WIWS: For the Birds

Linking with Fine Linen and Purple for What I Wore Sunday: 

I'm calling this dress "For the Birds"; it is from eshakti, and I'm pretty pleased with it.  The fit is good, it is a nice mid-weight fabric, the print is fun, but not so loud that I can't treat it as a nearly neutral base garment.  I'm planning to knit a coordinating sweater in worsted weight yarn later this winter, as this pointelle sweater is very light weight.

I ended up throwing on some nude colored cotton tights after I took these pictures as it was kind of nippy this morning!  I'll take it.  Fall is my second favorite season; winter is my favorite.  

I've decided that raglan and kimono sleeves are my best friends.  I customized the sleeves on this dress, as they were originally raglan cap sleeves, so I made them short, and I really like the profile on these sleeves.  My only complaint about this dress is that the lingerie straps are sewn on backward and are very narrow (unusually, for eshakti) and the neckline is right at my bra line so I have to be aware of my movements in the dress.

I found these shoes at a thrift shop for $10 this summer.  They are Clarks and pretty comfortable!  Plus, I like the unusual color.

My hair was a total disaster today, so I just kind of phoned it in.

Also, since it was church I could wear a hat, so I pulled this 1940s number off the hook and pinned it on.  

It was kind of hard to get a good photograph of the back (short arms!) but I think you get the basic idea.

I'm glad we were able to get to our regular parish today, despite the drive.  It is the first day of the new church year, and it was good to be there.  Birdie is still not quite well and has started coughing a bit, so I was undecided about taking her this morning, but it was fine.

A friend held her for a while after she fell asleep.

She actually fell asleep on my lap at the end of the service, which is completely unprecedented for her!  And then she dozed off again in the car on the way home, another anomaly.  The weather is so nice today--sunny and 68 with a nice breeze.  

Outfit:

Dress: Eshakti

Cardigan: Candies via Goodwill

Shoes: Clarks (thrifted)

Necklace: thrifted

Earrings: gift from hubby long ago

Hat: Ebay

A Live Grenade

Living with children who have serious chronic illness is a little like living with a live grenade.  You never know when it is going to go off, so you watch it, warily, waiting for the explosion which inevitably happens.  Sometimes you forget that the grenade is there, lurking in the corner, and you go about your merry business, but there is always the click of the pin as it is pulled out, the metallic ping as the handle releases that brings you back to watchful awareness.

Last week, Birdie had a fever for four days.  It was high, it required constant monitoring because of her propensity to febrile seizures, and it was unrelenting.  It was perhaps a blessing in disguise, as she was home from school from Wednesday on.  On Friday, I found out that a student at her preschool ended up in the ER with flu and that the serious enterovirus has hit Delaware, one state away from us.  Many people commute between here and there, so I give it a week maybe two to hit our city.  The EV-D68 hits kids with respiratory conditions particularly hard, and it is hard to diagnose at first because it presents like a cold or the flu.  A lot of them end up hospitalized, some on ventilators.  That means my airway malacia kids are particularly vulnerable right now.  

We were hoping to wait on the flu vaccine until October, when the flumist would be in our doctor's office, but we don't have the luxury any longer.  I've got a last minute vaccine appointment for the three older kids on Monday to get them flu vaccines, and we will hope and pray that the EV-D68 stays away for now.  Because these are the things you do when you live with a live grenade.  You look for ways to soften the impact, to shore up defenses, to remain constantly vigilant.  

Our sick season starts at the beginning of August and ends sometime in mid-June.  

Miles to go before we sleep.  Miles to go...

7QT: Zonked Squared

--1--

I think I might have to revise my earlier assessment of cooler weather=separates for me, as I've been searching out the dresses in my closet as the weather has turned.   

Some of it is that a lot of my separates are a bit snug around the middle right now, and some of it is there is just something easy about a dress.  It isn't cool enough yet for tights and boots, but I have a strong urge to Knit!All!The!Things! to make neat accessories and sweaters for the cooler weather.  

This dress is a perfect blank template for fun accessories, I think.

Dress: Land's End via ThredUp

Cuckoo Clock necklace: birthday gift (via etsy)

Earrings: etsy

Shoes: dankso via ebay

--2--

And, on my needles now:  I'm still working on the headband in fits and starts, and cast on a 1940s era pullover sweater in a twisted rib pattern.  The pattern was a little sketchy on details like gauge and finished size, but there were a bunch of people who've knit it up, so I used their notes to pick my needles and add a few stitches to the pattern for extra width.  The yarn is a true peacock teal color and will be gorgeous, I think!  I'm using some yarn I had in my stash.

