I am sitting at work thinking about cutting out the train fabric tonight.  This is usually the biggest time suck for me.  I hate making the first cut into a great fabric, so I put it off again and again.  The kids birthday party is next saturday so I don't have too much time to waste.  Cutting takes me a long time since I don't usually use a pattern, I just do the all the math and measuring myself.  It sucks!

I found some corduroy fabric to use as the backing for the bib and an awesome stripe fabric to back the placemats (the strip matches my kitchen).  Now all I need to do is cut them.  I love to make dual purpose stuff so the placemats are going to be great in the future and I can line them up in the dining rooom to make a runner for the party. 

I am also crossing my fingers that my sewing machine gets through this project.  I have a 34 year old viking that was the top of the line in its day.  My mom handed it down to me when she finally upgraded to a newer viking a few years ago.  The last time I took this machine in for service the tech told me they can no longer get parts once the machine is over 30 years old so all they can do is clean it.  That seemed to do the trick last time.  I had been doing some fleece projects and fleece does tend to muck up the machine.  I was going to replace the machine a few years ago but once I started looking into it I discovered it would cost over $1000 to get a new viking and to get a comparable model it would cost close to $5K.  I decided to limp along with my machine until it busts.  Here's hoping...