Gone With The Wind

Seems I've been away a while. What have I been doing? Well, looking at cookbooks, for starters.

Starters and desserts. And interrupting Hubby C with things like, "Yes, I know, but back to my question: Turkish pizzas or stuffed vine leaves?"

Wedding planning, my friends, wedding planning. Wedding planning with no budget, but with great resources, like my aunt who runs what may be the most popular food stand at the farmer's market (she's neck-and-neck with the waffle lady) offering to help us out with the cooking. And like my childhood best friend who is now a locally famous restauranteuse and pastry chef, who is getting all excited about making my wedding cake. And like the vintage clothing shop owner who has taken down Hubby C's measurements so that she can look for a suit for him while she's in New York on a buying trip. And the favourite photographer friend who has agreed to do our wedding photos. Sigh. I love this town.

And, of course, there's the luck of having found roughly 24 yards of ivory silk dupioni for $14 at the Salvation Army shop. It's currently in the form of someone's drapes, but that's easily remedied. I'm going to rock this wedding Scarlett O'Hara style.


See? Silky, drapey goodness. It's gorgeous. I did a burn test to make sure it's not full of flame retardant, and, much to my joy, it's totally flammable. Well, that's not really much to my joy, but you know what I mean. No asbestos means a much comfier, and less toxic, wedding dress. I'm planning to make the dress tea-length, with straps instead of sleeves... and perhaps a ruched bodice. By which I mean that I'm only using the pattern as a suggestion. Don't worry, I'll do a mock-up first. Although there is about five times more fabric than I'll need. So I could screw it up a whole bunch of times.


There is also a very froofy peach-coloured crinoline hanging on my sewing-room door. I was sort of considering buying a crinoline, given the dress I'm making, but I wasn't entirely convinced. Then I went down to Model Citizens to talk about Hubby C's suit, and there was a big pile of crinolines on the counter that had just been used in a fashion show. I fell in love with this one. It's not crinkly at all, but soft and drapey in a totally synthetic way. Which is normally not at all my thing, but let me tell you: I put this on and I felt like Cyndi Lauper in the video for Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Which is, I think, how you ought to feel on your wedding day, no?

I've also used the wedding planning as an excuse to take up a hobby that I've wanted to start for ages: stamp carving. It will be a while before I reach Geninne-level awesomeness, but I did design and carve this:


Which I then scanned and cleaned up so that I could make these:


Sure, I would love schmancy letterpress invitations, but time and cash are of the essence, so it's laser printer plus Photoshop plus card stock from Michael's this time around. Maybe we'll have letterpress invitations on handmade artisinal paper for our fiftieth anniversary party. If we start saving now.

So what else? Looking at a lot of purty wedding websites and stealing their ideas while laughing at how much money some people spend on weddings. I mean, it's special and everything, but, you know, so are groceries. Craftzine and Design*Sponge have all the tutorials I need, I've got a sewing machine and a rockin' stand mixer, I have the world's most meticulously well-organized maid of honour (my sister), and I have gotten over any guilt I once had about delegating responsibilities to friends and loved ones. Wedding? Bring it on!

Jam and veggies

So our cherries have been identified by an expert friend as sweet cherries, but under-ripe. Still delicious and perfectly edible, though. I had suspected they might be under-ripe, but I was so worried about them splitting from the rain that I went ahead and snagged what I could yesterday, knowing that it was supposed to be rainy last night. Then I made some of what I like to think of Busy Mom Jam. Yum.

I knew that Baby Bear would never let me sit in one place long enough to pit several pounds of cherries, so I cooked the whole cherries (stems removed) in a big pot with about an inch of water in the bottom. I cooked them until they were just squishable, maybe 15 minutes. I waited for them to cool while we ate supper, then I squished them with one hand while Baby Bear squirmed around in the other arm, since he refused to be put down for more than two seconds at a time. I squished the seeds out into one bowl and threw the cherry pulp into another, then I strained the seeds out of the last bit of juice and added the juice to the bowl with the pulp.