--3--

My sister will be pleased to hear that her yarn arrived.  She commissioned me to knit her a Katniss cowl at the beginning of the summer, and I said I'd probably get to it in September, as I wanted to finish the mushroom sweater first.  I'm going to do a gauge swatch this afternoon and get going on it soon.  I think it will knit up quickly given how bulky the yarn is.

--4--

I finally got some sewing done this week!  I tackled my modified Emery, using Florence fabric from Denyse Schmidt, which I love.  I know it looks orange on the photos, but it is really more in the coral family, which suits my complexion so well. The design is so reminiscent of 1930s fabric designs, and my mods to the Emery have kind of given the dress a mid-1940s vibe, which is exactly what I was going for.  I'll talk about construction when it is finished, but suffice to say, I learned a few things the hard way (*ahem* self-lined bodices), and this is the first time I added patch pockets without feeling like I wanted to stab myself in the eyes.  I still have a bunch to do.  The bodice is just pinned to the skirt, and I need to finish the sleeve edges and hem the skirt, plus it needs a zipper (I discovered mid-construction that the zipper I planned to use wasn't long enough), but I think it will come together quickly once the new zipper arrives.  I'm also planning to add some small vintage black buttons to the bodice.  I had wanted to finish the rest today (except for the zipper), but I'm too zonked to sew.

--5--

Birdie has been running a pretty high fever since Tuesday night and has been up every hour all night long every night since (and since her fever is spiking right after lunch, nap time has been much been a diaster)  We're keeping her home from preschool until the fever passes, obviously.  She did finally sleep in today, and seems a bit cooler and more peppy, but we'll see what the rest of the day brings.  She still has fever eyes, though.  I'm hoping it breaks over the weekend so she can go back to school on Monday.

--6--

The other reason I'm zonked is Ponchik, who normally gets up 2-3 times per night, including a 30-60 minute stretch around 2:30 and then wakes up for the day between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m.  Between her and Birdie, I feel almost deliriously tired.

--7--

Piglet is also home today because of an inservice day for his teachers (I know!  It is only the second week!)  He is still messing with a pretty bad ear infection (almost two weeks now) and while he seems pretty chipper, I think it is wearing on him, so I guess it is just as well.

And speaking of chipper, Boo is back!  The last few days, Boo has been seriously delightful.  After more than three extremely challenging years with him that made me feel like a failure as a parent almost every minute of every day, it is a welcome break.  We're hoping it means that he's finally turned the corner on the toddler years, but time will tell.  In the meantime, we're enjoying having our giggly (if slightly manic), agreeable little boy back.  

Linking up with Jen at Conversion Diary with all the other Quick Takers!

Yarn Along: Mushroom Sweater and Albion's Seed

The mushroom sweater is complete!  I'm so pleased to have actually finished a sweater that fits me!  It is a little bit too warm outside to wear it, but I think it will be lovely this winter, especially with dresses.  

So, construction details.  I used an Andalusian stitch pattern, which is super easy to memorize and very easy to "read" in the knitting as you go along.  Basically it is a four row stockinette stitch with a 1x1 rib row thrown into row 3.  I used Ann Budd's sweater book for the pattern, and knit a size 36 as my previous experience with her book is that there is a LOT of ease in the patterns and I wanted this to be fairly fitted.  

I used Lion Brand Wool Ease in mushroom for this project, and knit mostly on size 8s.  I used 5s for the ribbing as I wanted the ribbing to pull in quite a bit for the waist band.  I made the sleeves less wide than called for (10 stitches less) and as a result, the sleeve cap ended up a bit wide, but that worked out to make nice little 1940s style puff at the top.  I just ran a basting stitch with the tail yarn from both sleeves and pulled it in a bit as I sewed my mattress stitch.  

My only complaint is the shoulders--when I tried on the sweater before adding the sleeves, the shoulders were the perfect width, but after adding the sleeves, somehow they pulled out to the very edge of my shoulders, so I don't know what I did wrong in setting in the sleeves to cause that.  

I steam blocked the sweater because of the high acrylic/rayon content, which worked great (except for the steam burn on my hand!)  I used some vintage buttons (probably 1930s era, going by the card and the condition).  I debated about the buttons a lot, as I had several options, but in the end, I felt these reddish brown buttons would give the sweater the most versatility.

I also cracked Albion's Seed this week.  It is a doorstop of a book that promises to be a fascinating look at how immigration affected various regional culture in America.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along.

Odds and Ends, Vol. 13

I seem to have amassed another selection of great links, so here goes!

