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Author: 459856pwpadmin

  • Dreamland

    I spent the weekend perusing and dreaming over this newly arrived book:

    Rarebirdoffashion
    The book is valuable mostly for its pictures, and oh, what pictures.  This book is full on inspiration and dreams.  Even if they are someone else’s choices and someone else’s style, the pictures remind me to be true to myself, and have courage.

    I could sew an entire wardrobe based on the ideas I see in this book.

    It reminds me to buy what I love.  It reminds me to hold on to what I love, not purge in the name of "space" or "fashion".   It makes me think "Oh why did I get rid of those mustard suede flats I loved so much".

    This is a good book to look through whenever I get caught up in that old mantra of "should be".

    I spent the weekend looking at this book and dreaming. 

    I spent the entire weekend in shorts, tank tops, and flip-flops, whereas a mere week before I was wearing fur-lined raincoats thinking Spring would never come.

  • The promise of Spring

    Spring finally seems to have arrived and the weekend has been warm and sunny.  There are signs of growth in the flower beds once again, the daffodils and tulips are coming up although nothing is really blooming yet, and the forsythia are finally blossoming, although still a bit sparsely.

    Although the hybrid crocus have been out for some time, and have survived the cold and wet admirably, the wild (species) crocuses have just now stuck their heads up from beneath the leaves:

    Wildcrocus

    Spring is in the air in the Kitchen as well.  We had our first soft-shell crabs this past week.  I didn’t memorialize the event on film because I had temporarily mislaid my camera, one problem with having a teeny tiny pocket sized camera.  I had hoped for ramps this week but they are not yet up around here.  Apparently they are glorious just a wee tad south, in Pennsylvania for example, but not here.  I had hoped the guy who brings ramps would be buy this weekend, but he called and said he had so few that he could barely meet the restaurant demand.  I am a loyal customer, but do not purchase in quantities large enough to get first dibs after all.

    The mushroom man was by however.  Of course he comes all winter as well, if the mushrooms are growing that is.  I am lucky that my house is right on his route, between his stops at restaurants in Rhinebeck, the CIA, and Poughkeepsie, so I get fabulous mushrooms without having to spend more carbon in the procurement.  We had shiitake and oyster mushrooms this week, and they are far far better than any I can get at the local gourmet grocery — yet another plug for buying local when possible.

    Mushroomdelivery

    Last night we had shiitake with non-local asparagus and tonight we will have local chicken breasts roasted on a bed of leeks and shiitake.  I had hoped for ramps, so the leeks were purchased in a pinch.  But I know the ramps will come, and other spring treats as well:  fiddleheads, morels, asparagus, shad.

  • Hallelu! Hallelu! Halleluia!

    Patrones Came!

    (no offense intended at any irreverance)

    This is a wonderful issue filled with some lovely suits and very cute sundresses, and a few othr things that are giving me ideas, even if I don’t like the actual garment portrayed. Here are the best among a plethora of treats:

    Patronesapril20071
    Patronesapril200725
    Patronesapril200726
    Patronesarpil2007910
    Patronesapril200717
    Patronesapril200715
    Patronesapril200732Patronesapril200734Patronesapril200729Patronesapril200731Patronesapril200737

  • New Book

    When I went to the post office today I was very excited to see that I had a yellow slip, which means that I have a package to pick up at the window.  Sometimes the slips are pink, and I have yet to unravel the mystery of why sometimes the slips are pink and sometimes they are yellow.  Supposedly they are for different things, excess mail or packages, but they seem to be used interchangeably.

    But back to the package.  Despite my hopes it was not the April Patrones.  Instead I got this book:

    Dress_design
    I had ordered it before G went into the hospital, after reading about it on Blackwater Park,   but the truth is that it had been on my list for some time, I had just not bothered getting around to ordering it.    I have owned Mansfield’s other book, Clothing Construction for a couple of years and treasure it as one of my favortie sewing books. 