Next I measured the pulp into a big crock - one of those giant crock-pot inserts that you see at thrift stores all the time for about a dollar. Super useful. For every cup of pulp, I added 3/4 cup of sugar, then I stirred it up, covered it, put it in the fridge and went to bed.

This morning I got up and, after changing the baby and brushing my teeth and all that, I poured the cherry-sugar mixture into a large pot with about three lemons' worth of juice and cranked it up to a rolling boil. I won't go into all of the technical stuff about the jelling point and such, because Dan Lebovitz says it much better than I would here. I also won't go into all the details about sterilizing your jars and processing your jam in a hot-water bath because they're all available here. Most of the time I'm pretty stick-it-to-the-man, but not when it comes to preserves. Not only do I never want to give anyone food poisoning, but it would break my heart to have to throw out a whole batch of preserves because I couldn't have been arsed to wash my jars properly.


The jam turned out beautifully, and there are still a million more cherries on the tree. Hubby C has rigged a branch-grabbing device by attaching a wire coathanger to the end of a broomstick with electric tape. Gently bending the branches down to picking level is much more effective than hanging out a second-floor window and trying to bop the cherries off the branches and into a basket. Heh.

Oh, and yes, those are slices of butter in the photo above. The butter was cold, the oatmeal scones were crumbly, and spreading was not an option. Also, I eat butter like some people eat cheese. It's one of my many passions.

I've been slacking with the CSA photos. Here's week three:

There's romaine lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, snow peas, green beans, broad beans, garlic scapes, basil, parsley, green onions, edible chrysanthemums... probably some other things I'm forgetting... I'll admit, I have to play a bit of catch-up in order to keep on top of things this week. I've been running around a fair bit and not home cooking as much as I would like to be. The weather is supposed to be cook for the next few days, so maybe I'll do some blanching and freezing. Or just have stir-fries for every meal. Whichever.

Cherries

Since we moved into the new house, I have been watching this magic happen right outside our
windows:

That's a cherry tree, alright. Which is probably no big thing to people in most of North America, but which is a very, very big thing in my part of Newfoundland. Fruit trees are very uncommon here. I don't know why that is, because obviously cherries grow perfectly well in downtown St. John's.

The tree belongs to our neighbour, but almost a full half of the branches are on our property, bopping us in the faces with ripening cherries every time we go out into the back yard. Since we're just getting to know our neighbours, I wasn't sure whether they would be keen on us devouring half their cherries; I know that, technically, the cherries on our property should be ours to do with as we will, but people can be funny about trees. I needn't have worried; one of the tree's owners was climbing up after his cherries yesterday, and enthusiastically encouraged me to pick as many as I could get my hands on. Apparently this had always been the deal with the previous owners and tenants - whatever is on our side of the fence is ours to eat or ignore, as we wish.

Needless to say, I spent the afternoon picking these:


There's twenty times that many on our side of the tree, but they're too high up for me to reach. I can almost grab some of the biggest bunches by leaning out the befroom or dining room or bathroom windows, but they're just that little bit too far away to grab. I tried to rig up a basket on the end of a broomstick, in the hope that I could reach it out a window and sort of coax the fruit in but man, those cherries hang on tight. It's raining tonight, and there's a good chance that they'll split in the morning, and be ruined. It's a tragedy! Next year I'm totally saving up and renting a 20-foot ladder. It will be well worth it.

New to me

First of all, I finished the purple top I was working on, and I posted the details over at Wardrobe Refashion if you want to have a look. I accidentally saved the photos as really low quality, but you'll get the gist. It's super comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that I fell asleep in it Saturday night. Sweet. My machine did chew the hell out of it, and I ended up making two small holes when re-setting the snaps for the millionth time, but you can't see them, so I'm okay with that. If I make this shirt again I'll use some less flimsy material, maybe a cotton weave with just a little stretch.

