Philly

We recently visited Philadelphia, PA for a the 2013 National Homebrewers Conference.  If you have checked out the instagram account I set up recently, you may have noticed I crafted a bit with bottle caps before I went.  My husband is working on becoming a beer contest judge and has been researching the various styles, which includes tasting each.  I've been eyeing all his saved bottle caps and thinking of different projects to make.  I was going to go simple with some magnets, but thought it would be fun to make some beer bling to wear to the conference. 

So I got a metal hole punch and grabbed our pliers and went to work with some jewelry making items.  First I made some lovely earrings that look like a child made them.  So of course I didn't wear them more than 2 minutes or take pictures.  Then I made this pretty decent bracelet by punching holes in the caps and threading through some clear elastic cording.  The glass beads add color to the gold caps.

I also tried to make a belt by connecting the caps with jump rings, but I bought really cheap rings.  They kept wiggling open.  I should've made the belt with elastic cording like the bracelet.  Horrible picture btw - taken with my phone and not edited!  I'm also sporting a new Casual Lady Dress I whipped up in pink and purple houndstooth.  The pic does not do it justice of course.

While in Philly for the conference, I also had to visit Fabric Row!  I read this review of where to go before I dove in with my husband.  I saw most of these shops, but they carried a lot of fabric that I wasn't interested in.  I was looking for any cool printed knits or quilting cotton.  The shops had a ton of specialty fabric, dance wear, and home decor fabric.  J.B. Fabrics sounded promising, but they didn't have much.  I heard it was because their old store recently burned down in the spring.  I almost gave up on buying anything this trip because the shops are overpriced and I was too afraid to haggle.  But then I visited this place:

They didn't have a great selection of fabric, though what they had was reasonably priced.  They did however have a ton of cute buttons and trims.  I ended up getting zippers, buttons, ribbon, trim, and some purple knit with sparkles.

The green sparkly knit in the picture is from a different shop towards the end of Fabric Row - Fabrics on Fourth.  The store was a very happy place!  We walked in to find music blaring, people singing, and lots of crazy prints.  The people were very courteous and interested in what I was making.  You can maybe figure out from the goods I bought that I'm making some sort of Ariel dress.  I would've bought way more fabric from the store if it wasn't so expensive.

All in all, I didn't love Fabric Row, but mainly because I'm used to using coupons and I was looking for specific fabric that there wasn't a lot of.  But that is probably a good thing or I would've gone home broke.  One of the best parts of visiting Philly though is the food.  There is the obvious choice of Pat's or Gino's for cheesesteaks or Jim's on South - I won't say my fave, but it is the king.  But the mecca for food I visited was the Reading Terminal Market.  That place has so many different types of food.  My favorites were Beiler's Donuts, The Grill at Smuckers (awesome scrapple sandwich!), and Borden Farms.  We also tried a modern mexican place down the street from the market, Lolita, that was  pretty great.  I wish we had more time there to try other restaurants!