face looks like I've been out hunting with Dick Cheney without a shotgun proof facemask and I didn't want to leave the house, so I finished a project I started over five months ago - shopping bags for my little group of childhood friends. I wanted to have the bags finished for our annual summer trip, but part of my procrastination oath was that I would start things and not finish them, and I can't break my oath.

Now I know what you're thinking: This took five months?!! I know because that's what I think too. But you see, I'm not an artist. I'm artistic, but not an artist. The difference being I can think it, but I can't draw it, at least not easily. I knew the picture I wanted to put on the bags, but I can't draw without looking at something, and even then not well.

I had asked a neighbor to sit in a lawnchair and let me take her picture so I could try to make a cartoon drawing from the picture, and she said she had a friend who was an artist and she asked him to draw the picture I described: a pretty woman sitting in a beach chair with a drink, wearing sunglasses and a tiara. It's a nice picture, just not quite what I wanted.

The girl just wasn't quite Diva-ish, and the tiara a little too crown-ish. I didn't know what to do about it, so I did nothing for a couple of months. Then I decided I could take the parts I liked and draw them into what I wanted. So I ended up with a composite sketch that I could draw onto the bags and then paint.

And the back


I only have two bags finished so far. I ran out of the tan canvas fabric. Eeek! I don't even remember where I bought it now. That's one of the drawbacks of procrastination. If I had made the bags right after I bought the fabric, I could have gotten more. Now I have to improvise.

You're probably wondering about the tiara, since it's not really part of the typical Diva ensemble (like I know what is). Several years ago, well nine, in fact, one of the ladies in our group decided we needed to start having an annual weekend together. We had gone on weekend trips together before, but it was usually impromtu and not at all organized. But on this first organized girls' weekend, we met in Dallas, and talked, ate, and shopped. Oh, and laughed. A lot. While on one of our shopping outings, we went into a jewelry/accessories store, and K spotted some tiaras in a glass case. I think the trip must have been around prom time that year. So K pretended to swoon, right there in the crowded store, and proclaimed loudly that she just had to have a tiara - that now that she had seen such a priceless wonder (it was $4.99), she didn't think she could live without one. We all laughed at her joke and at the tiaras, and walked on. All except M, who dropped back and bought the tiara.

The next morning in the hotel breakfast room, M walked up behind K and crowned her with the tiara while everyone else bowed down to her. She hammed it up and let the hotel staff call her 'madame' and 'your highness' and wore the tiara throughout breakfast.

And from that moment on, we were the Tiara Group, kind of like the Red Hat Society, except I think we laugh a lot more.

So you see why my Diva had to have a tiara.