A New Beaded Bracelet for Me

Last night at our monthly Chicagoland Craft Collective Meetup, I made this spectacular memory wire bracelet. Analee was our wonderful teacher of the craft this month. I brought a bunch of beads I picked up on sale at Joann's a long, long time ago that I intended to be a purse handle but now I have this awesome bracelet.

Next month I get to be the teacher. I am going to show everyone how to make these cool wire-edge ribbon flowers. You can view a tutorial for the folded ribbon rose I wrote over at Craft Critique. I am going to teach this rose plus the leaf and then if we have time I will do the rosette and rolled ribbon rose. They are quite easy to do once you get the feel of it and they work up very quickly.

Last Week Was Vacation Week

Last week we actually took the whole week off work and did vacation stuff but we didn't really leave town. We decided we didn't want to spend all that time in a car (especially with gas prices) when we live near one of the greatest cities in the U.S., Chicago!

Although, we really only spent one day downtown we did enough in that one day that could have been spread out over a few days. After that we lounged by our association pool and visited the park districts pools and water park. Now my daughter is ready for a real water park with more than 3 slides. 6 year olds tend to get bored quickly, that is until you say we aren't going anywhere else then the local place is perfect.

Our day downtown consisted mostly of Navy Pier where we went to the Children's Museum, the Amazing Chicago Funhouse, ate at the Billy Goat Tavern (famous for the curse on the Cubs), rode the famous Ferris Wheel, and took a boat trip on Lake Michigan. We also dipped our feet into freezing Lake Michigan at nearby Ohio Beach. We also managed to hop on a free trolley from the Pier to the Magnificient Mile along Michigan Avenue where we visited the famous American Girl Store (luckily daughter didn't take much interest), the Hershey Chocolate store and had an awesome chocolate cupcake, and a few other places. Our only regret in our trip was the Children's Museum. If you want to go to a really nice children's museum for the money go the the Indianapolis Children's Museum or Wonderlab in Bloomington, IN.

The pictures on the page are from our trip downtown. One is my daughter in the cold water with Chicago in the background - the tallest building is the Hancock building. The other picture is her in front of one of the art pieces displayed along Michigan Avenue. The current collection are fashion inspired pieces using a dress form shape. This one was called Metamorphosis. There was a cocoon also but the streets were just too busy to keep stopping for photos.

There is so much to do here that we have a hard time deciding what's next. We've only lived here about 2 years and are just now getting to explore downtown really well. One thing I would recommend to do if you come to town for a few days during baseball season is to get tickets to Wrigley field. I've been to both the Sox and Cubs games but you can't beat the old time atmosphere at Wrigley.

Oh, I did observe one crafy thing at the Children's Museum, a collection of quilts made by kids for peace. I discussed them over at my quilting blog, Vertical Quilting Curve.