As some of you may have noticed, I've kind of taken a hiatus on the blogging front this summer. Between travels, summer activities, change of schedule and having been focused on just a couple of long-term projects, I suppose the updates (and desire to share) fell to the wayside.
But I'm back. Slowly but surely.
For one, during my awesome travels I took an old trusty friend along:
This may be a completely foreign object to some of you youngsters, but this is a medium format camera gifted me by a friend and former classmate nearly 10 years ago.
The film I shot on the trip was just dropped off yesterday for processing. Yes, Portland still has a few places where one can process not just film, but MEDIUM FORMAT film. What a relief.
Now, of course I also had my little snappy digital camera along, as well as my iPad which served as an alternate camera at times. But it's the film photos I am most curious to see. It had been a LONG time since I've shot film and gotten it developed. In the efforts of keeping this a dedicated quilting and craft blog I'm avoiding dumping the Alaska and Vancouver photos here, but if you are at all interested, please let me know in a comment and I'll be happy to share in a future post!
And speaking of LONG time... yesterday I sat down at the sewing machine I have at home to work on some make-up bee blocks. I had cut out all of the initial units when I was in the studio last Monday in order to bring them home and work on them on days/evenings I couldn't get to the studio. The block consists of many half-square triangle units and is super effective! My bee-mate Amy designed the block and has a great tutorial up on her blog, 13spools: http://www.13spools.com/2013/06/flock-of-half-square-triangles-block.html. Anyhow, I took out the thread and bobbin that were in the machine, put in lighter thread, wound a new bobbin and set the whole thing up. Then I started chain-piecing... and chain-piecing... until I got to the end of the 15 square chain. Then I went to cut the thread and flip them over to stitch the other side:
and something didn't seem right. They pulled and started gathering strangely... and then I looked closely on the bobbin side of things.
What's up with that??? Now, either the bobbin case wasn't properly seated, or the top thread wasn't properly threaded through the machine, but either way it was an easy fix. Too bad it only showed on the BOTTOM of things so I didn't notice while zipping away at the squares and wasted all that thread (not to mention time).
Is this what's called "getting rusty"? Guess it's time to scrape of the road dust and get back to business.