Necessary Chocolate

It's Pinewood Derby time again!

Yep - it's that time again. Here's the pickup/flatbed that I cut out last night:

It will be, in the next couple of weeks, the Pinewood Derby Float. Picture fringe along the back, and HO or Lionel scale figures in prom dresses, waving. And a banner, strung across the back fender. Maybe some balloons floating above. This year the girls at church are making cars, too.

I've been busy with non-photographable things: my parents coming to visit, a church women's conference, and a production of Lady in the Dark with Russell Sage College. I was in the chorus. Not just the chorus - the community chorale dressed in black BEHIND the chorus. It was lots of fun, and much better than I'd thought it would be from the dress rehearsals.

Now, every major thing I've volunteered for is officially over. I can start, or finish, any project I'd like. Of course, I have a long list, starting with the Pinewood Derby. I want to make ricrac roses for a tie one on apron. I want to clear stuff out of my room so that I don't sleep in a storage area. I want to sew stuff for Olive. I want to start on summer outfits for the Arizona kids. And I want to finish watching the Pickwick Papers DVDs from Netflix. I must pour Preen on the newly mulched beds. It all sounds so restful, huh?

My graphics studio

Since I've shared my sewing studio in the past, I thought it was time to share my state-of-the-art graphics studio:

My couch. The nest I've built up around the couch include my cable access, the laptop, scanner, tablet, speakers (I was listening to an internet broadcast at the time), printer, dark chocolate covered pretzels, and Pirate's Booty (cheese puffs). The most important element in this setup, even more important than the chocolate, is the television, just to the left of the photo.

Happily, I can move between studios easily; I took this photo from the sewing studio (aka kitchen) - also in viewing range of the television. Sadly, it all has to be put away when guests come to visit.

I have three - that's right, three - guest bedrooms in my house. You'd think that in six years I could have turned ONE of them into a studio. Perhaps I lived the portable apartment life too many years. But someday, I vow that I will set down roots and turn one of those rooms into a real, honest-to-goodness, studio. With a television, of course.

Weddings in spring

I'm not sure you should hope for such a day in Utah. It was everything that the poem in the favors described: 71 degrees, blue skies, and general happiness. Here are the final favors (nests with Jordan almonds), and a few photos to give you a feel for the day.

And finally: a glimpse of the cleanup process. My family ALWAYS stays to clean up. It's what we do. This time, we cleaned up to the sounds of a fabulous swing/jazz band, formed by friends of the groom's father. They love playing together so much that they just kept playing until we had to leave the building.

This picture was taken after we removed the flowers, sadly. But trust me, it was bright and beautiful and fun.

Now I'm back in NY, where it's supposed to snow tomorrow...

Baking with easter eggs

I'm back, and happily I'm returning to a refrigerator full of Easter eggs. I don't care for cooked eggs, so, every year, I dye a couple of dozen of raw eggs and use them for the next few weeks of baking and cooking. This idea does not work well with young children, obviously. But if you can manage to dye raw eggs, you too can open the refrigerator door and smile, even if it is snowing outside. Fair warning: you may end up with slightly colored fingers each time you break the blue or green eggs, but that's just part of the fun.

According to reports, the Easter dresses fit! Non-freckled Olive was a great hit: Christina told me that Olive loves to play, and that, because she has a flat bottom, she can sit on the palm of your hand.

Report on the wedding later!

And finally - the simplest Easter dress of all

And finally - as proof that I can take the easier road - here's Laura's Easter outfit. The skirt is from The Gap, the sweater from Crewcuts, and the t-shirt from Old Navy.

I added the ribbon on the skirt:

And embroidered the t-shirt:

I had far more complicated plans for this outfit. I was going to change the buttons on the sweater - wouldn't it be fun if they were all different colors? And I was going to embroider something on the hem of that wonderful, floaty skirt. It's two layers of lawn, gored to create more than a full circle. The poor third-world women who sewed the skirt did a lovely job; each of those gores is done with a French seam and the rolled, serged hem is one that I can only aspire to.

So that's Easter. New outfits for the four boys were sent out earlier, and all of the girls' outfits were sent Wednesday morning. Woohoo! Now, what am I going to wear????

Ottobre rules

Here's Christina's jumper, ready to go. I just followed the pattern instructions - what a nice change for me (as compared with Allison's, where I made up the pattern (although it was a Ottobre bodice). I even simplified a little - there's supposed to be a few appliques on the back, but enough was enough.

The one complication was to use two different fabrics on the front - that and the Oxford stripe, which wrinkles more each time it's ironed. Still, the bodice really isn't THAT wrinkled - ugh.  And look at those wrinkled pockets. Oh well. Maybe I'll just doctor the photos for flickr, and let everyone in Arizona assume that her mother doesn't iron (sorry, Janet).

I sent non-freckled Olive along, as well, since she matches the dress. So that should cause a little discord among the other kids...

Poppies, gingham & how to make things harder

Allison's dress is done, as is Christina's (I'll post it tomorrow)! I thought that, for future reference, I should record how to make a simple dress much harder:
1. Decide to hand-dye gingham to match poppies. This was, of course, necessary.
2. Decide to match pattern at back zipper. This seemed necessary-  but I forgot that the back skirt seam wouldn't match.  So, an imperfect match would have been fine.

3. Decide that the pattern on the patch pocket should match up with the skirt, so cut carefully, and hand baste to make sure:

Once they were sewn on, I decided to relocate them, so I flipped the pockets and made sure they didn't match at all.

4. Decide that a built-in slip is necessary. Once it was done, I decided that it created too much weight for the poor little spaghetti strap ties, so I spent one long evening unpicking and resewing.

This is, of course, all part of the creative process - and it's funny once it's over! Now, I have this vision of an underdress: a white t-shirt sewn to that leftover skirt lining, with redwork embroidery around the neck and on the sleeves...

Fonts at last

Even though "fonts" is listed up on my banner image, I haven't written about that particular obsession yet. Most of the graphic design projects that I do are work-related, or too personal, boring, or churchy to share here. I studied graphic design in college, but I wasn't quite good enough to make it professionally, or so I thought, so I ended up in interior design by default, which led me to historic preservation, and here I am, happier than I ever would have been in graphics.

The love of fonts has never gone away. My favorite font, right now, is Minion Pro, but I also like Garamond Book Condensed and Bickham Script. See? I'm a font nerd. At one point I only allowed myself to buy one font a month.

These are wedding favor tags for my cousin Heather's wedding (this Saturday! Go Heather!). She chose gorgeous fonts (Arcana and Charlemagne) for her invitations, so it was easy to copy them and use them in the tags.

I love doing wedding favors - they're frivolous and fleeting. Very few people save them, and so you can go to town with them without feeling as though you're designing something for posterity. I finished printing, trimming and folding these this morning, and now they're ready to Fedex off to Utah, where they'll join little bird nests filled with Jordan almonds and tied up with pink striped ribbon.

Of course, I complicated what should have been a simple process. I wanted to use the poem, which added the folding task, and then had way too much fun with images:

Pretty, but too busy. I had a scalloped version, and an Echino-like version. In the end, the simple double stripe was best, of course.

And they're done! And speaking of complicating the process, now I can spend tonight unpicking the built-in-slip lining I added to Allison's dress, which adds too much weight and puts too much weight on those little gingham shoulder straps. But more on that tomorrow.