Class Reunion

My ten year class reunion is tonight. And I am not nervous and haven't starved myself for the past week/month. Mainly because I am not going. How tacky is living in the town you went to school in and not going to your reunion? Very. But JoAnna is hear (woohoo!) and Justin is in NH until tomorrow, so I just sort of decided not to go. Thanks to facebook, I know what most people are doing, so there isn't as much compulsive nosiness as there would be if I hadn't heard anything about these people in 10 years.

Ten years... Surprising how time can seem so long and short at the same time. High school seriously was a life time ago. Since then, I have got a college degree (that has never been brushed off and put to use. But hey--I have one!), got married, moved across the country a couple times, had three children, and not grown up much. It seems hard to think of 2001 being 10 years ago, but it also seems like 10 years worth of stuff has happened.

What is it about reunions that make you evaluate life? Well they make me evaluate life anyway. I have to say I am SOOO glad I am 28 and not 18. 18 was great, I had oodles of fun and life was looming excitedly and all that. But I worried enough about what I should be doing with my life, where I should move, what my major should be, what boy I should be interested in, etc, etc. Life is a lot more low key now. Not less busy, just less.... well my decisions have more to do with grocery shopping, bills and what to make for dinner than life choices. And I am happy about that--Excitement and uncertainty are better as a spice, rather than a main course. For me anyway.  

Life is good. So here's to ten years!

And here are some completely unconnected pictures. Well they prove that life is good, so I guess they are not completely unconnected. These are from Olivia's camera, so technically they are her pictures. But I had forgotten my camera, so I told her to come out and take some of them, so I feel I have a proprietary interest in them.

Garden stuff

Oh the wonder of a tomato

Love this picture!

Spaghetti squash

A running Lily-bean

A dirty Gilbert

Helping Ashley weed the flower bed

Coming back from the corn and zucchini patch

Our mutant zucchini. Lily called it a bikini this morning--took me awhile to figure out what she was talking about!

Rocky, the mostly useless horse

Alfalfa and sky

Goofy girls

Oh hi!

Mom had a friend, Diane, who would always say "Oh hi! This is Diane." Occasionally she was goofy. All of us young and disrespectful children made "Oh hi." synonymous with goofiness. Why I am telling you this, I have no idea. I am not even feeling particularly goofy. But there it is.

We had a lovely Altamont. Busy, but lovely. I think our choice to not go to Freedom this year was a good one. Gilbert is a wild child! I did get a couple meetings in the meeting shed this convention, so it was an improvement on Almonte. Still, that child doesn't like to sit still and contemplate. He is more into active engagement. Probably because he just turned two and he is now allowed to be terrible. Just like that he gets free licence. Whatever he does this year, people will respond with a "Well he is two." I would like such a nifty excuse for uncontrolled behaviour. "Well.... she is twenty-eight. It is a wild and turbulent time."

I don't have cute pictures of his second birthday, mainly because it was the Sunday of Altamont. We will have a cake maybe this weekend--Gilbert doesn't seem too worried about exact dates. I asked him. And he just laughed, wiggled, and ran away. I took that as unconcern.

I had great plans for having the convention wash all put away Monday afternoon, but then I saw the garden, covered in weeds, tomatoes, and peppers, with onions and carrots pushing out of the soil. Obviously in need of a guiding hand. Which unfortunately, I couldn't give it. But I yanked some weeds and came home with a crate of tomatoes and peppers and a ton of onions. And what do you do with tomatoes, onions, and peppers? You make Salsa. If you have other ingredients that I didn't have, that is.

At convention, we heard about the difference between an adult and a child. A daughter-in-law asked for a recipe for a butterscotch pie and the mother in law told her to mound one cup of sugar in a cast iron skillet, heat it and wait for two puffs of smoke and then continue with the pie. Later that day, the mother-in-law saw her grandchild and asked if Mommy had made the pie yet. The granddaughter said "Yeah, but it won't be any good. She only waited for one puff of smoke." A child is literal and expects to follow directions, while an adult realizes they can compensate here and there. I got a large poke from Justin during this. And just to give him more ammunition, I made up my own recipe for making salsa starter. Basically the tomatoes, onions, and peppers. I figure I can add the other stuff later and make it taste fresher and less cooked. We will have to see how it turns out. Seemed like a good idea anyway! And it used up all my peppers and tomatoes and several onions.

