Back To The Drawing Board

AHHHHHH...feels so good not to have any deadlines. To not have any tricky mathematical problems to solve. Any squirmy children to fit. To celebrate, I decided to make something for myself. I took one yard of purple knit fabric that I was actually saving to make a blouse and used it to make a dress. I'm not so good at fitting things on myself yet but this one was supposed to be loose so it was ok. This is probably the first time I've ever sewn something that was so no-frills and plain. But...I only had 1 yard of material, so I did the best with what I had. Lucky for me I'm so short. The dress has a rounded boatneck collar, a v-necked back, and has a bodice made up of 4 panels. And I didn't even mention the best part yet: this dress has pockets. Yeah, pockets. Which is hard to find in a dress. Or anything made for a woman. I made mine out of the same gray lining I used for the girls' flower girl dresses. I've had knit jersey clothes with pockets of self-ma...

Yes, the wedding is over, and now I can reveal what I have been so busy with these past months. I made flower girl dresses for both my girls using a grey cocktail dress as inspiration. The material of the dress was too cheap looking to be used by the bridesmaids in the wedding, but the pleated details were too good to pass up. So, 12 1/2 yards of tulle each later, here are the finished products:  Each dress is gray dupioni silk, fully lined and tailored specifically to my daughters' body measurements. I love that the bodice of the dress is put together in 5 Georgian-style panels that taper to a point in the front. Difficult to execute, but life's more fun that way. It is VERY hard to find a flower girl dress that is anything better than just ho-hum (unless you like the Belle from Beauty and the Beast look - there are a few of those gaudy monstrosities around). Let's not even talk about how obsolete GRAY dresses are for little girls, let alone dark gray ones. So, I voluntee...

I know I haven't been drawing at all lately. But the other day Celina got into my portfolio and then one of my old sketchbooks. She found the plans for one of my high school art projects - a temple with an East Asian-inspired goddess standing inside. The whole assignment was supposed to be made out of cardboard, with a sculpture of some sort included somewhere on the project. Anyways, hearing me describe it, she decided to make one of her own. We got an old cardboard box, and then we started doing some sketching. She wanted something more Egyptian-themed (of course!), so we looked at books, patterns, paper dolls, and online for inspiration. I would copy down some things she liked, she would draw a figure of what she wanted, and we went back and forth drawing until we came to something she really liked. Her "statue" (it will be made out of paper since we don't have any clay handy in the house) is her own version of the goddess Hathor. She made me draw the final copy ou...

Today we finally had a taste of something we grew ourselves. Our very first cucumber. The girls were SOOO excited when they saw it on the vine and insisted I pick it at once. They almost couldn't contain themselves as I washed it and cut it. Miri wanted to eat it whole. But as soon as I cut the stem off and they realized what it was (a cucumber!) they wanted no part of it. Oh well. It tasted awful nice in my sandwich anyways. There are at least 4 more hiding under the vines, so I guess we'll be eating a lot of them for a while. I'm still in awe that we managed to grow anything this year. I'm winning my battle with the vile squash bugs and things are finally starting to recover after the tornadoes. Everything is taking a really long time to take off - tomatoes, zucchini, leeks, bell peppers... we've only been able to eat all the herbs so far. The day after we planted everything, the yard looked like this: That sad little box on the left is the garden, full of wate...

I went to get my driver's license Wednesday at the State Trooper's office on the arsenal. It's something you can only do on Wednesdays. I could have done it at the Athens city courthouse instead but I tried that once and was told to come back in 5.5 hours. Anyways, it took a lot longer than I thought it would. Supposedly the computer system was acting up as an after-affect of the tornadoes. So I waited for three hours even though I was the third person in line. I had Jeff come get Miri and after I had thoroughly checked my email and the weather numerous times, I hit on a brilliant idea. In the folder with our important documents was an old calendar from when Lina first started school here. Using the back of the paper, I managed to make a few motion sketches of the lucky souls who were only there to get tags for their cars (the computer system was working just fine for THEM). It was harder than I thought it would be; army people stare at people a lot more than is normal, so ...

A few weeks ago we started reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at bedtime. It's part of my mission to help Celina re-learn the English language after reading too many Junie B. Jones books. We've only gotten to the part when the boys run away to be pirates. But apparently my girls liked it enough to start pretending to be Tom Sawyer when Aunt Polly makes him whitewash the fence. So now when they're outside, they get their broom, dip it in the bucket of water, and "whitewash" the sidewalk. This is a drawing of Miri taking a turn at it. The head is my favorite part. It looks just like her. She's a hard little thing to capture on paper.

FINALLY finished Miri's spring dress. It's made from a knit fabric that I let her pick out herself. The pattern was the same one that I used for her Alice costume for Halloween. It has all these different options you can use, and I let her pick which ones she wanted. She chose the bib front with shoulder straps and that little placket-type thing in the front (I used some leftover blue lawn from Lina's Louisa dress). She picked out the buttons to decorate it and the venice lace as well. This was so easy to cut out and put together that I really truly believed I'd have it done in a day or two. Wrong. I now know that venice lace, while being my favorite kind of lace, is not suitable to being gathered. I did it anyways, around the placket, because it looks better that way. Then, because it looked a little lonely there all by itself, I added lace around the top of the bib. And then the straps. It looked even better. And finally, to top it all off, I added the last of it ar...