Redwood Terrace

Whelp, it's been a crazy month.  Three church feasts, two weddings (that the girls were in), one birthday, one baptism, the start of school, writing and giving a speech at Back to School Night, Juliana's Sewing School for several students, several gatherings with friends, two church picnics, keeping up with the garden, a nasty gastroparesis flare that lasted almost two weeks, two hurricanes and a flood, plus my husband was traveling for work the better part of three weeks.  No wonder I'm tired!

So I have quite a backlog of projects to share as I did a fair amount of making in that time.  There is some serious writing I want to do this fall, but I need to get my feet back under me first (and pour my brains back into my head--ha!)  In August, I taught several people how to sew or mend, and one of the sessions was with a delightful high school girl who is a friend of the family (and a classmate of my kids).  

She wanted to make a simple dress to get started with, and I dithered about patterns a while before settling on the Terrace dress by Liesl and Co.  (Can I just say that the long sleeve sample is terrible?  I would never make the pattern if that was all I saw of it.  Thankfully the Instagram hashtag was most helpful.  I've long said it, but what is up with terrible samples on pattern envelopes from larger companies?  It's like they don't want anyone to buy them or something.  That's why I look at line art instead).  

 I wanted to work out any kinks in the pattern before I made it with her, so I threw together a quick version with my birthday linen the week before.  I had only two yards, so it was a squeak to get the whole dress out, and I had to piece part of the obi belt, but I made it!  I used a little scrap of one of my favorite vintage fabrics for one side of the belt so has different looks to it depending on which side is facing out.

The dress doesn't have my usual nice finishes because I was in such a hurry, but it turned out relatively well, and I've worn it a bunch since, including one of the weddings and Back to School night (where I picked up another adult student for Sewing School).  

Word to the wise: the obi-belt is meant to be worn almost right under the bust to look right.  It took me a few times to figure this out.  The belt also works as a sash (see below).  Also, reinforce the back seam at the seat or you'll have problems.  I caught it before disaster struck, but bears mentioning.

 

For size reference, I made a straight medium, which is about right.  The finished garment measurements had me considering a small, but I think the shoulders would have ended up too tight in a small.  I'm not sure if I'll make this again.  I like it, and it is a good church dress, and I've worn it a bunch, but I dunno.  It's not my favorite thing in the world.  I have three yards of beet colored linen that I thought I might make up the 3/4 sleeve version, but I keep dithering about it, wondering if I should use that linen for something else.   Watch this space!

Fairy Godmother

....well, not quite.  I do, however, have a new goddaughter--my first infant!  (My other godchildren were received into the Church as adults).  As the parents are also very new converts, I offered to make the gown and bonnet, which ended up being a pretty fun project.  I went with Robert Kaufman's cotton voile and ordered a yard, which is close to 60" wide.  I also ordered a lace swag thing to use for the overskirt, figuring it was probably cheaper than sourcing something by the yard and easier to work with.  I have loads left, so I could even make a lacy overskirt for myself or one of the girls at some point.

 Next was a pattern.  I don't have many baby patterns (and no newborn anything) because I didn't start sewing for my girls until they were toddlers, but I did have the Made By Rae Geranium, and wanted something like that.  I was on a tight deadline, however, and wasn't looking forward to grading the thing (the parents asked us less than two weeks before the proposed baptism date, during which time we had to get ready for school, the girls were in two weddings, and Birdie had a birthday.  As it happened, the baptism was pushed off a week, which helped my timeline considerably).  

After looking around a bit, I realized Rae made a free 0-3 month version of the Geranium!  It doesn't have sleeves so I decided to draft some.  I looked at various sleeve drafting methods, and then found a great tutorial here, which worked great. The dress pattern is pretty straightforward, particularly since I've made it in a larger size for my girls, and my only change was to make the skirt longer than drafted so it looked more baptismal gown-like.  I think I went with 18", but can't remember exactly.

