Stuff on a Donnerstag

S came over tonight and together with Jeff and Wally we watched "The Hurt Locker". The movie was fantastic, albeit sad. My heart was pounding throughout the entire movie.
While we were watching, I managed to finish knitting my husband's "seaman's cap".
I managed to take a picture while he was watching the movie. He is not the easiest model to work with. It fits well and looks good. I made exactly what he requested.
The hat was one of the gifts for our 3-year anniversary (which is tomorrow). I also bought him a cot for when he goes on fishing trips. And I made a scrapbook of our honeymoon in Mexico. Below are a few of the excerpts from it. I am not really into scrap-booking, but I thought it would be a nice and meaningful gesture.
We had a Mayan wedding ceremony and a dinner just for us.
The resort where we stayed, Le Blanc, was pretty much my piece of heaven. The beach, the waves, the infinity pool were all unbelievable.
You can't really see on these photos, but the room we had was better than anything we could have imagined. The bed was facing the beach (upper right hand corner), and we woke up each morning to a beautiful sunrise.
We also went out to see Mayan ruins (Tulum).
The food and the restaurants in the hotel were just like from a 1950s movie.
I would love to visit there again sometime soon. Every moment on our honeymoon took my breath away. I never regretted not having a wedding and having a honeymoon of our dreams instead.

And then there were sleeves

It is just my luck that on the day we were taught how to do the hardest thing - capped sleeves - my trusty little Crofton sewing machine started NOT working. I struggled with it the entire time, and finally the instructor came to check up on me. She tinkered with it herself, and finally said: "This is a piece of crap (ouch!) - you need to buy another machine."

I left the class since there was nothing I could do, and headed over to Joann Fabric store to see what they had. Unfortunately, the rep selling the beautiful and mighty Swedish Viking machines was not there, so I would have to return to the store tomorrow.

Once at home, I decided to play with my good old Crofton and I got it to work. It is a little hesitant, but it does things after some pleading and petting.

Luckily, I have a photographic memory of the demonstration the instructor did in class, so I was able to recreate her steps and make my own capped sleeves - unassisted.
And I thought the zipper was hard. This was not easy at all. I struggled and struggled, but I finally got a hang of it. Feast your eyes on my unfinished little baby dress bodice with brand new sleeves.
Being anal that I am, I must admit that it REALLY bothers me that one of the sleeves is slightly more scrunched than the other. Grrr! I am afraid I might tear it apart till I get symmetrical pleats on both sides. I'll try to live with it... for now. Actually, I am going to go and try to fix it.

This is what I call hedonism

Maybe it was a food show on TV, maybe it was my sweet tooth cravings, but I decided that from now on, I would like to make a new dessert every weekend - from scratch. I started out with an Apple Crisp recipe from the Williams-Sonoma Fruit Dessert cookbook.
I made a trip to the grocery store to get all the ingredients, and 50 minutes and six Granny Smiths later, the scent of this delicious treat was permeating my kitchen. "Divine" is not even the word to describe how good this turned out. I served it warm with sugar-free vanilla ice cream. Yum!

This weekend was productive in another way, too. I turned this...
...into this. A soft, warm, colorful headband.
The ends are held together by a sweet little button in the back.
You can have a ponytail and a warm scalp, too. And you can have an apple crisp and eat it, too.
Love! <3