Christmas the European way

Mr. H and I make it a priority to travel out of the country at least once a year. I understand that not everyone can afford this "luxury" but we do make sacrifices to be able to do this because I think it's so important to see the rest of the world.   This year we decided to see how the Europeans celebrate Christmas! We leave this weekend.  Here are the places we'll be visiting:

Bruges, Belgium

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 Brussels, Belgium

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Luxembourg

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Strasbourg, France

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Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany

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Munich, Germany

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Prague, Czech Republic

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I can't wait to visit all the Christmas markets, drink the mulled wine and eat the yummy Christmas treats! If anyone has any suggestions on places to visit and things to do in any of these cities, please share them with me!

Creating my own fabric on Spoonflower

Have you ever heard of Spoonflower? I discovered them when I was searching for a specific pattern for a fabric I wanted to use to make my nephew a baby blanket.  His mom and dad love the abominable snowman aka Yeti.  I searched for a fabric with Yetis but the ones I found were too girly or too mean looking.  I wanted a friendly cute Yeti.  Then I stumbled upon Spoonflower.com and found that I could create my own design and send it into them to print onto fabric!  I can't draw.  Let me repeat, I can't draw,  but I thought it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.  After spending a few hours messing around on the digital drawing pad, I finally created something I liked!  Here he is!  I put him against a background of snowy mountain tops.

I uploaded the drawing to Spoonflower.com and ordered a yard of the fabric. It was very reasonably priced, only around $18 for the yard including shipping.  Here is the fabric that I received.

I paired it with a blue and white stripe fabric and a snowflake fabric for the binding.

On the back I handstitched a "V" for Victor. 

So if you ever want to design your own fabric, I highly recommend Spoonflower!  I promise no one is paying me to say that!  Another great thing about their site is if you allow your design to be "Public" and allow other people to use it, Spoonflower will give you 10% of their purchase price. I haven't decided if I want to do that yet.  I am now working on turning the abominable snowman into Bigfoot!

Wish list: Sunroom/sewing room

Now that I'm sewing almost every day, the dining room has turned into my sewing room.  While Mr. H says he really doesn't mind, I would love to have a sewing room where I wouldn't have to put everything away every night, where I could put a spool holder on the wall instead of throwing them all in a plastic bin,where I'd have drawers for all of my fabrics instead of stuffing them into a bag each night.

We have a deck on the side of our house that we never use. It just gets way too hot in the summer and of course during the winter we don't go outside much. Here is what it currently looks like.

Here is the view from inside the house.

I think it would be perfect to enclose this area and turn it into a sunroom/sewing room!  Ever since I thought of this possibility, I've been obsessing over it.

I love these rooms:

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Of course there would be a sewing table in there along with all the other essentials!  Kind of like this room:

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The problem is we have a kitchen to renovate and a front porch to re-do so I'll have to try to figure out how to squeeze a sunroom/sewing room addition in there somewhere!