Peppers and tomatoes in the morning light

Washing them

All done peeling tomatoes. I don't know why I didn't blanch them and then take the peel off. Instead I stood here for about an hour and a half and peeled them. I am stupid. The red bowl is the peels, seeds, and cores. Obviously too much waste. Someone clever needs to find something yummy to do with peels, seeds, and cores. Or maybe someone has and I am not clever enough to know it. 

The proportions.

I had to roast all of it in three batches.

Orianna keeping herself entertained. Snow White dress over a swimsuit for next year, with her new snow boots and her pet seal on a string. 

Dumped it all together, used my handy dandy immersion blender, 

And salsa starter. I think I will have to add a goodly bit of salt and a touch of sugar, along with the cilantro, garlic, and whatever  else strikes my fancy. I have 11 bags of it (frozen) so I have a bit to play around with. 

While I roasted, I looked at all the catalogs that came while we were away. At Altamont, we heard beautifully about having the fragrance of a lily. I think I need more lilies in my life. The flower varieties that is.

This is a double oriental lily. It is outrageous. I like outrageous flowers.

Boden comes with stickers to stick on your favorite things. I like stickers. 

Here is a conundrum for you. Moon--because British Tweed is the Best......

And in the description, it says imported. What? And in case you can't see the fuzzy price, it is $348. Buy a couple. 

Everyday dungaree jacket. Which is fun. But $175. I think I would have to wear it everyday for a few years to make it worth $175. 

But you can't hate a catalog that poses their models in front of cows eating hay. 

And I have a slight crush on this dress. 

AND this skirt. Thankfully, Boden has outrageous prices. And while I like a little outrageousness in flowers, I don't like it in prices. So looking at Boden doesn't make me contemplate buying things. Well until they have their sales... One thing I have noticed though is that they have a lot more skirts and dresses than American companies. Do the British wear more skirts and dresses?

And I think I deserve one of these leather chairs from Pottery Barn after standing in one spot peeling tomatoes for an hour and a half. Seems reasonable. 

And now, I really should fold that convention wash before I have to iron it all from sitting in the laundry basket for a couple days. 

A twirly skirt tutorial (or how not to do it)

I mentioned this awhile ago--I decided to do a sort of tutorial on how to make these twirly skirts. Except I completely messed up. In all my born days I have never messed up these skirts so badly. Well maybe in April when I got talking with JoAnna while I was sewing and made Orianna's twice as full as it should be and Lily's half as long as it should be. Alright, this was my second worse mess up. Anyway, I am really prone to doing things wrong, so I don't know why I decided that I could be an oracle of wisdom on making these skirts. Probably because I am really prone to thinking that this one time it will be different.

Anyway, while making these skirts for Almonte convention, I was endlessly amused with myself for thinking I could do a tutorial, even one about something I have made 20-30 of. And by the end of making these skirts, I had laughed long and hard at myself (I can really amuse myself--obviously I don't get out much!) and I ended up being very fond of their messed-up-ness. So I am going to give you the tutorial anyway. I don't care if you don't want to make skirts or don't know any little girls to make skirts. You are going to learn how. Or sort of how. Well at least vaguely how.

This is how they start out--math. I measure the girls waists, which were 19 and 24 inches. From there, you can either double that number for each tier or multiply it by 1.5 each time. I generally do the 1.5 thing. Next, I measure one of the girls skirt that is a nice length on them to determine length. Since I was using Charm packs (pre-cut 5" squares from Moda, all coordinating) for these skirts, the two middle layers had to be 5" in length, so the waist band and the ruffle at the bottom were what I varied for the different lengths.

Once you determine the height of the waistband, you need to add bout 1.5-2.5 inches to that number, since you have to fold it over to make a casing (tunnel) for the elastic. For the ruffle, you add .5" or .75" for a hem.