I took photos of some of the pretty things I picked up at the house sale in Holyrood on Saturday. Look at these three lovely little plates that Kathleen sold to me for fifty cents apiece.

I couldn't not take them home. They're so sweet.




This one is my favourite. Look at all the wonderful crackling. I want to make some really beautiful cookies to put on it.

We also found this marvelous camera:


Apparently it works perfectly, just needs a battery, which I will pick up today along with some film to test it out. For $15, Hubby C and I didn't think twice about it, even though neither one of us knows anything about film photography. I did some online poking around when we took it home, and by all reports it's a great little early-1970s camera. A lot of people in different Pentax forums (fora?) described it as a favourite, and I guess I can trust them, right?

I've had many opportunities to learn to use a proper camera, but I've always been too intimidated. There are a number of really stellar photographers in my life, and I'm constantly in awe of them. I think that control is probably an issue, too: you can set up all the conditions for a perfect photograph, and then it can still get all shagged up in the developing. And you won't know until you see the prints. I can handle screwing something up (well, not gracefully, but I can handle it), but I don't like not knowing whether I've made a mess of something, and then having days or weeks to obsess over it. Having a digital camera to rely on for the day-to-day stuff makes it easier. That way, the digital is for practical photo-taking, and the 35 mm is for just tooling around. No big deal. We'll see what happens.

It's funny, because there are many high-pressure projects I'll take on with no experience at all, just because I've read about how to do such and such a thing, or I've seen it done and figured it out on my own. Usually, these projects turn out fine, often better than I had expected. But photography is different. I've built it up too much, I think. When I was about 16 I had a mad crush on a photographer I knew. That's probably what did it.

Unrelated, but awesome: my old school chum, fellow refashionista, and wardrobe inspiration Erin Whitney has started a new blog, The Bitchin' Stitch, to document her adventures in dressmaking. She's a real-life costume designer and she knows all kinds of technical stuff that I can't wait to learn. Thank you , Erin!

Another day of great bounty

Gifts from all directions. First of all, it rained, which is wonderful because the season has been really strangely dry here. The snow melted very early this spring, so we didn't have our usual amount of run-off, and the weather has been uncharacteristically sunny and hot. The water levels are way down, and everybody's watering their gardens with grey water. Which we all should be doing anyway, but I suppose it takes a scare sometimes to remind people how wasteful we are. I've been a little ashamed of how quick I am to waste water, especially considering that I spent six months living in a shack with no water at all, just two camping kegs that I filled up each week, and I got by just fine.

We were at the farmers' market - and by "we" I mean myself, Baby Bear, my mother, my stepdad, my grandmother, and a pile of aunts and uncles - when the rain started, and I don't think I've ever seen a bunch of people so happy to get sopping wet. My mother even did a little dance. One uncle was busking, and he just kept on playing, finishing his set under the canopy of a red maple.

After all that, my mother and Hubby C and I packed Baby Bear into the car and drove out to an acquaintance's moving sale in Holyrood, which is about half an hour out of town. When we got out of the car and walked toward the house, there was a rabbit just hanging around in the garden. A sign, I figure. My mother is a friend to rabbits everywhere. The house and property are just amazing. If you've ever dreamed of owning a place in Newfoundland, just off the beaten track (but close to all amenities), perhaps this is the little retreat you've been looking for. The seller has a photo gallery up here. It's a very magical place, with fairy-inhabited woods and everything.

We bought some wonderful things, many of which we have to go back and pick up, since we couldn't fit them in the car. I don't have pictures now, but I will. Perhaps really nice ones, even, because one of the things we bought is a great old camera. Also a set of chairs, a cabinet, and some beautiful little plates.

To make up for having no photos in this post, let me just share the adorableness of the fabric pack that Marissa is giving away over at Rae Gun Ramblings. What is it about Japanese fabric designers that allows them to tap into this unearthly cuteness? I'm not one to throw around words like "ridonkulous," but, I mean, really:


Look at that! The cuteness! Anyway, have a look at her blog and enter for a chance to win a big bunch of teeny little squares of fun.

