Pillowcases and Getting out of Town

Here is the completion of my most recent project, one of a set of pillowcases to match the cream-colored sheets we bought a year ago but couldn't find cases for. This pillowcase turned out pretty well. Pillowcase #2 didn't fare quite as well because I didn't remember the directions in the correct order and foolishly failed to read them all the way through. Also, the mean French seam was so thick that it broke two of my sewing needles when I tried to sew the outside band to the front of the case. So it is back to the drawing board for me to figure out how to make that seam less gigantic and how to make the outer band actually match the size of the case itself. I did follow a pattern; however, for some reason the instructions aren't working that well for me (or for some of the others in the class, for that matter).

We headed out of town this past weekend for Canton, OH and Angola, IN. My brother-in-law, David, lives in Canton and we stayed with him for the weekend as part of our trip to a family reunion in Indiana. It felt really good to get out of town, drive to a larger city where there were actually a variety of things to do, eat lots of good food and see family. While in Canton, we relaxed at David's and (happily) caught an episode of Sherlock Holmes, hung out at Borders, walked in a nice park and saw the memorial for President McKinley, and bought ourselves a really nice mirrored hanging candle holder and a glass orb from Plant et Art. The Pokagon Park in Indiana where we had the reunion was really nice as well. It was not easy to find our family reunion, but it was a nice place to go. It was great to see family, especially Mom, and we were showered with gifts from all of our parents: Fishing poles and a tackle box with accessories for Lucas (and me), cookies, cheese, cookbooks, milk and refrigerant for our car's drained A/C.

The previous weekend, we had Sarah and Jason visiting from Kalamazoo in honor of the Harry Potter book release. I managed to finish the book in just under 24 hours (and that includes sleeping time and hanging out with friends time). I was quite satisfied with it and it was even better than I could have expected...definitely worth the thousands of pages and countless hours I've spent reading and pondering it. The best part was that no one could really predict the ending of the book no matter how hard they tried. Certain theories were proved correct; however, the last leg of the book had elements that were really unexpected. I'll write more about my impressions on our literary blog. We also went to see the new movie, Order of the Pheonix. It was not bad but not amazing. I think my favorite movie is still number three (but you have to give them credit for adapting a huge book into the short fifth film). It was great to see Sarah and Jason and we had a great time chatting, eating thai food and cooking Indian food for them.