    I had in fact, forgotten that I had ordered it, and read about it again when I was catching up with Tany’s blog   yesterday.  Luckily I checked with my various orders and saw that it was on the way.

    I think I am going to love this book as much as the other.  I curled up with it and read the first chapter, on dress forms, and can’t wait to get to work.  I think I need to reread some of my other sewing books as well.  So many new things to learn and absorb and try, and eventually a new dressform to pad out.

    I will take Tany’s suggestion and look for a copy of the April Patrones if mine does not arrive, and I will e-mail or call the publisher and find out what happened to my copy if it does not show up.

  • Where o where?

    I am home trying to catch up on piles and piles of things that have been allowed to accumulate in the house, and hundreds of blog posts, e-mails, and message board entries. 

    I can’t catch up with all that has happened, but know this:  all is well.  My darling has had surgery and is home, tired, weak, and uncomfortable but in good spirits.  It appears that all of the evil stuff was caught during surgery and things look good.  I have been in and out of the house, mostly out, and certainly out of the office.  I have so much to do that should have been done before that I will never make it up — so what health and happiness are far more important than a few days work. Now, while G convalesces I shall try to put everything back in order.

    Patronesapril2007
    Despite the fact that I should be working, I have started catching up with blogs, very slowly.  I was reading Tany’s Blog, actually catching up with posts since mid March because my mental state was not such that I could give her the attention she so richly deserves, when it struck me that she has pictures of the April Patrones  up and I don’t think I have gotten it.  With my new subscription, I received the first issues (Jan – March) so quickly that this surprises me.  Now I admit that I have been terribly distracted, and I have piles of mail that have not been gone through.  They roughly sorted into "handle immediately" "not so urgent" and "no rush at all", but I would think that no matter what was going on, the Patrones would have been in my hands and unwrapped right away. I did get the April Burda and I remember reading it although I don’t remember where I put it right at the moment; I most certainly did not put it where it belongs.  Oh well.

    As I said, there are piles, so I shall wait until May, see if it comes, see if the next issue comes, then begin to panic.

    And why am I worried about not getting more patterns anyway?  Do I not have enough?  Have I sewn anything in the last month?  So much for good intentions.  But, as stated before, patterns are dreams, and dreams are very dear right now.

    Back to work

  • “Despite his title, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; a cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn’t understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife’s body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.

    The Secretary of the Interior knew, of course, that there was a brain in his head and that the human brain was Nature’s most magnificent creation. It never occurred to the Secretary of the Interior to wonder why, if the brain, with its webs and cords and stems and ridges and fissures, with its glands and nodes and nerves and lobes and fluids, with its capacity to perceive and analyze and refine and edit and store, with its talent for orchestrating emotions ranging from eye-rolling ecstasy to loose-bowel fear, with its appetite for input and its generosity with output; it never occurred to the Secretary to wonder why the brain, if it is as awesomely magnificent as it purports to be, why the brain would waste its time hanging around inside a head such as his.”

    • Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins , pp 295-296

    More quotes from fiction. Nothing earth shaking, but don’t we all know people like this? I certainly know people like this.

    Of course I probably spend too much time plumbing the depths and not enough looking at the surfaces. The surfaces catch me by surprise far too often and I would rather retreat back into my own head.

    I can’t say there has been much reading here, obviously I am still slowly making my way through the same book. G came home from the hospital last night and although he is tired and sore and not yet fully up to snuff it is so nice to have him home. Even disturbed sleep, together in our own bed, with interruptions every hour was a relief and I experienced the best sleep I have had in over a week.

    Meanwhile, slowly catching up, puttering, and just generally getting through life.

    What a relief.

     

     

  • Brief Note

    "Of course I’ve contradicted myself. I always do.  Only cretins and logicians don’t contradict themselves. And in their consistency, they contradict life."
                                                Tom Robbins, Only Cowgirls Get the Blues

    I really like this paragraph even though it is only from a novel, not some great philosophical work.  But then what is philosophy and what is philosophical and what is "great". 

    Oops.  If your a philosopher, please don’t answer.

