Bright spots dark spots

First the bright spot.

I did my Burdastyle seminar on Thursday.

I just had a blast. There is nothing like a captive audience of folks to listen to your opinions about interfacing and pressing to give a girl a good time.

Really I just loved it and am looking forward to one on knits next month and sleeves in November. I have so much I want to say about sewing and this is another way to have that conversation.

I am thrilled.

O.K. on to the dark spot.

Today the husband and I were in a golf tournament where if there had been a prize for the worst drives our foursome would have won, at least my end of the foursome.

Afterwards there was a lunch and because it a husband's work thing there were draws and prizes throughout the meal and since they are all in the engineering field the grab bags contained knives, flashlights, and golf balls with the big door prize a set of cordless drills. They kind of threw the prizes around and said "OK if you are finished eating see you next year." Let's say it was not exactly run like a shower if you get my drift. I thought it was hilarious and the man holding tightly onto his ticket to see if he won the drills didn't see what so funny.

But it was. If you were me it was.

Back to the dark spot.

OK.

Every foursome had their pictures taken. I looked at ours there I was black shoes, jacket, and pants. I looked like someone who was there to park your car.

It was at that moment that my style came to its final screeching halt.

For my whole working life I have been a black basic sort of girl. 

It's logical.

It's economical.

There is always something to go with something and there is always a black version of whatever you want to buy.

It made packing for business trips a breeze and accessorizing a snap.

It made it easy to go to New York.

I knew what to wear to a black tie and to an office party and a funeral and a speech.

According the lady who did my "colours" in my mom's living room in 1978, black is my colour and I have been working around it ever since.

The problem is.

I look like someone you would give the keys to.

I look dull and lifeless.

I look like I am wearing a uniform for a company at which I am not the CEO.

I look like someone else and not like me.

So the black has to go and leave me behind.

But how exactly am I going to do that?

What about the twenty pairs of black shoes?

The black leather bags?

The boots?

47 yards of black you know what?

The question is:

For me what is the new black?

Flypaper thoughts

• Lots of sewing but none to show.
• Working on my Burdastyle webinar for this Thursday
• Just making the pieces I need for pictures.
• Will get back to the rest of the garments later.
• Two jackets and a suitish thing.
• Shape appears to be going out of style.
• Same thing happening here.
• I have a student who paints little landscapes on fake nails then glues them on.
• Pretty impressive.
• Next thing is the assignments.
• My favourite foods may be crabapple jelly and rhubarb pie.
• This realization is part of why I am going to start phasing out black from my wardrobe.
• Maybe if I don't look so serious they won't expect it.
• Maybe they will know who they are really dealing with.
• About time.
• I can feel the serious reservoir getting pretty low.
• May not refill it.
• Why do children start to whine only when their mother comes to pick them up?
• Why do dogs get up to pee 5 times in the night only when my husband is away?
• Why do facing pieces always go missing?
• Why do they come back only when you make new ones?
• Who is around to answer these questions?
• The hard part of getting this webinar ready is knowing what to leave out.
• I am going to be haunted by the "I should have saids"
• Fall people start "activities."
• I think someone should start a book club where the rules are only funny books.
• The last one I tried exposed me to the fact that only books of suffering get prizes.
• Three months of all members saying they really didn't like the book.
• Too bad, the food was pretty good.
• How about a funny book club where you can come in your slippers and at break you eat rhubarb pie.
• And you can ask people how they get their eyeliner on so straight and they show you.
• After the pie.
• Do you think in the webinar I should say cut twice the number of facings?
• Will someone other than me let the dog out?
• Back to the sewing room.
• Call me when it's dinner.

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.