The front

The back

The tricky part was figuring how how to sandwich the sleeve in between the outer bodice and the self-lining, but I got there in the end.  I wanted the insides to be as clean as the outsides on this, so I did French seams where I could, and sandwiched what I couldn't into the lining.  

The lace overskirts did give me a bit of a pain, as I struggled to figure out the best way to cut them, and the fabric was extremely slippery.  In the end, I used two layers cut into rectangles according to the pattern, but lengthened considerably. 

Clean insides!

The only 'clean edge' goof I made was to finish the waist seams together with the self-lined bodice, so I ended up laying down a strip of fabric over the edge like bias tape and whip stitching it to the bodice lining by hand.  I had already installed the overskirts and zig-zagged the edges with all the gathering, and I just couldn't see my way to unpicking ALL that just to get the lining edge out.  It looked great and worked well.  

Before I sewed anything on the dress, I put a tiny strip of knit interfacing in the middle of the bodice and embroidered a little Orthodox cross in bone colored DMC floss.  I wanted it to be tone-on-tone, but also to stand out slightly, and that worked perfectly.  

 

I used some vintage white buttons on the back, and added some lace trim from my stash to the neck and sleeves, since the bodice looked very plain against all that lace on the skirt.  I think the lace came from my gram, but I'm not 100% certain about that.  It was the perfect size and scale, and I put it on at the 11th hour, so I was very grateful to have it in my bin o' trims!

After the dress was finished, I set about making a bonnet.  Time was running short, so I knew I wouldn't have time to make booties, so I ordered some cotton crocheted ones that turned out to be much nicer than anything I could have made anyway.  I also wasn't interested in paying for a hat pattern, so a little bit of searching got me to the Purl Soho Baby Sunbonnet, which was the perfect shape.  

My yard of voile was nearly gone by this point, but I made it!  I have one small rectangle of fabric left, maybe 40x18."  Not bad for a $20 dress and cap.  

For the bonnet, I sewed a lace layer together with the outer layer, treating them as one layer, and then added a lace overlay that hangs over the edge, but it actually ended up looking better to have the lace overlay hang off the back, so if I do this again, I'll skip the overlay all together.  Since it is self-lined, the insides are very clean.  

The last thing was to decorate the candle, and I admit, I did leave this a bit late (in my defense, it was the first week of school!) and when I got out my florals to have at it, I realized I could put one of the corsages my mom made for my wedding on the candle and call it good, so that's what I did.  I tied a tiny strip of lace from the dress scraps to give it a little bit of swag.  It looked perfect, and I was glad to have a use for the corsage, which would otherwise just sit in a box until kingdom come.

The service was beautiful, even though I was juggling godmother duties with choir duties.  

Multi-tasking!

Ponchik helped me with the candle, and one of the other kids took over as photographer (another friend took pictures as well; hers are the brightly lit ones).  Birdie's photos are interesting, though.  She's got a good eye, though.  So creative, that one. 

We are so blessed to join this new little family, and to have them be part of ours.  Our kids are thrilled to have a baby around regularly, and there is no shortage of baby minders!  Boo in particular loves the babies and always wants to hold her.  As for me, I love holding a baby and doing the bouncing that the very little ones need (I've been called a baby whisperer a time or two, which I find slightly hilarious, given my own kids' babyhoods), but I'm also happy to hand them back to mama or papa when it is time to go.

Talking Tuesday: Master and His Emissary

 

In his latest substack newsletter, Rod Dreher writes about Iain McGilcrist's work on the brain, and McGilcrist's observation that Western culture has prioritized left brain dominance over balance with the right to great detriment.  (McGilcrist's work is dense, but this short video is a great overview).  Basically, says Gilcrist, the right side of the brain is the master, because it sees big picture, makes lots of different sorts of connections, and is creative but can be prone to madness.  

The left brain must be the emissary of the right so that both sides work together for an experience of reality which deals with the tangible and rational, but also lives in spiritual reality, the amorphous realm of mystery that we can only glimpse in slivers from time to time, because a view of the whole would be too much for us.  Our mystics and seers are ones who get to see more of that realm and live in it more fully than we.  They give us a window on it.  