I'm working on another bit of summery breastfeeding apparel, but I'm not sure it's going to turn out nicely at all, mostly due to poor fabric choice. I was trying to refashion a really soft jersey t-shirt, but my sewing machine is from 1972, and when it hears "stretch," it thinks "polyester double-knit," not "super-fine cotton jersey, cut off-grain and stretching if you so much as look at it." I'll let you know how it works out.

Amazing invention: prototype

So, here's the sundress I've been working on. The grainy photo disguises the many, many things that are wrong with it: uneven hem, lumpy seams, droopy straps, gaping neckline (okay, that one's obvious), comedically long ties, wonky topstitching, mismatched bobbin thread, spots where the fabric is nearly worn through. It has more darts than the Legion on league night. It's actually a Frankendress. The outside is made from a vintage bedsheet, and there's a hidden layer underneath made from a thrift-store cotton nightie. It's a functional garment: a breastfeeding dress!

I've been suffering some hardcore sundress envy , watching all these sweet summery little numbers pop up on people's blogs. But dresses are highly impractical when you're a nursing mom. You can either shove your baby up under them, leaving your entire body exposed, or whip your boobs out the top, in which case you're effectively flashing the entire world. You could wing a scarf or something up over your shoulder, or one of those boob-hiders that people make, and that's all fine and good until your baby hits what I call the "look what I've got for lunch" phase, where he or she insists on hoisting or flinging any covering off in order to enjoy dinner while still keeping an eye on any goings on around him or her.

If I'm not keen on exposing my gazongas to the greater St. John's region, I'm less keen on exposing my belly. Perhaps once, before it had been used as a rental unit to a short but impressive succession of hooligans who kicked the walls and who definitely aren't getting their damage deposits back, but certainly not now. And while I will defend to the end a woman's right to render herself virtually topless for the sake of feeding her wee babes, I'm a bit too Victorian to go that way myself.

In order to keep myself decently covered while still breastfeeding a very squirmy baby all over town, I usually wear a convoluted combination of layers to hike up and pull and stretch all out of shape. But it's summertime now, and it's hot, and I want to float about in little cotton frocks like everyone else. Proper breastfeeding clothes are totally inadequate - stretchy, clingy tops, all very sporty and not particularly pretty. Riddle me this: with all the money flying around at maternity boutiques, why isn't more research put into what makes decent breastfeeding attire? Because chances are, you're going to be breastfeeding for longer than you were pregnant. Are you supposed to wear that same black stretch t-shirt for the whole two years?

And thus, I have decided to invent the breastfeeding frock. The design is a little bit retro and a little bit genius. I took this little nightdress and separated the yoke from the skirt. The yoke has little buttons that open, and really, if you were going to wear it as a nightdress your boobs would totally fall out of it.

I created a top layer to go over it, like I said, from an old bedsheet (didn't take a picture, you know what a bedsheet looks like). The nightie-yoke is attached at the bottom to the dress (bedsheet) skirt, but the outer layer is not. The outer layer has a little aprony-bit attached, and that aprony-bit has long (too long) ties, so it wraps around like a sash.

I know, this doesn't make much sense, and it probably won't from this picture, either, which is grainy enough to look vaguely porn-y. I was trying to hold up the apron-y bit by the ties while operating the camera with one hand, but at the same time attempting to angle the whole affair so as not to show my nipples... heh...


See? That whole sash thing going across is attached at the top and the sides, and then underneath there's the button-down nightie bit for ease of infant access. Then you straighten up, tie the sash in the back, and off you go, pert and pretty as anybody else in their sweet summer dresses.

Or, if you live in St. John's, and it suddenly gets a little chilly, you take a long-sleeved t-shirt and chop it into a cardigan so that you'll have something to cover your arms, but that won't interfere with the big silly bow on the back of your dress.