James Alexander Cameron is writing a dissertation on English churches, and his observations about medieval architecture mistakes are hilarious.  I ended up subscribing to his blog on the basis of this article, but am enjoying his writing.  I find his secular detachment from the sacred subject he is studying to be an interesting study in contrasts, as well as valuable commentary from the other side.

Related: this image haunts me.

One of the original crunchy cons, Joel Salatin takes down Amanda Marcotte's whiny Slate piece about home cooked dinner.  I agree with Marcotte that there are many obstacles to getting a good dinner on the table, but many of the objections she cites seem to me to fall under the category of #firstworldproblems.  As usual, Salatin provides a farmer's perspective on these things: 

"With slow cookers, indoor plumbing, timed-bake and refrigerators, today's techno-enabled kitchens allow busy people to cook from scratch and eat with integrity far easier than during Great Grandma's time. She had to fetch water from the spring, split stove wood, start a fire and churn the butter and she still managed to feed a large family very well. If our generation can't do at least as well with our 40-hour work week and kitchen tech, then we deserve to eat adulterated pseudo food that sends us to an early grave. I don't know that anyone's children deserve this, however."

Read the whole thing.

Amazing paper cut illustrations.

Tolkien and goodness.  I was reminded of a quote from Graham Greene's Bendrix in The End of the Affair: "happiness is even harder to write than goodness."  From the article: "One of the reasons that Tolkien’s stories continue to inspire us is that he does something few authors are able to do: he makes goodness compelling and desirable."

This is real faith.  Read the embedded link as well.  Both are a powerful story of one man's unshakable faith in the midst of a terrible storm.  God gives us much grace in the moment.

I read Wendy Shalit's book A Return to Modesty about nine years ago, and it had a pretty big influence on me.  I've always been a fairly modest person, but her book helped me to feel good about it.  She recently wrote an article about the troubling trend of nude selfies (so called s*xting), especially amongst teenagers, and why modesty remains important.  Far from an antiquated notion, modesty is about protecting the private self.  In our increasingly public age, maintaining and protecting this space is so important, and we have to teach ourselves and our children how to resist the allure of living everything out loud.

Yale has digitized a mass of photographs from 1938-1945, organized by county, and the database is fascinating!  Click the county on an interactive map, and it takes you to all the photos stored for that county in the time period.  

Amazon customer support gets creative with a disgruntled customer.  I'm ambivalent about amazon these days, after the whole Hachette debaucle, but I will say about this particular exchange, well done!

Black and white photos of 1950s/1960s Hong Kong.

Since finishing Cheap and reading Peter King's book, I've been thinking hard about what it means to my modus operandi, and while I don't yet have a global approach to the issues raised in both books, I have been thinking more about my shopping habits, my basic consumerist mindset, and how to change that to something pre-modern.  I don't have any coherent answers yet, but I found Sarai's article on having restraint with fabric shopping helpful.

And in a related article: Design Sponge talks about cultivating craftsmanship and making mindful purchases.  This is basically what Cheap is getting at, in the end, but it is hard to do on a large scale, given how the global economy works and the relative price of wages to quality goods.

Shana of The Mom Edit (formerly Ain't No Mom Jeans) shares a reader letter that is wonderful.  The letter is about how sartorial sense is shaped by where you come from, and why it's hard to leave who you are behind.

Rod Dreher continues his discussion of the Benedict Option, and what it is (and isn't).

I read a lot of germ theory history during graduate school, and I remain fascinated by medical history in general.  A new study turns the current thinking about the progression of disease in the New World on its ear.

The problem of pain.

World War I in color.

Evidence continues to pile in that people read differently on e-readers.  I got a Kindle for Christmas last year, after much debate, and actually, I don't really like reading on it that much.  I still prefer a physical book, and the highlights from other readers in the Kindle versions *really* annoy me.  I did read some light things on the Kindle, and that was the primary purpose of it for me, but I can't do serious reading on it, and I dislike it for fiction reading that I want to attend closely to.

I don't even know how to caption this one, but these photos are fascinating.

