Domesticity

I have been thinking lately about next life stages. The fact is that women reinvent themselves many times in their lives and often in the same day.

Any working woman who has hit her first week alone at home with a newborn knows what I mean. Any working woman who has become instantly transformed into Mrs. somebody at parent teacher after day spent in meetings where no one knows you have a family at all knows what I mean. Any woman who has gone to a husband's Christmas party, any grandmother who sits at a birthday party being served the cake, not serving it, knows what I mean. Any divorced woman who goes to that first Christmas party alone knows what I mean.

And as I decided when I found myself home alone the first time with that first baby, you can only be happy if you do reinvent yourself.

And women do it. That's probably why we aren't the ones who have heart attacks the first day of retirement lifting the golf clubs into the car, the first day of an undirected life. 

Which is exactly what happened to one of my neighbours.

Twenty years later his widow is still driving around the neighbourhood, earrings matching necklace, car window rolled down so she can stop and talk to everyone she sees.

I am entering a new decade next month and will be retiring in stages sometimes over the next five years. I love my job but increasingly only take on what I really do love, that means more time with the kids, less time with the adults.

Observing what my next transformation looks like, this is what I am picking up:

Learning to be older is partially a process of learning to be alone more. With the kids gone you can go out when you want and there is no time you have to be home. In my case, with work continuing to call my husband away on projects further and further away, it also means more cooking for one. 

Looking around I can see that the cheerful older women are those who don't rail against being alone, but who get good at it. Many of those are sewers, many of them are those who appreciate and develop their female friends. If those women sew, so much the better.

I am also noting, and this is a surprise, that as you move into this next stage it is your domestic skills that are most appreciated.

After years of having those activities only on the edges of my career I wasn't expecting this, but a summer of a lot of caregiving has reinforced it. 

Despite all the other things I still do, it has been the meals I have made, the children I have babysat, the mending I have done, the dogs I have walked, my canning, my sock knitting, my "how do I get that stain out" advice that has been most appreciated. Who's going to feed the cat when you are away?

Mom can do it.

Men who leave the boardroom and become dad in the baggy pants down the basement seeing what is wrong with the dryer probably feel this too.

Sure I can still discuss Syria and I still have too much work to do but I am beginning to hear the call home, at least some of the time.

I have a big work project to figure out, and I have to think it through. Today I don't have classes so I am staying at home, away from the interesting corridor chat, and setting my laptop up on the island in the kitchen. My plan is to wash the kitchen floor and make some crabapple jelly from the bathtub full of crabapples we got down from the tree over the weekend and write down my plan as my thoughts on this one come together.

I am not quite ready to take some of that jelly and leave it on desks at work, but maybe one day I will do that.

Dresses

Busy week, simple sewing.

I started the fall term this week and that is always exciting for me. 

I am a social person and kids are so funny so I am always glad to get back into the classroom. I always tell them, just around the time I note that glazed-over look, that I always know that there is one person in each of my classes who thinks the material is terrific.

And that is me.

I love seeing the new students, particularly the first years, who come in all dressed up with whatever dressed up is at home- clubwear for some, studied blue hair and don't care for others, and I watch them relax and find themselves and their style through the year.

And of course the same is true of me.

With a time challenged year ahead, and with samples and things I am making in my after hours time the Burdastyle webinars, my own sewing has become very streamlined.

I am doing a lot of skirt alterations (now that's a fun job, just love to waste creative time putting in a zipper again) to account for the fact that I lost about 20 pounds over the spring and summer watching what and how I eat to deal with a sore throat the doctor told me was reflux, and turned out to be just dairy. Along that way I must have also stopped eating like a stevedore and stopped eating before bed so that weight has stayed off. (Opps another explanation just popped into my head - in the same period of time my husband has been away during the week and he is the much more elaborate cook).

For whatever reason the weight has been off long enough  to require me to take in some clothes I like.

A person can't just do must-do sewing of course without losing it, something I try not to do often, so I have been sneaking in some for me sewing.

In my case that has meant dresses.

So I was delighted to see in this morning's NYTimes that I am on track with the sophisticates in the big city - something that doesn't happen as often as you might think.