You can probably figure this out on your own, but if not there's a highly scientific diagram here.

Oh, and since the fabric I made the dress with is a little worn and gauzy, I sewed a casing and some elastic on to the discarded nightie skirt, which I am now wearing as a slip. I like using all parts of the animal.

Pretty pretty, pretty tasty

I finally received a parcel of fabric that I'd ordered on eBay ages ago. It's not the seller's fault that it took so long; parcels always take ages coming from the U.S. (I suppose it's all those terrorists transporting details of their evil schemes encased in 1930s calico... dastardly!), and I also didn't manage to change my mailing address quickly enough, so the parcel had to be held at the post office for re-routing. But it's well worth the wait.

I love the blue on the left, a really unusual tone for that sort of print. The red one has little dancing ladies and bundles of flowers all over it. The next one is a cute floral from the 1980s, and the blue and white is a nice heavy cotton twill that I can use for something sturdy. I'm thinking of making some sort of mei-tai-like baby carrier with it, perhaps. We did just get a very nice stroller for Baby Bear, but there are times when you really want to carry your baby on your back, and my stretchy wrap is wearing out (to be fair, I did cut it from a very soft cotton jersey duvet cover, and it's been used almost every day since he was about two months old).

There were a bunch of vintage quilt scraps in the package, too, but I didn't manage to get a decent photo of those. At least one of the prints, though, is one I remember from when I was a kid.

I picked up some old pillowslips at a thrift shop earlier in the week:


There are two of the stripey one on the left. The one in the middle is a quite heavy cotton. The one on the right is more worn, but still quite lovely. You would think that I would bother to iron these before taking photos, no? Hrrm.

Supper last night was another blissful arrangement of veggies from our CSA: Asian broccolini, garlic scapes, savoy cabbage, and carrots (and garlic and onions, naturally) in spicy black bean sauce, over noodles, with thin slices of sirloin that had been marinating, all but forgotten, in the freezer for weeks - Hubby C had bought and prepped too many, and stowed this one away for later but, like squirrels with acorns, we often forget what we have put away and where, a habit I'm working hard on correcting. I sliced the meat thinly, fried it quickly in a very hot pan so it was still oozing pinkly in the middle, and laid it on top of the veggies. Oh my freakin' goodness.

When I started making dinner I realized that we had no ginger, so I sliced up some pickled ginger (like you have with sushi) and put that on top, with some sliced green onions and crushed peanuts. It was absolute heaven. Somehow, the pickled ginger tasted fresher than fresh ginger would have. Does that make sense?

I'm working on another item for Wardrobe Refashion, but I've done just about everything wrong so far. It's actually getting to be rather funny. If all goes well I'll be able to post some photos today. If only the baby will sleep...

Best. Thing. Ever.

I've been writing for The Scope for three years now, and in my three years, this is the most delicious thing I have ever made.

(And while you're over there, Elling's interview with transgender athlete Jennifer McCreath is really interesting, too.)

Savoy Cabbage Salad

This isn't a great photo, but my camera died before I could take any more. This is one of the things that came together from last week's organic vegetable delivery, a sort of cole slaw, but very light, which Hubby C and I ate with barbecued hamburgers... oh good heavens. I know that a lot of people are at a loss when faced with a bag of veggies that they might not have selected themselves. I end up having to find uses for things I would never ordinarily buy. It's a total blessing, because now I'm developing tastes for foods I usually pass up. I don't think I've ever bought a Savoy cabbage, but I'm so glad I ended up with one in my fridge, because I got to make this:

1/2 head Savoy cabbage, thinly sliced
1 tart apple, in matchsticks
2 small Harukai turnips, quartered and thinly sliced
small handful of wee tiny radishes, quartered (about 1/4 cup)
2 green onions, chopped

dressing:
1/2 cup thick plain yogurt
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon celery seed
salt and pepper

Do I need instructions to go with this? Um... stir dressing ingredients together, pour over salad makings, toss about until everything is covered. Enjoy.

