Often times when I tell people that I sew or quilt, they say “I just don’t have enough patience for sewing” and I think I often forget that it really does require some patience.  Sometimes, you can work on a project and everything goes smoothly and it’s great – one neat thing about sewing is how quickly you get to see results.  It doesn’t take a lot of sewing before you start to see your project coming together.

Then there are those times where something isn’t working on your machine and it takes a while to troubleshoot it – that can be very frustrating if you aren’t a sewing machine repair expert (I’m not!).  It’s like the times that my quilting machine and I fight – I’ve tried so many different solutions without any consistent answer and the biggest frustration is that I feel like I still don’t know the root cause of the issue and you can’t fix the problem if you don’t know what truly caused it.  Times like that require patience.

Over the past few weeks, we've been working on projects and travelling so much, we haven't gotten enough time to just...chill out.  This weekend, I was expecting to work on more projects but instead, we had a surprising yet nice "Florida style" weekend.

Friday night we went out to The Mansion for a friend's birthday dinner and had a few drinks.  Click the pic to check out their website - it's a really neat restaurant that also has a huge beer/wine/liquor 

Some of you may remember how I was counting on receiving a package of fabric about a week ago so that I could make Emma's quilt last weekend but then it didn't come on Friday so I couldn't work on it over the weekend (which is why we had time to get the light fixture and fan up).  So the fabric finally got here on Monday and I got the fabrics pre-washed after bootcamp.  Tuesday Ryan and I swam laps before work and I had bootcamp after so I was just too tired to do anything.  Wednesday we had dinner plans for a friend's birthday and then Thursday after bootcamp I had an Alpha Phi meeting that ran pretty late.  So there I was...Friday morning...quilt due saturday morning and all I had done thus far was wash the fabrics...yikes!!!

In light of my recent obsession with remodeling, upgrading and beautifying our house...for my birthday I asked for gift certificates to get things for the house (big surprise huh?).  Thanks to my Dad & Laurie, we were able to get a new chandelier and fan for the landing and stairway.  The chandelier is from the same set as our dining room light and I have wanted to buy it and put it up practically ever since we got the dining room light fixture 3 - 4 years ago.  Here's the old light fixture that was there:

Once I got that modular storage area finished and made all pretty...it was time for a little closet makeover.  Since I took away the actual bookcase I used to have against the back wall, I needed a place to put my reading books.  The original bookcase (shown below), got moved to the theater room with both of our college text books.  But I wanted to keep my reading books in the quilt room since that's where my reading nook is.

I hope everyone had fun making their Shoebox Swap Crafts!  I just finished up the wreath I was making for Doreen and it came out pretty cute.  And it actually is as soft as it looks!

Friday night Ryan and I went to this little hole-in-the-wall place called "Rolli's Pork Loin" that serves pork sandwiches.  Ryan has been wanting us to go there for a long time and we finally went.  It was pretty tasty indeed - basically big greasy sandwiches with lots of barbecue sauce and some sort of other sauce.  Yum!

Yesterday was a fun but exhausting day.  I am doing another round of bootcamp with Bonnie & Steve Pfeister.  Their bootcamp is pretty intense and they are great trainers - watching out for people's form and correcting them, pushing everyone to go harder, providing tips on their nutrition and diet.  Here's our coaches Bonnie & Steve (click their pic to go to their facebook page and check them out):