What goes around comes around (if you wait long enough).

I've been seeing dresses with this same general neckline style lately (round yoke and gathered bodice) on patterns from different pattern companies (the one shown is from Kwik Sew). I've thought to myself, that's neat, maybe I should get one. But I just hate paying $10 for a pattern. And then while I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, I found the vintage pattern below for $1 and bought it instead.











And the nice thing is, if I make the narrow skirt instead of the full one, the pattern takes less than 3 yards. I have three yards of a great blue print just waiting for this kind of opportunity. Plus, the vintage pattern has the option for little sleeves, which is nice.

I planted flowers today. Not these flowers, obviously. This is the only picture I have of last years flowers. I don't know why I chose this particular angle. You could see more of it from the front. There were also flowers from my wedding planted along the end of the house, but it turned out that those flowers were not well suited to our heat and they died off pretty fast.

All in all, to survive the heat, dryness, and my gardening skills, the flowers I plant need to be pretty tough. Last year I had a lot of nursery flowers, and they mostly died. So this year I just planted seeds. The ones you see in this picture were all from a "wildflower" mix. Lots and lots of petunias.

I like to look at flowers a lot, but I'm not a terribly good gardener. Plants just don't interest me the way animals do, and I don't feel nearly so bad when they die.

Word Geek Fun

My mom emailed me a link to this site which not only helps you improve your vocabulary, but also helps alleviate world hunger.

Free Rice donates 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program for every word you correctly define on their word quiz.

The cool thing (to me, because I am a geek) about this word quiz thing is that it adjusts to your vocabulary level, giving you progressively harder and more obscure words. There are a total of 55 levels, and the highest I have gotten is to 51. And that mostly because it is multiple choice, and I made some good guesses.

Some of these words are hard to work into conversation, though. I might could work in "lagniappe" (small gift) for example "I have a butterfly pocket mirror to give as a lagniappe to the first person who buys a skirt from me", but then there are words like "catoptric" which is apparently, "mirror-related". I'm having a hard time coming up with a situation in which that would be useful. "I have a catoptric langiappe for the first person who buys a skirt from me"? Or words that could be used, but you would sound pretentious - "lanuginous" instead of "downy", "apiculate" instead of "pointy". I'm guessing a lot of them are actually words that would be used in a scientific context. My spell-checker, by the way, is highlighting all of these. But some are just fun - "katzenjammer", for example, which if I remember right, means "hangover", although it sounds to me like it should mean the night that led up to the hangover.

The Idea and the Execution

I haven't done much fashion drawing since I was a kid, but now that I am trying to put more clothing in my Etsy store, I am dabbling at it again. This is the first one that I've actually made up. I drafted it to my measurements, from scratch. It is very simple, but its a start, anyway. You can see there are a couple of changes I made, no contrast waistband (I had second thoughts about the attractiveness of that), and the ruffle is shorter. I was using scraps of leftover from a previous project for the ruffle and pockets and such, and just didn't have enough for the wider ruffle.

The waist facings are polka dot too, just for fun.

If you are interested, I am selling this skirt in my shop. (And if you aren't my size, I do custom work!)

Baby Pictures

The proud aunt (that would be me) holding Connor for the first time.











This is the only time Connor really opened his eyes for very long while I was there. Definitely the only time I could get a picture of it.

Past Projects - Number 2

This is the dress that the blue floral dress was a muslin of. I loved the fabric, which has cats on it and has great colors, but didn't want a whole dress out of it.

Changes I made from the muslin:

1. I added pockets modeled off of an apron my great-grandmother made (turns out they are too shallow to be very useful, though).

2. I lengthened the bodice by 2 inches (though 1 inch might have done fine)


3. I shortened the hem by a few inches, I can't remember how many.

4. I brought the sides of the neckline in a little, since the neckline of the muslin almost constantly revealed my bra straps (I ended up sewing little loops and buttons on the inside neckline of the muslin to keep them pulled back out of site, a trick from the Vogue Sewing book.)

Saturday night, my sister had her baby. His name is Connor Lewis Henley, and he weighed 7 lbs., 2 oz.

We went up the next day to visit, and he was adorable. Maybe pics will follow soon. I have a lot, just not on my computer yet.

It's very exciting, probably exciting enough to get me to actually finish his baby quilt now!