Berry season begins... for real

So, my computer may be well and truly damaged, but I have managed to get my data files off it, and will be sucking my eight million photos out tonight, then my computer-whisperer brother-in-law(-to-be) is going to gut the thing and start from scratch, which may fix it all up. The keyboard is only partly working (as in, the letters a, f, g, j, and k work, and the right arrow key, and that's it), which may mean actual hardware damage, which may mean ugh. It could be much, much worse. So that's good news.

I spent Saturday with a friend at her place in Witless Bay. She's rebuilding a house out there, and she has lots of land completely covered in wild strawberries. Which we picked and picked and picked, hanging out in the tall grass. It was so beautiful.


Um, neither one of those is the house... I didn't get a picture of the house, for some reason. But it's a sweet little normal-looking house. These are two of the three other buildings on her land. They're full of intriguing things. The two-storey barn is super cool.

The strawberries are the wonderful wee tiny ones, and they made the whole field smell like jam. Look how tiny:


I managed to pick two small buckets of them, and I would have picked more if I hadn't had Baby Bear there with me. He only has so much patience for berrypicking. Not enough action for him.


Somebody has a new favourite food.

Help! Au secours!

My laptop might be dead. I'm typing on Hubby C's computer right now. When I try to boot my computer up, it makes this horrid extended beeeeeeep like a smoke detector would.

Only a smoke detector wouldn't have my poetry manuscript on it. Or all my photos.

Back-up? What do you mean, back-up?

Heh. Yeah.

Sooo... anyone want to lend me a thousand dollars? Like... indefinitely?

Bye-bye, Buttercup

That's my girl, about to get into a taxi to the airport. That dapper-looking gent in the appropriately candy-striped sweater is B's dad. He lives in Chicago, and every summer B goes to stay with him. This year they're spending four weeks in Chicago, and then two weeks visiting family through Ontario.

She won't be back until the last week of August.

Of course, she's been bouncing off the walls for a month. She and her dad are really close. There are kids and dads who see each other every day but who never really get to know each other, who never get to do anything meaningful together. Because their time with each other is concentrated the way it is, B's dad puts a lot of thought into what they're going to do, how they're going to get the most out of their summer. B goes to play camp, she has friends who she only gets to see when she in Chicago, she gets to spend time at her Nana's, in a sprawling and wonderfully cluttered Edwardian house across from a park, and with her Grandpa and cousins at an incredible cottage on a beautiful lake. They visit relatives in Toronto, and friends on a farm outside the city. There will be lots of swimming, good food, visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, trips up the "Serious Tower," adventures and music and fabulous experiences (like last year when she went to see Bill Callahan play a free outdoor show and danced her heart out in the front row, saying to her dad, "I know this song!").

Still, there are so many things she'll be missing here. Picking strawberries and raspberries. Gathering cherries from the tree out back. The Lantern Festival in Victoria Park. Watching Baby B figure out how to crawl (or head straight into a gallop). Then again, maybe she won't miss these things at all. Maybe I'll just miss having her here to do them with me. Her dance card is pretty full.

When she comes back we'll still have time to go camping and to the beach. There will be blueberries to pick, and the weather will be beautiful - August through October is the best time of the year here. Back-to-school shopping, barbecues, birthdays.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that B's peppermint Oddfellow's dress grew a ruffle overnight. When I very proudly showed her that Jen had posted her photo over at The Fabled Needle, she asked, "How come you didn't put a ruffle on my dress?" I replied that I thought she had said that she didn't want a ruffle. "No, I said I didn't want pockets! I reeeeeeally want a ruffle!" If I were a more sane woman, and if I weren't preparing to say goodbye to her for the whole summer, I would have said no. She is so sweet. I'm overcompensating. And I'm okay with that. She held up that dress this morning as though it were the most beautiful Cinderella ballgown. Well worth an hour of fiddling with gathers in the middle of the night.

