Iris

These lovely purple beauties are blooming all over my garden.

Old style short irises and lavendar colored moss phlox.

Regal and beguiling.

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Space and Light

You know what this is, people?

This is the south wall of the living room, which, for the last five years was home to a gargantuan piano that I had every intention of playing. Yes, it was in front of the window. Yes it covered about 3/4 of the window. No, there was nowhere else it could go.

The piano is now in a new home and I now have light and space in return.

We will be getting new living room furniture soon to replace the couch I got before we were married (and it was used then). Hopefully a couch and a love seat, which will go on the south wall in front of the window.

More space for guests. More space for us to sit and play. More light for this dark room in all seasons, but especially in winter. Now my husband can stop worrying that he'll come home some cloudy winter day to me painting the room a lighter color.

I can't quite articulate just how happy I am to have the piano out of the house. It's like if you had an extra toe. It was interesting. It was a conversation starter. It was something you occasionally fiddled with. But really it was crowding your foot inside your shoe. It was something you felt you had to apologize for. It was something that, while not life threatening, just needed to be removed.

Maybe. Or maybe that comparison is just crazy talk.

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Sunny Wrap Skirt

This week's Sew Weekly challenge is circle skirts. I started with a thrifted round tablecloth with a pale yellow ground (the only yellow in my color book) and darker yellow, orange, brown, and gray flowers. Through a short series of unfortunate measuring and cutting incidents, I ended up with something that could not be used as a true circle skirt unless my waist was about 50 inches around. So I made my circle skirt into a wrap skirt. And I'm okay with that. Actually, I think it's pretty darn cute.

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Amish Dresses Redux

Well, it looks like the Marketing Powers That Be have decided they want photos rather than illustrations for the covers of The Adventures of Lily Lapp series for which I made some costumes a while back. The first book, Life with Lily, looks like this:

I don't know about you, but I think this is super cute.

And now I need to make some more items for later cover shoots. Dresses in plum rather than blue (because Lily moves and different communities wear different colors) and a new bonnet (one of them has been misplaced). Hopefully the aprons will still fit the girls!

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Pretty Polka Dots

I finally finished and got photos of my "childhood inspiration" sewing project for The Sew Weekly. Here are the inspiration photos:

Polka dots and the navy/white combination are basically the only elements from most of my childhood wardrobe I would care to repeat. Not the splatter paint sweatshirt. Not the unicorn sweatshirt. Not the tragic hot pink plaid pleated shorts with tucked-in pink mock turtleneck tank (and if you think I'm sharing that picture, you've got another thing coming).

But navy and white polka dots? I can do that. So I did.

It's a 1940s pattern, but it looks like it would be right at home on a secretary in the late 1970s and early 1980s, doesn't it? And it perfectly matches a great vintage 1970s wool plaid coat I found this winter at a vintage shop in Easttown in Grand Rapids, Michigan, called Found.

And it's a good thing because the fabric is pretty thin and the day these photos were taken was pretty cold and windy.

But we had fun at the playground flying kites and playing on the jungle gym despite the chill.

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Sew Weekly Slacker

Okay, so it's really apparent to me that I just don't want to sew on a deadline. I've skipped a couple Sew Weekly challenges, mostly because I didn't have a lot of time to spend finding a good place to shoot or I just didn't care to do that particular challenge. Now I'm a zipper, a couple buttonholes, and a hem away from finishing this week's challenge, but am I going to have time to finish, do a photo shoot, and post by Monday? Unlikely.

Priorities, priorities. Last week it was getting ready for Easter, going to extra church services, and having a lot of deadlines for work. This week it's a Saturday that was spent at a writing conference (which was a lot of fun), a garden that needs some attention, and more queries to send out to literary agents. Plus I've been helping my husband craft queries of his own for his recently finished novel. We've been researching agencies, considering the merits of this word over that one, typing, deleting, cutting, pasting.

And during all of these activities, I haven't once thought about the Sew Weekly challenge. I've been wholly and happily involved in what I was doing. And I like that sort of focus. I have a lot more going on than just sewing in my life, and I like it that way.

So who cares if I never again make it back on SW as a contributor? I'm just a little busy with the rest of life. And that's just fine.

I'm not even taking the time to take some photos or even get existing photos off my camera for this post. Because now I think I'll take a minute and put in that zipper.

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The Show Must Go On

While flipping through photos to find some inspiration for the Sew Weekly challenge of childhood inspiration. I never realized just how many shows (tumbling, ballet, jazz dancing, tap dancing, plays, musicals, bands, and even synchronized swimming) I've been in. Hard to get an accurate count, but I would estimate in just 15 years of adolescence I was probably in 40 performances of some sort or another. Add the random plays we came up with and forced upon unsuspecting audiences and that count must go up a lot. Here are a few photos from various performances that made me smile.

Tumbling in kindergarten

Ballet in 1st grade

An original dress-up performance of some sort.
My sister and I often put on plays for our longsuffering parents and babysitters.

Jazz dance...maybe 5th grade?

Arsenic and Old Lace sophomore year of high school

Damn Yankees sophomore year of high school

The Bald Soprano junior year of high school. I'm in the orange.

Witness for the Prosecution senior year of high school

Witness for the Prosecution senior year of high school

Dress rehearsal of Hello, Dolly! senior year of high school

Dress rehearsal of Hello, Dolly! senior year of high school

Funny how you don't realize how much you miss performing until you look at those old pictures. Perhaps someday when the boy is grown up I'll try out for a community theatre production.

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A Very Stylish Easter

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Buried in Fabric

Remember my vow not to buy any new fabric in 2012? Well, the year is 1/4 over (how can that be?) and, I'm proud to say, I have stuck to that vow. I did allow, when I made the vow, that I would accept free fabric. And I'm really glad I did. Because the mother lode of free fabric arrived at my doorstep with my mother last Thursday.

Remember this batch of super cheap fabric I got from the daughter of an elderly lady entering a nursing home (pics near the end of the post)? Well, she had to get the rest of the fabric out of the house. So I am now the proud owner of about 500 lbs of wool, suiting, polyester blends, silk rayon, and scads more unidentifiable (to me) fabrics. All free. Seriously, it has to be hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of fabric. Forty-seven pieces, all 2 yards or more, most 3 or 4 yards.

Forty-seven.

I passed a bunch more (beyond what is pictured here) on to a friend (luckily our coloring is different enough that it was easy to pick out what would look good on each of us and there wasn't much crossover), but I am still left with six big boxes stuffed full and more that didn't fit in the boxes. It boggles the mind. I will now have to vow not to buy fabric for the next five years!

But I'm not complaining. Oh, no. I am very, very happy about my predicament.

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I'm Still Here

It's been a week. A good one, but a busy one. Filled with catalog copy creation, nursing an injured geriatric dog (Max had a fall at the beginning of his stay with us and required extra attention . . . and a fair amount of lifting of his 50lb body off our slippery hardwood floors), visiting with my mother and my great aunt as we scoured photos and talked family history, and even an extra trip to Grand Rapids for my mother-in-law's birthday celebration.

So I'm still here. But I'm also still busy. So maybe my brain and schedule will slow down enough for something intelligent to say later in the week. Right now, I'm still catching up with myself.

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