A cool day in July

Looking at cleomes

Surely this July in Dallas has set some sort of record for low temperatures.  Even as I sit here writing, the windows are open!  In the middle of summer, in Texas!  No air conditioning on!  Earlier this month Mr. C and I took advantage of another similar day to stroll around the Arboretum, and I can't resist posting a few more photos.  Just as I can't resist snapping photos every time I go there, capturing that day's ephemeral beauty.  There's always something different in bloom or at its prime, as well as changing seasonal plantings.  I especially like browsing the two trial gardens.  That's where we came across the little bunny who seemed unfazed by the attention.  It's not the first time we've spied one there.  I do wonder how the Arboretum handles their wild visitors, such as raccoons, who are no respecters of gardens. Obviously, it's all those not-quite-behind-the-scenes hands toiling to keep this piece of Dallas always perfectly photogenic.

Ornamental peppers

Gebera daisies

Hardy hibiscus

Some type of lily?

Timeless sewing

The date on this Vogue pattern is 2008, and I know I snapped it up as soon as I saw it. Now, several years later, I still find it just as appealing, with its interesting seaming and shaping, pleats front and back, flared sleeves and off-center closure. Fashion has not passed it by, at least in my opinion. But, then again, I do tend to keep and wear things season after season.

All the time and effort I put into garments are a main reason I don't lightly cast them aside.  But age, my age, probably also has a lot to do with it.  After so many decades of sewing and dressing, I think – I hope – that I have a fairly good sense of what suits me personality-wise and what flatters me physically.  Plus, for some time now, there seems to be a really wide range of fashion options rather than an over-riding trend, such as the big-shouldered silhouettes of the late 80s. (Alas, I spent too many of my best years enveloped in "fashionable" over-sized clothes that were less than ideal for my short, I mean petite, endomorphic figure.)

Of course, the flip side of believing that you know what's your best look is what women of a certain age are constantly being warned against: settling on an unchanging style in hair, makeup, wardrobe. It's a balancing act, isn't it, keeping current without slavishly following trends.  At least older women aren't expected to dress in the dreary, discreet manner that seemed to be de rigueur in decades past, as the blog American Age Fashion so often illustrates.  Rather, it would be wonderful if we all had the courage and the verve of the ladies of Advanced Style.  My own look is much more sedate, but, who knows, in another decade or two, what I might feel inclined to sew and wear.

Back to the jacket which I made in a cotton twill that had been in my stash since the 80s! I finished it at the end of May, so in addition to waiting for several years to use the pattern, I'll have to wait a few more months to wear the jacket.  By then I will have forgotten any minor flaws and frustrations in its sewing.  It was a simple enough jacket to make, although I probably wouldn't categorize it as Easy which the pattern envelope does.  I toiled away on it in my usual obsessive manner starting with the muslin at the beginning of March; you can read all the fascinating details in my Pattern Review here, if you are so inclined.

 

At the Arboretum

Diligent I have not been where this blog is concerned. I repeat the modern mantra: too much to do. Although I am luckily, happily, eagerly doing exactly what I want. I am also lucky to live close enough to the Dallas Arboretum to make it an easy destination for an afternoon stroll. Or sometimes Mr. C and I grab a little picnic to take along, which we did on the day I snapped these photos. Then we feasted on all this glorious spring color.  Its uplifting beauty reminds me of a line from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay: "O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!"

All snug in their beds

 
I'm not sure what might be dancing through their heads, but our porch kitties seems very satisfied with their polar fleece beds which I finished last month. (They also have heating pads underneath to keep them even snuggier.) Mama – that's the lovely longhair gray one – brought her three little striped kittens to our side porch one rainy August evening in 2012. Well, what could we do but offer them food and an old rug to curl up on? So, of course, they stayed. The kittens were feral, while Mama, oh-so-thin under all that fur, was only extremely wary. And, of course, we intended to find them homes, since we already have an official cat who definitely desires no other feline companionship. But... As you can see, they're still here, no longer feral, at least to us, but not house cats either. They live on our front porch and amuse us endlessly (as well as cause us a lot of worry).

Last winter Mr C built them a terrific, insulated, carpeted house with two levels inside. The only use they have made of it, even in the coldest weather, is to sit on top of its padded, polar fleece-covered top. So this year I decided to make them polar fleece beds. I wanted them to be deep enough to block the wind when the occupant was curled up inside and thus decided on constructing them with vertical channels that would hopefully stand up rather than spreading out as I was afraid that horizontal rings would do. As I wrote on Pattern Review, these are labor-intensive and time-consuming to make, but not really difficult. (I highly recommend a good audio book to take you through this project; I listened to Paris: the novel, by Edward Rutherfurd: 30 CDs! That was for four beds.) If you'd like to make one, read on for my complete tutorial.