Left brain dominance cannot see the forest for the trees; it is a kind of tunnel vision that not only thinks itself the master, but no longer perceives the presence of the right brain and is insistent that such a thing cannot exist.  To put it another way, it's like a tree in the middle of the forest sees only itself, and is blind to the fact that it is part of a forest, a larger ecosystem of reality. 

Writes Dreher:

"Reading McGilchrist [IM], it seems to me that the experience of consciousness is like what quantum physics tells us about reality: that it is both wave and particle. We live within a wave field that only becomes particle-ized through observation. When the left brain wishes to fix on something to understand it, it isolates the thing, but what it sees is only a partial picture of reality, because it denies the wave context (and has to, in order to see the particle). Yet a purely right-brain perception of reality cannot perceive the reality of the particle in isolation, so it too provides only a partial picture of reality. The truth is, living in time, we can never fully apprehend reality. But we can know it through participating in it.

IM quotes Herbert McCabe: “When we speak of God, we do not clear up a puzzle; we draw attention to a mystery.”"  ~Rod Dreher, "Detaching the Limpet," Daily Dreher Substack newsletter, September 18, 2021.

I've been thinking about these sorts of things all year.  What does it mean to live in the balance of the left and right brains?  How do we participate in the mystery of reality that is not tangible?  How do we orient our telos such that it reflects these things, and what does that mean for day to day living?  

I have no pat answers, but I suppose the questions are perhaps an orientation toward understanding.  It's maddening sometimes, like I have a shine of something important in the corner of my eye that I can't quite make out, but when I try to look directly at it, it disappears.  But maybe that is the point--one cannot approach these things head on, but can only sidle up to them from an angle, hoping for a sliver of insight.

School Colors

I mentioned that I made a kelly green knit dress on the same pattern as the teal one in August, I think.  I saved it for the first day of school since it was exactly the green of our school color.  I had to do a meet and greet with new families, so it was good to have something highly visible on!  

 This dress was much more successful than the teal dress, I'm happy to report.  It also is a bit more saturated than it photographed, mores the pity, as it really is a gorgeous shade of green.

The teal dress is out of the telio cotton knit that is slightly heavier than the KnitFabric.com mystery cotton knit, and so the whole thing drags a little from my shoulders, and the ties are too heavy.  I need to fix it now that I made the green dress ties differently.

Not much to report on construction; I used the fit tweaks I made on the failed yellow dress to make the bodice and skirt slightly roomier, cut 3" ties at twice length (they are twice as long as the skirt), and rounded the neckline slightly, but not much else.  It's a good dress and I'm glad to have it in my closet. 

#sewnshownseated

 

 

 

We've been assigned to a more ethnically Russian parish in the past year and a half, and I was recently reminded that Russians dress up more than Americans, particularly for church.  I had forgotten, being away from Russia for so many years.  I'm never a schlub, but I clearly need to up my church dress game, especially as a clergy wife.  And stop wearing Birkenstocks to church.  

#sewnshownseated

Which left me with a connudrum.  I have fine shoes for cold weather, but usually wear comfortable sandals in summer because we stand for almost 2 hours on Sunday morning (plus another 40 minutes or so Saturday nights), and my feet are terrible.  I can't wear even a low heel on a regular basis in that setting because of my neuroma, so I've been casting around for solutions.

I bought these shoes, which I never thought I'd like, but I actually do, and while I wouldn't want to do any serious city walking in them, they will do for summer church services.  They have a big toe box, unusual for this style, and the ankle strap is light and flexible. 

They are extremely flat with no arch support, and I did need a little bit of moleskin along the back edge but I have bone spurs on my heels and arches for days, so that's no surprise.  Forgive the swollen legs and feet; the humidity is still pretty intense. #pittingedemaisnofun

It seems like I have a lot of balls in the air just now, so I'd better get back to juggling!