My dog Rosie is a big girl that likes to chase just about anything that moves, and every five months or so, she breaks the mechanism on her retractable leash and it has to be tossed.

When she broke it this weekend, rather than rush out and purchase a brand new leash, I decided to get crafty — I removed the lanyard off the broken leash, sewed a band of fabric to 6 feet of heavy webbing and made a handle at the other end, and voilà, Rosie’s new one-of-a-kind super leash:

(I wanted to make a pink one with heart fabric, but Kevin said that he would be embarassed to walk her with it! hee hee)

I’ve got a springtime cold — BOOOOO! — and have been feeling under the weather these last couple days. The good news is that I got to catch up with my soaps, but the bad news is that I haven’t made much progress with my purse.

I feel a lot better today, though, and raring to get some work done!

My weekends are usually a blend of cleaning up around the house and running around doing errands, just trying to tie up all the loose ends from the week. But even though I had a ton of items on my todo list, I still managed to squeeze in some fun.

On Friday night, Kevin and I were out Mac window shopping at Best Buy, and ended up with a “cute little Mac mini”:http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0926INGFS10064692&catid=22154&PCName=ClearanceHome&logon=&langid=EN.

We named the little computer Lucky because that’s what we were, someone had just returned it, so we got it at even better than sale price and who could pass that up?

Saturday, I got my first pedicure ever — I was pretty nervous because I don’t like getting my feet touched, but the pedicurist understood my woes and assured me that she would take it easy, and it was a total success:

Mix in seeing a snake with the puppies and a Sunday evening knitting session with Erin, and I’ve got to wonder, why did this weekend have to end?

I woke up bright and early this morning, scooped up my mum and away we went to the “Port Colborne Market”:http://city.portcolborne.on.ca/visitinghere/attractions/farmers_markets/ to see what the locals had to offer.

There was only a handful of vendors, a lot different that during peak summer season when there’s more than forty but there was some new faces, so there was still a lot of new variety. The best was sampling a variety of different cheeses at one of the booths, we tried mustard & ale gouda from Wales, cumin spice gouda (which was my fave!), Dill Havarti, which was the kind we we ended up purchasing along with a small brick of aged Cheddar from Quebec. Cheese is something I don’t have very often, but I always enjoy it.

What else did we get? Three boxes of Pansies, one loaf of focaccia bread, and tub of Mango Honey — which made for a most-delish lunch on the back porch in the sun. Yum!

As soon as I saw this mixed package of vintage fabrics at Value Village my mind started swirling with ideas — Would I make a “hobo tote”:http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=6043.0 for the summer, or a circular needle roll-up, maybe even a bibbed apron?!

Too bad once I got home and opened the bag, all the fabric and already been cut into and all I got were sloppy seconds. :( I guess there’s enough to make a mini-quilt or some patchwork pillows, but I was pretty disappointed.

Let this be a lesson to you!