Here is Bill Cunningham on Simple is best, dress dressing:

http://nyti.ms/167A1KA

On that theme, despite the fact is it back to school not fashion week around here, I made this dress, the Kristen from Stylearc:

Now obviously there are a lot of similar basic knit dresses around (this one has an invisible zipper in the back - went it quite well because I stablized the seam allowance with fusible knit interfacing) but Stylearc always has a nice fit in the neck and shoulders, and since that's where a dress hangs that's important.

I made this as a sort of trial garment for this pattern and to have a backdrop for some silk scarves that were new to me during some vintage store shopping with various younger relatives over the summer. 

So this is a basic (my husband even looked at it and said "that's a basic" which just shows you it is that obvious).

So it needs something but sometimes you have something that needs a dress that needs something, if you follow.

So here are the shots:

One of the scarves and with the pink glasses I got because I was tired of hearing my daughter complain about my new googly glasses.

Outside in the wind with a necklace that doesn't go with anything else.

My favourite scarf because it has lions and the jungle on it, and it's pretty hard to beat that.

So all in all a good teaching dress, suitable for tired first thing Monday morning classes when there will be a lot of walking around the classroom going on. I am going to start thinking now of course of how I can make variations of this one.

After the next alteration session.

Proper Burdastyle webinar link

I have contacted Burdastyle about the class time issue and this is the correct link that tells you all that. Sorry about that.

Burdastyle webinar

I have a couple of projects I have been working on, including a radio show on elections, but the one I am really interested in are a couple of one hour live webinars for Burdastyle.

The first one will be on September 19th and will be on how to make your garments more professional looking. I will be doing one on knits in October and one in November on sleeves.

The details for the first session are here. 

I am so pleased to be doing this for a whole lot of reasons:

• I have sewn for a very long time. I have made a lot of mistakes, figured out how to do a better job, taken classes, read, talked sewing, and practiced. A lot. I have sewn long enough to know how much the patterns don't tell you, and I also know most new sewers are more or less teaching themselves as they work through the pattern instructions. I want to share some of what took me so long to learn with sewers just getting going - because I want their projects to turn out so they will feel as good about sewing as I do.
• This is an online course, a live webinar, although my understanding is the material will also be available as a recording. In my day job I do a fair bit of teaching that way. I am pretty pleased to have my worlds collide like this, and for once to be working with material that is dear to my heart not just my head. Imagine how you would feel if you went to work and they called a meeting and said "OK let's forget about the agenda and just listen to (insert your name here) talk about interfacing instead." Pretty cool thought isn't it?
• The folks at Burdastyle have been a delight to work with, clean, organized, and best of all, they are letting me do my own thing. All the characteristics of a good relationship.
• The webinars are cheap. $19 is reasonable and this makes the course accessible to the kinds of sewer I am most interested in talking with.

The only downside of course is limiting the content in my head - there is a lot of "man I have to tell them that too" going on around the old laptop at the moment, but I am trying to control myself.

Oh and yes they sent me this, makes sense:

The camera never lies subtitle: how to waste time for non-beginners

I am wrapping up this week having waved goodbye to my son from New York, and gearing up for a weekend with the little girls doing a multi-night sleepover while their parents get a well earned break and some fun time at a wedding in another part of the province.

I am of course crazy about my son who lives so happily in New York and will be heading down there for a visit end of November I think. My daughter and son-in-law will be there earlier so we are going to space ourselves out a bit. Us folks from Nova Scotia operate on the assumption that anyone who moves away must be just dying without the relatives so we try to make sure they are never alone- as much as seat sales allow.

This trip my son didn't have his girlfriend with him, she is in the middle of big and interesting work projects, either that or lying in a dark room somewhere with a cold cloth on her head recovering from the last round of visitations, and I really did miss having her here too.

Don't get me wrong, I raised this guy and did a real good job, but he is a guy and there is a limit really to what you can do.

I'll give you and example.

They have just moved into an apartment in Brooklyn and I want to do a housewarming thing. Of course I want to make it. In my worldview a person doesn't need a mother to do what you can buy at a store. So when I was home I asked him, "I really want to make you something for your apartment, what would you like?"

His response was, "well I am not sure we want to clutter the place up."

This is not an answer. Not a reasonable person answer, so I really wish his girlfriend had been with him. She gets it. I can talk about projects or all the stuff that is moving around inside my head and she knows what I mean. 

I don't need a translator.

I really like her. I think I will just email her instead now, go direct.

