Creativ Festival Report

So, I went to the Creativ Festival in Mississauga on the weekend.  There were a decent number of booths with a variety of focuses - knitting, crocheting, stamping/cardmaking/scrapbooking, seweing maching embroidery and more.  The free classes weren't as good as I'd hoped, but I did have fun at the one make 'n take class I went to (where I made the 'laugh' card in the 'things I bought' photo).

One of the coolest things there was a booth demonstrating the Turkish art of Ebru.  For $7 you could try it and take your piece home.  Here's the one I did:

Ultimately I had a good two days, and came away with some new techniques.

Creativ Festival

I'm heading to the Crativ Festival this Friday and Saturday.  Should be a ton of fun.  I hope to learn a bunch of new sewing and card crafting tricks.  :)  I'll try to post some photos next week.

Sewing Book Review: Illustrated Guide to Sewing: Garment Construction, edited by Peg Couch

Pros: step-by-step colour photos for everything, left and right handed instructions for hand sewing, progresses through basics to quite advanced techniques

Cons: some later instructions may be hard to follow without referring to the accompanying photos and even the glossary

The Illustrated Guide to Sewing: Garment Construction is a great guide for beginner and intermediate sewers who want to give their sewing a more professional look.  It starts with the basics, touching briefly on some machine and hand sewing techniques, fabric preparation and essential notions.  It assumes some knowledge and suggests reading through your sewing machine guide if you're a complete beginner before starting with this book.

This book teaches garment construction specifically.  From the hand stitching techniques of basting (to check fit before sewing) to hemming, the book moves on to the correct construction order for garments and then to professional style finishing techniques.

Each set of instructions is accompanied by a series of full colour photographs with the different steps numbered for reference.  The photos certainly help with clarity.  Actual beginners will find themselves flipping to the glossary at the back of the book and to earlier sections where some procedures are given in more detail.  I imagine many of the techniques taught (as with everything skill related) take time and practice to master.

The book recommends taking extra time with pre-sewing adjustments to ensure that you only sew once to create flattering, well constructed garments.  And this is certainly a great book to help you achieve your sewing goals.

Hemming Pants

I have that 'lucky' body type whereby I can either fit clothes to my waist or my height.  Ultimately I choose waist (of course) and end up hemming all my pants to make them shorter.  I remember, once, finding a pair of jeans that fit perfectly when I tried them on.  No adjustments necessary.  Alas, that's not the norm, so off to hem them I go.

I had no idea there was a tool designed to help you hem pants.  I'd always worn them to measure how much material needed to be cut and hemmed for the pants to fit right, remeasured after taking off the pants, pinned the line, drawn a line to cut on, cut the excess, then measured, pinned, invariably pinned the wrong side of my pants, pinned again, turned under the hem and pinned one last time.  Finally, the easy part: sewing.  After an hour or more my pants would be hemmed and I'd be annoyed enough that I'd avoid hemming another pair for as long as I could.

But I was looking at sewing notions a few days ago and came across this: it's called a sewing and knitting gauge and it cost $1.20.

And I just happened to have a pair of pants ready to be hemmed.  I put the pants on and pinned up the sides, so I knew where to begin, then I got out my new tool.  There's a plastic slier you put to the measurement you want, then you stick it inside the groove and make sure the fabric is the same height all around using that measurement.  It was very fast and required no pins.

I then decided where to cut for the hem, and used the measurements on the side of the tool to mark a pencil line for cutting.



After cutting, it was again easy to set the hem line, then turn down and pin the fabric.  This is the second point where pins were needed, rather than the third or fourth.


In a fraction of the time it would normally take me to hem pants, these were done!

Punta Cana - Spa and Entertainment

The Spa at the Majestic Elegance is very beautiful. You have to walk off the main resort, across a bridge of naturalistic swampland to get there. The front had a few lounge chairs and a large Buddha statue. Reception was tastefully decorated and had a metal staircase leading to the massage rooms.

As I said in my first post on Punta Cana, the overbooking of the hotel let to our being given a $100 spa credit. So I got a 55 minute aromatherapy massage. The room had 2 massage tables, sink and shower. The massage itself was amazing.

After it was done, I headed downstairs to go to the other half of the spa. Here they have a series of pools (hot, cold, jetted), a hot stone chair, steam room, sauna, aromatherapy room and nifty showers (each stall had a different shower, like a pull cord bucket and wall jets).