    I am reading again, somehow just picking up where I left off as if the last couple of weeks were just a little mental burp.

  • The “high priestess flunks HTML

    Well, I copy the text for the previous post.  It looks great when I am writing it.  It looks great when I preview it at Typepad, all properly aligned and centered, but after I save it and go look at the actual blog, what do I get?

    Bah! Humbug!

    So what am I doing wrong?  Why isn’t it centered?  Obviously my priestlessly skills don’t extend to HTML.

  • High Priestess

    You are The High Priestess

    Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education.

    The High Priestess is the card of knowledge, instinctual, supernatural, secret knowledge. She holds scrolls of arcane information that she might, or might not reveal to you. The moon crown on her head as well as the crescent by her foot indicates her willingness to illuminate what you otherwise might not see, reveal the secrets you need to know. The High Priestess is also associated with the moon however and can also indicate change or fluxuation, particularily when it comes to your moods.

    What Tarot Card are You?
    Take the Test to Find Out.

    Thanks to Ann at Gorgeous Things  and Barbara at Cat Fur Studio for steering me toward this diversion.

    I’ll be back.

  • Aqua

    I am still in the painting stages of the closet.  The walls are painted and the trim and radiators have been painted.  And while I am on the subject of painting radiators, why the guy that built this house (before we owned it) baseboard heat in all the closets is absolutely beyond me — it is the worst thing for my clothes and shoes and fabrics.  So I try to keep it turned down.  But some rooms would have no heat if it weren’t for the closets, which also means of course, that you have to keep the closet doors open….. duh!

    Well, someday I intend to put in radiant heat under the floors, but that means we have to get rid of the wall-to-wall, which is pretty much everywhere, with no finished floors underneath (gotta love the ’70s).  But let’s not tell G yet, he’ll think he can’t retire.  I can wait a long time…..

    Sewingroomcloset1  So here’s the basic color.  The walls are done.  Isn’t it a lovely aqua!  The trim is a light blue gray  and I still have to put on a second coat. 

    The shelves will be aluminum so the gray trim will look really nice.  It looks so nice in fact that I am glad that I never got around to painting the windows and window frames in the sewing room because I think I will use the same gray.  It looks good with the light green of the sewing room, the turquoise, and this lovely aqua. . 

    Isn’t it nice to be able to justify having not done something when your were originally supposed to have done it?

    I don’t know if I have enough of the gray to do the closet doors as well.  I’ll do the trim first.  The gray paint is one I have had for years, it is a Martha Stewart color from K-Mart that I used for painting some planters a few years back.  I don’t even know if it is still available.  But then, maybe I don’t need closet doors.  The room is small enough that they are in the way if they are open and I like to see in.  At the same time having doors does keep dust and light out.  I wonder if I can mount one of those honeycomb shades inside the door frame and get one in a pretty, complimentary color.  Then I can just open and close it at will.  Is there some rule that closet doors have to be a door?

    Well, I probably need to think about that a bit.

    In the meantime I have been doing some more shopping late at night when I can’t sleep.  A package filled with lovely treats came from Lucy’s.  I ordered them immediately after finishing my top (and I still haven’t cut out another).

    Browntweedrayonspandexlucys StripejerseylucysIndiarayonspandexlucysRayonspandexblacklucys

    I don’t have any immediate plans for these fabrics so they just go into the stash, even though my stash is definitely at SABLE proportions (stash accumulation beyond life expectancy)  I don’t usually worry about it, although I had been more cautious about buying fabric for a while, just because I wasn’t sewing.

    As I’ve said  before, I love my stash for its own sake, and I obviously love pretty fabric.  I do realize that I may be overindulging right now, but shopping as therapy is not a totally bad thing unless you let it get out of hand.  I don’t intend to.  I was about to say I was already slowing down, I hadn’t bought any fabric for several days, until I got the Fabric Mart swatches yesterday, but swatches provide a whole different level of temptation.

    Well, we’ll see how I feel tomorrow when I have to put everything in the closet.