Reading round the world

Last year our bookgroup traveled to Russia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Haiti, England, Egypt and China. Quite a bit of that involved time traveling as well, to the eras of Henry VIII and Cleopatra, to colonial America and France during WWII.  We all look forward to our monthly peregrinations, to discovering little-known corners of the world and participating in the lively discussions that follow.

We began this year with a return to Afghanistan, and next month Burma is our destination.  Here's our literary itinerary for the year, if any of you would care to join us, virtually (we're hoping to have a bookgroup blog online soon) or in person here in Dallas.

   
You can find our 2013 books here and more information about the bookgroup plus our 2012 books here.

Illustration Friday - Reflect

The one-week time frame on Illustration Friday topics means you have to get thinking and starting doing, a good thing, right?  It also often means, for me, that come Thursday evening, I'm still working away furiously, trying out this and that on a composition that just hasn't quite come together.  Or I end up calling it done when I know that being able to look at it with fresh eyes in the morning would probably help me improve it.  All so I can link to the topic on the IF website. 

Thus it was this past Thursday when I hit Save for the final time a bit after midnight and prepared for the rigamarole of uploading to Flickr, posting on my blog and linking to Illustration Friday.  Only to discover that the topic had already been changed!  And that after IF had been so lax lately in changing topics promptly; the last one had been up for over two weeks.  Well, does it really matter if I submitted my work offiically?  It's not a class, it's not a contest; I only get the satisfaction of knowing that I did it and that anyone browsing the submissions for that topic might decide to have a look at mine.  It's not the first time I missed the IF boat, but I do think the deadline is a good motivator. Unlike, say, making a garment that you want to wear, it's easy to let projects that have no purpose other than exercising your creativity just peter out or get put aside and never taken up again.  So I thank IF for encouraging me to put paid to each "assignment" I undertake, and, hopefully, for engendering self-discipline, which I believe is ever more important for us – ahem – older individuals.

I wanted to illustrate both the sense of "reflect" as the act of thinking back or contemplating, as well as the physical mirroring of an image, as in water. My starting point was the silhouette, created from a photo of myself, in a "thoughtful" pose. Next I layered three textures from Lost and Taken as well as a photo shot through lace curtains out of one of my windows. Then I simply started trying out assorted graphics and parts of photos. ( At one point I had a bunch of butterflies, which seem to be my default decorative elements when I'm stuck.) The green vining foliage are some brushes I had downloaded some time ago, probably from Deviant Art, but I no longer remember their exact source. And finally, I selected the photo of the trees and creek which is at a lovely park here. All done in Photoshop, of course.  Linked or not, I'm glad I made the effort and pleased with the result. 

Fun with felting

At last I've completed a sewing project worth reviewing and blogging about.  It actually started way back in October when I went through my fabric stash and unearthed a couple of wool jersey pieces way down at the bottom.  They probably date from the 1980s because I was quite fond of wool jersey dresses back then.  I have since more or less sworn off wool of any kind because of moths here in Texas (and probably also here in our very accessible old house).  These two pieces were nibbled on, especially along the outward facing fold, and since they were unusable as so, I decided to felt them, something I had long been wanting to try. 

I found three articles on felting wool jersey in my archive of Threads magazines, and after a little experimenting with some scraps, I plopped the first piece into a washer full of hot water and then into a hot dryer with satisfactory results.  The articles suggested repeating the process three times, but even one time left me with such a reduced piece of fabric that I stopped there.  Unfortunately there was not enough for this Marcy Tilton jacket (for which felted jersey is one of the recommended fabrics).  The second piece was longer and by dint of careful placement of the pattern pieces I was able to use it.  It also helped that there are no hems or facings on this jacket.  All those outer edges are simply cut and left raw since felted jersey doesn't ravel.  I'm not a raw-edge sort of sewer, but after trying various stitching effects on the edges, I had to conclude that they looked better left alone.

As always, I made a muslin for the jacket which led me to make a couple of crucial fitting changes.  (For details, see my review on Pattern Review.)  The result is a jacket that I'm really pleased with.   The felted jersey was easy to sew, if a bit bulky.  Of course, it wasn't the three-hour wonder that other reviewers had boasted about.  I think I'm constitutionally incapable of making something quickly.  And, of course, I couldn't just leave it plain.  When I showed it to Mr C, he asked "what are those lines all over it?"  Those, I explained, are embellishment.

That first shorter piece of jersey is still laying on my cutting table, silently challenging me to come up with an idea for turning it into another jacket. I just hope I'll get it done before winter here is over.