We attended one of the many bingo games (my husband won a bottle of rum, which we traded for a CD of local music), I did a karaoke number (Walk Like an Egyptian) and went to a few of the evening shows.

If you're in the area and have the chance, two shows were definitely worth it: The Michael Jackson show and Circus Chan-Chi. They had a few trapeze artists, a guy who balanced various things on his head, a fire juggler and more.

Circus Chan-Chi Fire Juggler from Jessica Strider on Vimeo.

One day, the resort allowed some of the local artisans to set up a flea market. Let me just say that you have to bargain hard and if you're not used to it, you'll either end up paying a lot more than the items are worth or not enjoying the shopping experience. It was very different from negotiating in Thailand (and I wasn't very good at that either). Still, I got... decent prices for what I bought. Makes you appreciate set prices though.

In a bit of unplanned entertainment, a mother duck and her chicks were seen swimming in the pool and wandering the grounds.

But alas, all good things must come to an end. We caught our shuttle back to the airport, where we waited in line, watching the windows computer 'error' message on the Toronto departure screen. At least the Big Ass Fans were there to keep us cool. And I mean that quite literally. We were fortunate to witness a nice sunset from the plane and arrived back home without problems.

Punta Cana - Food

Let's talk about food. It doesn't matter how pretty the resort is, if the food's terrible it's not worth the money. People on TripAdvisor had alternating ratings with regards to the food. I heard a few people complain about it while I was there, but I actually loved the food. There was always a huge variety at the buffet, the restaurants had good food, but generally smaller portions. Ok, their sushi bar was kind of weird (pineapple sushi anyone?). On the whole though, I loved the food and loved not having to cook the food and getting the chance to try new things.

Their breakfast bar included omlet and crepe stations, cereal, fresh juices, hot chocolate (theirs is much richer tasting than ours), breads and sandwich additions. And let's not forget the pastries with chocolate to dribble over them and exotic (for us) fruits in syrup. And the not quite breakfast foods (mashed potatoes come to mind).

There were two buffet locations for lunch. The main buffet (Flavors) and See & Sea, by the beach. They had pasta stations, fresh salads, nachos, pizzas and desert spreads. One day they even had a barbecue with live music on the beach.

For dinner, the buffet was always themed, with a VERY high variety of offerings and some nifty decorations. Not sure what the 'American sauce' they put on the mahi mahi was (and chose not to try it to find out).

There were several a la carte restaurants, Italian, steakhouse, Japanese, French and seafood. Only the French and Japanese teppenyaki tables needed reservations. We tried all but the French restaurant. For people staying up late, there was even a fast food place open all night.

I ate a LOT more than I should have on this trip. And I seriously miss the buffet breakfasts.

Punta Cana - Beach and Pool

Of course you can't spend all your vacation admiring the buildings or sitting in your room - however nice they all are. So, it was off to the beach. I bought an Olympus Stylus Tough camera for this trip, which can go underwater! I had to learn a few tricks on the trip, which was unfortunate (as my photos before I learned the tricks weren't as good as the ones I took afterwards), but it was nice being able to take photos everywhere, even in the water.

As I said yesterday, the beach was made up of fine white sand. The different resorts all had roped off areas for their guests, with occasional free areas where natives offered boat rides, parasailing and other services. And the area closest to the water is free for everyone to walk, so you can wander for hours down the beach...

Our resort (and this was not true of all of them, as I learned later) had a large number of shade palapas, palm trees and lounge chairs. It also had a beach bar service and a nearby bar/lunch & snack restaurant (at night it was the seafood restaurant). The stretch was also long enough that if you didn't want to join in the activities (at one side), you could read in relative quiet elsewhere. There were also geckos that came by your chair looking for food. One day we walked down the beach for over an hour and came to an area of shops on the beach. It had much better prices (and more reasonable starting points) than the people selling on the beach and the flea market that came to our resort.

After I'd gotten a decent sunburn that first day on the beach, I decided a day at the pool would be nice. There were 3 pool bars, two dry (spaced a ways apart) and one wet bar. A separate kids pool was supposed to keep the noise down (though there was only 1 noisy kid there when we were, and he stayed by our side of the pool, unfortunately).

The pool was lagoon style, with swim up rooms along one side and several bridges to cross over/under. A fountain on one end and 'jacuzzi' (it was jetted but not heated) in the middle made it varied and fun to swim in. And it was gorgeous to look at.

It was especially beautiful at night.