CSA week 1

We got our first official delivery from the Seed to Spoon Collective CSA this evening. Excuse the weird lighting, but it was well into nighttime before I got a chance to take some photos.

Those little Hakurai turnips are delicious. And the greens! Ah, how I love greens.

The shares are still on the small-ish side, since July is still early in this part of the world. I can's wait to see what comes next. I've offered to help out with some value-added products later in the year - pickles maybe, or chutneys. I do like a good canning spree.

One for B, one for me

I made Furious B's pink-and-white striped sheet dress, to her detailed specifications. When I was looking at this post on the lovely The Fabled Needle blog (scroll down... cute blue gingham dress... yeah, that's the one), B leaned over, pointed, and said, "I want that dress with the pink striped sheet." Which was fine by me, because that's exactly the sort of dress I can approximate without too much trouble. (I did make her say "please," though.)

This is, in fact, the same dress I wore to my prom, only that one was floor-length and black. Uh-huh... I was that girl. But the point is that I can whip together a peasant dress in no time. Perhaps I'll actually put up a tutorial one of these days. It's just four funny-looking hexagons sewn together, with some elastic pulled through. You can make a blouse instead of a dress, you can do long sleeves instead of short, you can belt it or not. Most versatile pattern ever.

I've been calling this B's "Oddfellow's dress" because I think it makes her look like a character straight out of Emily Martin's Oddfellow's Orphanage series. Can't you see it? She just needs a little white fur capelet and some Victorian boots. And a wistful, mysterious look in her eye. She would be the lollipop-maker's apprentice or something. Maybe that's just my Emily Martin fixation coming out.

I'm really pleased with this dress; like I said, drafting the pattern wasn't any big deal, but I took my time and finished the seams really nicely. I'm totally rocking French seams these days. It's absolutely worth the time, especially on something that only has eight seams anyway. And I used seam binding at the neck and hem - two different kinds - and it worked wonderfully. The fabric is fairly tightly-woven, and a regular turned hem would have been really bulky. Same for a standard facing at the neck. Seam binding is awesome.

High on the triumph that is this dress, I tried to make B another dress, this time from a men's dress shirt. I had wanted something like this, but of course I didn't actually read the tutorial. Long story short: it looks like a sack on her. Fortunately, it looks kind of cute on me:

The colours are much nicer in light other than the overhead in my bathroom (and damn, that mirror is dirty). That's not an actual belt, but the leftover button and buttonhole plackets I used to cinch it in a bit to keep it from looking too much like a circus tent. It's not the sort of thing I would usually wear, but the cotton is super soft, and those French seams are so tidy! What on earth made me think this would fit a five-year-old?

I guess I'll sew a proper belt for this and count it as my first official refashion for me. I have another couple deliciously soft men's shirts and a few plans for them. I also have a fairly ambitious jean refit in mind. Can it be done? Am I crazy enough to try? Yup.

An interesting note: this shirt was originally a 2xl Fubu dress shirt that I picked up for a couple bucks at Frenchy's. When I was picking off the breast pocket I noticed that the little Fubu logo was stitched on over a buttonhole. Kind of weird, but I figured maybe they had changed designs or something. Then, when I was picking off the label, there was another label sewn underneath! Someone had just cut out the old label - but left the edges - and sewn the Fubu label on top! Strange, no? Is someone circulating fake Fubu dress shirts? Or are the folks at Fubu passing other people's shirts off as their own? Anyone else ever come across something like this?