I've noticed in the last few years that American culture lately puts a lot of value on artists, entertainers, creative types, etc., and I've wondered about whether this value was misplaced.  It certainly puts a lot of pressure on non-creative people to be so.  I consider myself a fairly creative person, at least in the sense that I like to make things, but I find the way that creativity is currently valued very frustrating.  When every second show on television is a campy reality show, and all the world is a Facebook stage or a Pinterest pin, it is hard to find private space, to create for the sake of it, to enjoy natural beauty.  I find that Pinterest really exacerbates this for me, which is why I rarely go on the site.  It just makes me unhappy. As it happens, modern notions of creativity as a force to be unleashed within the self are very recent, and not only was creativity not valued in earlier times, it was not even understood to come from within.  Joshua Rothman explains.  From the article:

“Every culture elects some central virtues, and creativity is one of ours. In fact, right now, we’re living through a creativity boom. Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative—how else, we think, can we become fully realized people?...This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it’s a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world. By contrast, our current sense of creativity is almost entirely bound up with the making of stuff. If you have a creative imagination but don’t make anything, we regard that as a problem—we say that you’re "blocked.""

and more:

CREDIT

"It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age. We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things. Perhaps inevitably, we have reconceived creativity as a kind of meta-consumption: a method of working your way toward the other side of the consumer-producer equation, of swimming, salmon-like, back to the origin of the workflow."

Read the rest.



Amazing night photography.



And more (different photographer and technique)

Long time readers of the blog will know that I lived in Russia for a time about 12 years ago (in addition to a student semester there in college), and that experience was quite formative for me.  I still miss living in Russia, and the arrival of fall always makes me miss it more for some reason.  I keep up with Russian news and to a lesser extent, Russian politics.  I want to revisit my Russian language learning at some point.  So it goes without saying that this article about the rising mortality rates in Russia since 1992 piqued my interest.  It turns out that the larger picture is one deeply rooted in the history of the Soviet Union, one that as a Soviet historian, I find very interesting.

Check out Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth's amazing woodcut.  

Pants.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: pants are not my best look.   I currently own two pairs--my green swing trousers that I'm actually pretty happy with, and a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt Amanda jeans, bought largely on the recommendation of Brittany from Va-Va Voom vintage.  I've been wanting to try a pair of 1940s-style jeans for a while, since I used to wear jeans a lot, but the Freddie's price tag and international shipping has kept me from taking the plunge.  I do prefer dresses and skirts, and I have a pretty hard-to-fit figure for jeans, so I really don't want to pay that much money for something that may or may not fit right, and then not be able to easily exchange it.  I also have realized that my sewing skill set is just not up to jeans at this point, so I'm saving the denim in my stash for now.

Enter the Amanda jeans.  I figured at the amazon price point, and easy return shipping, I could give them a whirl.  I wish the ones with the contrast top stitching had been available when I ordered mine, but otherwise, these are fine.  I don't love the center front fly (I think a side closure is more flattering on me), but I do need to figure out what to wear with them (I'm thinking a fitted, cropped knitted jumper would work well).  I think that's what I liked about Brittany's styling--she had a pretty fitted knit top with her jeans.  I should try them with one of my French Breton shirts when the weather cools just a bit more--today was the first day that could be called "fall-like" in several weeks; I'll take it!!

The Amandas are fairly similar in look to the Norma Jeans from Freddie's, actually.  They are comfortable, the rise is actually high enough on my crazy rise, and they don't gap badly in the back like almost every other pair I've ever worn.  They do have a fairly high spandex content in them, and the denim isn't very thick, but again, for the price, I'm satisfied.  I bought an 18 regular, as I intended to roll the bottoms, although I think if I get another pair, I'll buy a tall because I'd like to be able to cuff them twice.  I also think I should try them with a belt or something to define the waist a bit more.  I ended up leaving my shirt untucked all day because I couldn't decide what looked better (I worried that the tucked in version looked a bit mumsy given my figure).  But perhaps I shouldn't worry about that much.  Anyway.  Pants.  So there.

Outfit deets:

Gingham Portrait Blouse: me made

Gloria Vanderbilt Amanda Jeans: Amazon

John Horse Brooch: Acorn and Will

Strawberry earrings: Modcloth

Dansko sandals: ebay

Glasses: Zenni Optical

Easy Like Saturday Morning

A simple Saturday morning outfit.  It is still very hot and humid today, but there is supposed to be rain this afternoon that will break the streak.  Please God, because I need fall weather.

I've decided that I need to beware of most pinks, but that peaches do my skin tone a lot of favors (this top is quite peach, even though it looks more pink in the photos)

I hadn't thought to pair this skirt and top together before today; I like it when things work out like that!

The lemon slice earrings are from ModCloth.  I purchased them a few months ago with an account credit, but wore them for the first time today.  (Can I just say: what is up with the big round plastic earring backs that everyone uses now?  They are completely non-functional and I always have to find proper earring backs to replace them).

Outfit deets: 

Top: Ann Taylor via ThredUp

Skirt: Lady Hazan via The Parader's Vintage during their close out sale last year

Earrings: Modcloth (appears to be out of stock now, but they have bananas and apples that are cute too!)

Necklace: Thrifted

Shoes: Dansko via ebay

Glasses: Zenni Optical