Once the math is done, you get to mess with colors. I decided which charms (the 5" squares) I wanted next to each other. Actually, since they coordinate, I was pretty much just trying to make sure I didn't have 5 yellow in a row.

Then you place possible choices for the waistband and for the ruffle in amongst them to see if any of them strike you as right or totally wrong.

I decided to go with an aqua waistband with a yellow flowered ruffle for Orianna's skirt.

Next, you sew chains of the charms. What a weird sentence. You just sew each one to the next and then sew the last one to the first one to make a big circle.

Then you iron them. I am pretty sure it was Lisa who told me to iron them like this to make it lie flatter. That is for quilts, but it works in any situation where you have a lot of seams. I think of it as making one square major and the ones next to it minor. One square will be ironed so you can see all of it, while the ones on either side will be partially covered up by the seam allowance, making them look smaller.

Just iron it somehow. 

Then you gather. Gathering is just stitching a loose seam and then pulling the loose thread end to make the material all squoosh together. You have to make sure you spread the sqoosh out though, so it is even looking. I am not always patient enough for this. My motto for most of these skirts is "No one is going to notice as the girls run past at 40 mph." I should really sign those girls up for the Olympics at that rate.

The point of gathering is to make the lower and wider layer fit into the upper and narrower layer. Once they match, you pin them to make sure they match, and sew them together.

This is what you have so far. A very mini skirt for a very wide person. But it is colorful. 

This is what you shouldn't do. ALWAYS keep the sides of your seam taut as you are sewing, so extra fabric doesn't creep in there and bubble. Bubbles are bad.

Once the two parts are sewn together, I go back and sew the seam that holds them together down against the top layer. I think it gives the skirts a more finished and smooth look.  

A somewhat uneven finishing seam. But the colors are nice. And no one would notice the seam as the girls go past at 40 mph. 

If you are impatient like me and don't feel like getting your rotary mat and cutter out which are buried somewhere, you just cut with scissors for the ruffle and waistband, moving the tape measure as you go to make it even all the way. Not as even as if I had got the rotary cutter out, but sort of even.

I hate trying to hem ruffly things, so I tend to hem them before I gather and sew them on. This wouldn't work in tailored skirts, but no one notices whether the hem is even as the girls run past at 40 mph. (Seriously, I said this to myself about 40 times to try to convince myself that I shouldn't just give up and chuck the skirts out. I think it may have actually been the cuteness of the fabric that prevented me.) So I just iron the raw edge up, then iron it up one more time to cover the raw edge completely. This keeps it from unravelling.

This is the ruffle for Lily's skirt. It looks really cute, but I didn't think about having the aqua waistband, so the overall effect of the skirt isn't as color pleasing as it could be.

Then you sew the waistband on. But not like this. I wasn't keeping the sides taut again.

And see what happened. Keep your sides taut!

And I did it again. Seriously.

While I did a lot of seam ripping, I gave Gilbert our kind of expensive photo book to look at. This is probably a bad idea, but he loved it. 

It was around the 10th seam ripping experience that I stopped taking pictures. So you can't see the elastic being put in. Basically you sew the channel on the waistband very similarly to the hem, except you make it a little wider than the width of the elastic you are using. You determine the length of the elastic by making it slightly smaller (up to an inch smaller) than the child's actual waist measurement, since you don't want the skirt to be falling off. You leave an inch or two open (don't sew the channel part all the way around the skirt) and then poke the elastic in with a safety pin attached. You wiggle the pin around until it comes back out the other side. This will probably make you want to mutter a lot and think how stupid you were to start this ridiculous skirt to begin with. Espeically if you have become intimately acquanited with your seam ripper during this skirt experience. Then you sew the ends of the elastic together flatly and sew up your channel opening.

 Ta-da! 

You have a twirly skirt.

I didn't take a picture of the girls wearing it, so today, I copied Lisa's etsy page and took pictures against the sky.

And these are the April skirts that were too wide and too short. This picture looks like a dolly and me kind of skirt. But fortunately, Lily had the perfect little capri leggings to wear under it, so it worked out sort of all right. I mean they have umbrellas on them. So that makes up for a good bit.