As I wrote last post I have been up to my eyeballs, with family stuff, with students (I taught summer school) and now with coordinating a new program we have got going.

Just so you know when you take over someone's job and they are sooo delighted and rush over all the files and thank you publicly in all the meetings, well that may not be a good sign and there might be a lot of pages in those files with the page twos missing so to speak.

All that said I have done an enormous amount of stress relieving project planning (we are going minimalist this fall owing to the time crunch not the runways) have almost finished a StyleArc dress (can't find the battery recharging part so the photos are probably going to be taken by an almost four year old with an iPad this weekend, take that into consideration when you see them), and have been engaging in some excellent time wasting.

First off I read this piece in the NYTimes before terrorists took the site down this week (this really happened) on how lipstick was toxic which I knew anyway but up until this week didn't care about.

I decided however that I might as well care so I invested in a cool bunch of mini samples of mineral makeup from this outfit

Since the samples arrived I have been doing major fooling around in the bathroom where I apply one of the samples on my unmade up nearly 60 year old face and then take an iPad picture of it, (that's when I realized the recharger had gone AWOL), find my glasses and take a look.

It is really interesting to me how things I wouldn't normally wear look so different in the bathroom mirror than they do in an actual picture. Much like when you make something which you think is splendid until you take a blog shot and realized it makes you look dumpy.

Same phenomenon.

This is really pretty fun and both Mr. Rascal and I are very entertained by this process, which owing to the number of samples I ordered is going to be going on for a few more days (the little girls are going to love this).

Here is what this high level process looks like, which you might find interesting if you don't see nearly 60 year old women's faces without makeup except one part with her natural hair colour and natural baggy eyes often enough:

Au natural except for some purple mineral eyeshadow and some lipstick made of organic something or other.

Googly eye glasses with some dark powder type eyeliner added, no mascara nothing else. BTW I also have a pink smaller pair of glasses but I have to say the big nerdy glasses are good for seeing, which if you are talking eyeglasses has some relevance.

This is a pretty fun way to waste some time and my one revelation is that this stuff actual seems to stick to your face pretty good which surprises me, since it is all essentially loose powder.

In addition I have also worked on the smallest of sewing projects. My youngest son has lots of theories about most things and one of those is that the tiniest bit of light keeps people awake.

His solution is to go sleep in a forest or something but I like my running water and power plugs, but it is true sometimes I don't sleep - a pattern that started waiting to hear that teenage kid open the door and rolling over to see what the time was on the digital clock, before they moved to New York and the forest. The pattern of broken sleep of course continued with The Change and things like fair isle vest knitting,  nailing down the sub sections of the meaning of life, and wondering if this year I should be a dress person or a skirt person.

Long and short of it I made these little numbers, one for summer and one for winter, although with there being more light in the summer I think I have to season reverse them. And yes that is lingerie elastic you see:

The thing is.

These eyeshade really work. I haven't slept this well in years. Seriously. They even worked to help me get back to sleep when the phone rang at 3:00 a.m. and it was a student, you know the one who had called me at home that afternoon to ask for an emergency extension because she had strep throat and had a fever of 103.

"Opps," she said, yelling over the sounds of the bar. "I must have pocket dialed you."

Yep my sleep mask worked great and I went to bed with a smile on my face knowing whose paper I would be marking first Monday morning.

What's with the end of summer?

As bizarre as it is, apparently it is now the end of summer.

I am taking this hard despite the fact I got a jump start on summer by going to Florida for two months starting in April.

Summer is my season.

Even so this one is a bit of a blur. We started with that horrible week when we drove home in from down south in emergency mode to join my poor daughter for about seven days in and out of hospital with the staff unable to "call" if the baby's heartbeat was still there or not. A full week. I did the rounds after that returning the maternity clothes.

We got through that. 

Because this was also the summer Miss Scarlett learned to swim. And the summer my niece came and learned to knit hats and cook.

It was also the summer my step-daughter had her own scare and went on bedrest.

Most of the local fort manning has been done solo.

My husband got called away to work on a project out of town in July and that will be ongoing until maybe Christmas. At least he is home on the weekends.

I miss him anyway. I like people in the house. I think I was about 35 before I was in a room alone and I sleep better when there are doors being opened and closed (if you have teenage sons that would be microwave doors). But that stops after a while.

