Back from the Beach / Show and Tell

Got back last night (cue sad music). It was lovely to be in Florida in November, even if I did get a bit of a sunburn on Day 2. (I forgot the sunscreen). By the time we got back from the Gulf Coast to SIL's beach house on the Atlantic,I was quite uncomfortably crispy, and  I didn't leave the house without SPF50 on for the rest of the trip.

I tried to blog, but it just wasn't working on the iPhone. I think when I star-2-2-8'd (to update my roaming capability) I screwed things up. Back in the day, you needed to do that with your Verizon cellphone to alert it to the local towers. It seems every time I went somewhere and did that, my signal just got worse (or maybe it was because there aren't any cell towers out in the ocean, which was on one side of me...or maybe because I'm in a concrete house.....). So, I amused myself by doing lots of Facebook posts with photos...sometimes every 5 minutes on a road trip, just so I could see all the places I was posting from be listed on my posts. (I'm easily amused)

I spared the hubs the usual quilt shop hop in Ft. Meyers Beach and Cape Coral area. Dragged him into Michaels for some Christmas stuff...I know, how is it I'm on vacation 1100 miles from home, and I'm shopping in Michaels? They had a great coupon for Fri and Sat, and I didn't want to miss out. He was a trooper about it, and it was his idea to go back on Saturday in between games (I suspect he was sulking over sending a runner in who was tagged out, and just wanted to get away, and the only place he knew how to get to was the shopping center with Michaels in it).

We did our usual Polish Pottery visit to pick up a couple replacement pieces (casualties of the hubs' occasional campaign to be relieved of emptying dishwasher duty...which isn't going to happen) and add a few more pieces (I can't resist, and I've still got a tiny bit of space in my cabinets).

I got to go to a really expensive decorator's warehouse in Orlando (where I spent a whopping $4.00). It cost us at least $25 which is what we'll be fined from the car rental agency once they get the photo ticket of us running through the toll booth without paying. Florida is sneaky like that....they put 2 toll booths on the on and exit ramps...one is EZ Pass, the other is exact COIN. Who knew???? I've got 20 one dollar bills, but no quarters, and the toll is a buck and you have to pay with coin. And there's 12 cars behind us. What are we suppoed to do? We had to drive through without paying. Of course, the minute we do that, it then occurs to us that now we've got to get off this road and we're looking at doing this again. I find two quarters in my purse...cool, we're passing exits that are 50 cents. We're set. Then we get off at our exit and it's 75 cents. Seriously!? Fortunately I also had some nickels and dimes to total the toll, otherwise, we would have driven until we found a 50c exit. The place (Margie's Interiors) had some really great decorated trees, and some excellent accessories, but the prices were seriously out of control, and I'm not sure the trip was worthy of the price of admission..

We stopped at The Quilt Place in Rockledge, FL which advertises having 11,000 bolts of fabric. It's a big shop, and they have a lot of fabric, but I just can't buy into 11,000 bolts. Who counted them? How long does it take to count to 11,000? (Sorry, I'm way too math challenged to figure that out). I suspect that someone counted  the number of bolts in some set length of space and then made some math mistakes when trying to compute how many bolts of fabric went into the length and width of the place.  Most shops advertise having 2000 or 2500 bolts of fabric, and this place just wasn't 4-5 times the size of those shops. They are a large building, but they've also got 3 or 4 Gammil long-arms in the place.

They did have a lot of Christmas fabric, so I decided to add a Christmas quilt to this year's ever increasing To Do List.

We drove to Vero Beach Monday and the hubs found a basket of Australian FQs, so I had to come home with a handful.

And this martini fabric just screamed my name.

Just because the vacation is over doesn't mean the fabric fun is. Today, my prize for winning the weekly quilt contest arrived...40 lovely batiks from Moda's Paridise Batiks line. Courtesy of Jojo's Quilt Shop in Elk Grove, CA. (Thanks again everyone who voted for me)the

All that remains is for me to drive up to Frederick this weekend and pick up my sewing machine (which has been enjoying a lovely spa visit while I've been beach bumming it), and I can get to work.

Yeah, I should be able to fit some sewing in between the treck up to pick up the Aurora,  painting the living room, taking the kids to the airport (Jamaican honeymoon), going to the Sugarloaf Craft Festival, making and delivering cookie exchange invites, and cleaning the house....this is a 4-day weekend coming up, right? (I wish!)

Tomorrow it's back to work for me, and after that it's back to other work as well. Welcome home!

I got a lot of stitching done on the trip, and I'll post those photos tomorrow. For now...goodnight, and have a great tomorrow!