Overcast

We took a spontaneous trip to Lester's Farm today with my mom (that's her up there holding on to a sleepy Baby Bear) to see if the strawberry u-pick was open yet. It's not, and it probably won't be from another week. Strawberries may be a spring crop elsewhere in the world, but for us they don't show up until mid-July. I don't mind waiting, except that I've been looking at photos of gorgeous strawberry shortcakes and smoothies and jam for two months now. I did crack when I saw those Nova Scotia ones, and the two quarts I bought were delicious, but I'd rather have something from the farm down the road. They have a petting zoo there - some rabbits, a donkey, a pig, some goats and cows and horses - and there are feed dispensers all over the place. Little small kid hands spill a lot of animal feed. Which would explain the number of pigeons. I find it very strange to see pigeons on a farm. But Lester's is in the city, and those pigeons can hear the sound of a kindergarten class slopping grains and seeds around from a great distance. I ended up just buying some broccoli because my first official farm share basket comes from Seed to Spoon tomorrow. I'm so excited! Like, excessively excited. There's something so magical about getting a big bag of mystery vegetables, of things you might not otherwise eat or even know what to do with. My old CSA in Montreal was my introduction to Swiss chard, which I called "bette à carde" for ages before I knew what it was called in English. (Although I believe it's called "silverbeet" in England, is that correct?)

The sky was a thousand shades of grey all day, until supper time, when it cleared enough to send a stream of light through the house, illuminating my reading daughter and my blue-topped stairs and the kitchen with Hubby C cooking in it. Now it's clouded over again. That's how it is around here.

View

If I had a decent camera, or if I had any clue how to operate my current semi-decent camera, I would be able to show you how lovely the view is from my sewing room window right now. You'll just have to use your imagination. Trust me, it's pretty terrific.

Two down...

I've managed to get the first of Furious B's new clothes put together. I used the flowery sheet to make this wrap dress:


I based the pattern on an old dress she had, with Melissa's wrap dress tutorial for guidance. My bias tape stitchery isn't perfect, but I'm getting better. Which is good, because remember the 68 packs of bias tape I got on eBay? Yeah. I'm in love with bias tape now.


I also made a Spring Ruffle Top from a well-loved but way too small dress. Here's what it looked like before. It was beautifully made, which made it difficult to take apart. Lots of kids' clothes are crappily enough constructed that you can just pick out a few threads and that's it, it's done. The dress was also really faded, with many dandelion stains, but I would expect no less from the favourite dress of a girl whose alter ego is Josie the Buttercup Fairy.

I managed to preserve a lot of the original gathers, which may actually have made the sewing more finicky, but if I had ripped them out the fade marks would have been more obvious. I also changed some of the proportions to better suit a child's dimensions and to make the best use of the weirdly-shaped pieces I was left with after taking the dress apart.

I had wanted to put pockets on from the leftover bits of clover border, but B wasn't into that, so here it is, pocket-free. Apparently it is the perfect companion piece to B's favourite blue "twirling skirt," which is another bit of clothing that's been worn and repaired and worn and repaired over the last two years. When B finds something she likes, she really commits to it.


I'll be posting these - and the rest of my make-it-do clothing adventures, over on Wardrobe Refashion from now until year's end. Oh, I suppose I should make my official pledge:

I, Andreae Prozesky, pledge that I shall abstain from the purchase of new manufactured items of clothing for the period of 6 months. I pledge that I shall refashion, renovate, and recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn or other media for the term of my contract. I pledge that I will share the love and post a photo of my refashioned, renovated, recycled, crafted or created item of clothing on the Wardrobe Refashion blog, so that others may share the joy that my thriftiness brings!

Now, I'm taking this pledge for myself mainly, but I'm willing to bet I can make it until the new year without buying any new clothing for the kidlets. Santa Claus is exempt from the pledge. As is Hubby C. He's on his own.

July 1

July 1 is a strange day here in Newfoundland. It's Canada Day, so there's a certain amount of merriment expected, but it's also Memorial Day, which is a gloomy time.

I had hoped to make it down to the War Memorial for the annual ceremony, but a certain baby was having none of it. We did head down a bit later to see the wreaths that had been laid. Downtown was ghostly and cold in its north Atlantic summer way. Barely a soul around.