The thing about my husband is that he is pretty eccentric. He hasn't found a problem a three inch nail or duct tape can't fix, and he has a limited future as a home decorator or image consultant. In fact we just had two mantlepiece things he had made arrive this morning and they are different styles - for the same room. He can't hear the noises I can hear in the car and can tell me from a chair in the living room that it is just because the wires are wet, whatever that means, and which in Nova Scotia on the ocean is a pretty broad analysis. He once installed an electrical outlet in the ceiling because he ran out of wire and didn't think plugging the lamp cord up to the ceiling is weird. "It works doesn't it?" he said.

He is also shy with new people and is no master of cocktail party small talk. He figures Yes and No and analyzing the possible recipes of everything on the tray should just about cover it.

But the thing is he is the nicest man in the world and he listens. More than anyone I ever met, more than any other man for sure, he knows how to deliver those magic words:

"Tell me all about it." 

Words that are as powerful to the female psyche as that other fabulous line: 

"No I don't think you're crazy."

A person misses a man like that.

So it has been a busy summer and not a lot of sewing got done, apart from some utility stuff (more on that later) and a lot of knitting. Knitting late at night in bed work with Netflix on the iPad and Mr. Rascal trying to take over the pillows.

I can't show you what I have been making however as it's all for presents for Christmas, so I figure the next step is to ban the family from blog reading.

I think I am due to sew again soon.

Since summer is over I need to think about back-to-school clothes for this person at the front of the classroom.

Always a bright side.

Sewing on the edges

We have had a busy week around here, getting the bed rest routine down, and doing details like feeding three dogs in sequence, as well as the regular work and other family stuff.

I have slipped in some sewing related activities but nothing real heavy duty as those sorts of things were being done elsewhere.

First I have to say I can't imagine what a nuisance life has to be if you don't sew.

One particularly warm night I found myself wrapped up in a knit nightie around my neck. When I got up I said screw this and went down to the sewing room and made two minimalist nightgowns from 100% cotton seersucker left over from that delusional white shirt project. 

Minimalist means I serged the whole thing and the only decoration is a bit of baby rick rack around the neckline.

You absolutely can't buy exactly this. I don't know why. I am reminded that one of my sisters ordered in some $50 or something "menopause" nightgowns that were supposed to keep you cool. These babies cost me nothing except my time spend rooting around in my piles of fabric to find this seersucker.

Since I have made them I have been sleeping like a baby.

Must be the rick rack.

Here is a shot on one on a bush which is my version of an arty bit of photography:

I just adapted a summer dress pattern which is why this has bust darts, not a usual nightgown detail.

And yes I know this looks like something they issue you when they take away your shoelaces and sharp objects, or like something from a Swedish film where there are subtitles and more angst then should be fit into any one life, you know before the character in this nightgown is told to go back to her room and continue to go mad.

So if you overlook the part that this is a highly institutional little garment it is mighty cool in the literal sense, so I am just moving on.

In my time slivers I have also been doing some sewing room organization.

I am always impressed by the organized sewing room shots, you know the ones that look better than your living room at home and are about as disorganized as the instrument tray at the dentist's office.

Suffice it to say that my sewing room, although a large and even partially drywalled room in my basement, doesn't exactly look like that.

However organizing a sewing room is fun in a 14 year old boy cleaning their room sort of way - you know you pull something out and then spend 20 minutes fooling around with it until you go to the next item. I mean this isn't exactly top speed cleaning or organizing.

So as evidence that not all sewing rooms are marvels of decor here are some corners of mine.

My dear husband, the not finishing drywall one, put up some peg board a while ago for me. The plan was to go to Home Depot and get little hooks and be a new me.

That was fine for a while but the hooks turned out to be too expensive, about $20 for five, particularly if you translated the dollars into fabric.

However this month I discovered a retail display store and they had big long hooks that were perfect for serger thread for less than 20 cents each and these bicycle basket things that are perfect if you are pretty messy for tossing in odd spools of sewing thread, for $5.00 each.

So here are some shots of all that on the pegboard:

Finally in the back corner, furthest from my sewing machine, I have neatly folded all the mending projects that hopeful men in my family have brought down for me to fix:

I have no intentions of ever touching anything on this shelf. 

And yes that is a Tennessee Vols sweatshirt with the broken zipper. My husband has been back from Tennessee for nearly a year and a half now.