"Snowfall" in San Francisco Bay Area

A week ago the entire San Francisco Bay Area was waiting for the snow. Every other post on Facebook was about it. I didn't believe for a second that it would be possible. Then on Friday night at about 11 p.m. my son ran out of the house with a camera around his neck. I knew something interesting was happening out there, so my husband and I immediately followed him. A miracle: snow was falling from the sky!
Our relatives, who live a half a mile away from us, didn't get it. How lucky for us!
We live on the very top of one of San Bruno mountains that reside between Daly City and Brisbane with Radio Peak being the tallest: 1314 feet elevation. So our area got cold enough temperatures to allow us to have snow for about 5 minutes.
Here is the proof:
 

Use weights while working with fabrics

Are you familiar with a situation where you try to keep a fabric flat on a table or make a template from brown paper and they just roll up and move nonstop? You pin it down to the table, and that doesn't help. The pins just leave big holes in the paper or pull the fabric. Yes, that is very annoying.
My sewers came up with a very clever solution; they make small 4"x6" bags out of scraps pulled from a trash can (the trash cans are very clean in our workroom) and fill them with pennies. They are pretty and easy to make. On top of that, it's recycling scraps that otherwise go waste. What can be better than that?

Pillows for a horse barn

One of our clients Barbara Hoskinson at Rosebank Design asked me to come to a horse barn to talk about several pillows that she wanted us to make. I was in for a big surprise. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a jokey jacket in a shadow box. The barn's owner's father was a well known jockey, and that was his jacket displayed on the wall.
Barbara based the pillow design on this jacket and decided to have the pillows made from a durable ultrasuede.
It was quite a challenge to make these pillows; each took 8 hours! And that is not including the time it took me to calculate the width of each stripe so we use blue and yellow colors as many times as possible and gray as few times as possible as it was requested.
Since ultrasuede doesn't press at all, Santiago, one of our sewers who was working on them, had to glue each seam allowance down so they don't move around once the insert is inside.

After a long discussion, all strips were cut across the width, not on bias (yes, even ultrasuede stretches when cut on bias). Then came another idea; there are buttons on the jacket. Why don't we buttons instead of zippers? We got a "yes" from Barbara and made a button closure with fabric covered buttons. Look how pretty these button holes look!

The pillows turned out beautifully! That is all that matters.

And I was very lucky to take a close look at one of the most beautiful creatures on the earth: horses: