The One With All The Pictures.

On to the eye candy. I started this project at the end of April and completed it the beginning of September. It started with a compulsion to make something a little more useful than I had been doing before. I made a shirt and dress which were auctioned off for this charity which I talked about in this post a couple of days ago.

First up, the dress:


Completely hand-stitched from reclaimed t-shirts. The blue ones are from the same golf tournament the year before. The flowers are relief appliques from still more t-shirts.



You can see the charity logo on the bottom left back which was reused from one of the volunteer t-shirts. This will fit as a dress from about 6 months until about size 2 as a shirt making it long wearing. I love that it can be used for a long time as kids grow out of sizes so quickly.



I was so worried about the buttonhole loops. I'd never done them before and left them for the last minute, but they worked out really well. You can see the vintage buttons and zigzag chain stitch here as well.



Palestrina stitch along the bottom hem. I love the look of Palestrina stitch - it's delicate and looks almost beaded.


And now on to the boy's shirt. Mothers of boys always complain that girls get all of the fun clothes, so I wanted to make sure I made something good for the boys. My daughter who's two saw this picture and said "There's my bear!". She loves this guy.



Again completely handsewn using reclaimed t-shirts. I enlarged the charity's logo to use as a pattern for this reverse applique.



I wanted the stitching on this one to be a lot simpler, but still let it have some details. This one is a 12 month size.



And a close up of some of the stitching. I used linen thread (brown) to give it a more rugged appeal.

It was hard to let them go after spending so much time with these two pieces, but both went in the silent auction and now have the most loving homes as well as having raised money for a charity very close to my heart.

A Fashion Designer is Born.

You are looking at the face of the worlds newest fashion designer.



I should back up a bit. We happened upon an arts festival in our town this weekend. An entire street was blocked off and art was everywhere – pottery, paintings, photography – but Ailsa gravitated towards a particular set of abstract paintings stopping at one that had black painted fabric flowing from it and a face painted on the canvas. She said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. I thought we should tell the artist that as she was sitting right there. Jolan was her name – but apparently the kids call her Yo yo. The conversation went something like this:
Yoyo: Are you an artist
Ailsa: ?
Yoyo: Do you like to make things?
Ailsa: Yes.
Yoyo: Then you are an artist.

We told her about the doll dresses that Ailsa had made and some of the other projects she had done (she really is an artist). Completely stoked, we went home, got out the fabric and started sewing. My little girl is now a fashion designer. She is NOT “going to be” a fashion designer she IS a fashion designer. Right now. And she’s about as excited as it gets. The enthusiasm is contagious, really, and I really admire (envy?) her confidence.
And why not. I’ve heard so many brilliant people say they started doing their life passion (ballet dancers, mechanics taking everything apart, engineers building bridges with lego) when they were six.

Here’s a parting shot in case you don't believe me. These were taken this spring. The outfit just shouts creativity, don’t you think?



p.s. Anyone know anything about fashion design for real? Like what skills to help her learn – drawing and sewing obviously, as well as looking at clothing, art, color around her. I’m looking for ways to help her realize her dream.

Scott Smed - part 1.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house and that was a good thing. The Annual Scott Smed golf tournament came and went this week, and I was thrilled to be part of it again. No, they weren’t crying about their golf games, in fact, I think the golf part is almost like an afterthought. Almost. They were crying because the charity had touched their hearts. again.

It all began when my friends Shannon and Peter were pregnant with their first child – a boy – Scott. I didn’t know them at the time, my sister was still dating Shannon’s brother (they are married now with a baby of their own this year). I remember my sister saying that Shannon had read every baby book there was and was so excited about the pregnancy. Anyone who knows Shannon knows how she throws herself into things with contagious enthusiasm (oh, that laugh!), and I can only imagine what she would have been like then.

But, sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. Something went very wrong and they ended up loosing the baby in the third trimester. Peter always says that the charitable works that they do make Scott’s life and death have purpose. That even though he is not here with us, his presence can be felt by the good things that people do in his name. The Scott Smed Memorial Foundation is making efforts to improve the experiences of families who have lost a child. The money raised has gone towards building special delivery rooms in soon to be four Calgary hospitals for families who are experiencing a loss, support and resources for families, and training for hospital staff.

What I really admire about this charity is its grassroots beginnings. It’s the story of a family seeing a need in the community and deciding they can do something about it. And this group of people is accomplishing that in really concrete and measurable ways. The best part of the golf tournament, in my opinion, is the guest speaker. Someone who has used the services of the Scott Smed Foundation gathers up all their courage and tells their story. You grieve with them, but you also can hear the hope coming through, and the gratefulness that they didn’t have to go through it alone. That’s why I choose to volunteer at this tournament every year instead of just sending my silent auction items. To be part of something like this, even for just a day makes us all feel a little more human.

(come back to see part 2 - I promise lots of pictures, less seriousness, and a follow up to the sneak peak posts I keep taunting you with. Thanks for reading this far.)

Sneak Peek!

Here's a sneak peek at a huge project I've been working on since, oh, probably April.



Completely hand sewn from leftover volunteer t-shirts. They are for a favourite charity to include in their silent auction.



There are two of them, one boy, one girl. The boy one is a t-shirt with a bear (their logo) reverse appliqued on it, about 12 month size and the girl one is a dress with flowers relief appliqued on it size 12 months to 2T - it grows into a shirt as the child grows.



Guess how many hours of stitching this was! Happily I've found a better solution for inside labels!

PINC GLAS AND YELOFEED (glove pictures)

Here are a couple of glove pictures I haven't shown you yet. I packed up a big order of gloves this spring - the one on the top is a freebie I threw in as a thank you for the massive order. I was getting a little tired of monograms at this point so the geometric folk kind of flower design was really fun. I will definitely be doing more of those.



After the big order was this pair.



They were a special order.



#8 on my order list - it says: Ailsa (the name of the orderer, my daughter) A H (The desired monogram) pink gloves. Yellow thread. You know, all the details. Don't you just love kindergarten spelling? I love that thread starts with the letter F. Precious.

On Water. And how to get more of it into you.

We’ve been struggling with water in our house this year. Our older daughter has a medical condition and meds which require her to drink a lot of water.

Her specialist is a very different sort of doctor. I like him. At our April appointment he brought out a spreadsheet and detailed how we could increase her water intake a little at a time at specific times during the day to eventually get us to where she needs to be. I get spreadsheets, and this made a lot of sense to me.

But I am really really random and following a specific, timed, numbered consistent plan like that was doomed before it began. Oh, we gave it good effort, but fell off the boat in a couple of weeks. Fast forward to last week’s appointment and I realized we need to take a radically different approach and be serious about this.

And that is how the race began. A. and I are in a race to see who can drink more water in a day. To make it fair we somewhat arbitrarily decided on a 2:1 ratio – as in 1oz of her water = 2oz of my water. The logic is that I am at least twice as big as her. I should mention that it’s not just water that counts – juice, popsicles, soup, jello, freezies, snow cones, lemonade, iced tea, anything wet other than milk is fair game (and we’re looking for new ideas here – please comment if you have any suggestions.).

We’ve got bar graphs and everything.




Hers on the left, mine on the right. Notice how my bars are twice as fat? That’s the 2:1 ratio. We just have to compare the height of our bar graphs to tell who is winning.

She totally creamed me yesterday. We’re 4 days in and she’s already only a couple of ounces away from her daily goal. Now, doubling your water intake in 4 days is definitely not recommended, but it shows that this method is really working. Hopefully it is sustainable. We’ll have to figure out how to make it sustainable. And how to make it work when school resumes in (eek) 5 weeks.


Now I have to tell you that it all falls apart on the weekends. Remember that random part? Ya, the kid needs set meal times and routines to get her body back into a normal rhythm. I am totally lost on how to do this on the weekends. I could do a whole post on weekends because I can’t decide if we’re severely dysfunctional on the weekends or maybe that’s the only sane part of the week.

Well, I’m off to fill the water bottle again and head to the bathroom for the 4th time this morning! Please comment if you have anything to say, I'd love to hear your experiences, ideas, wisdom.

why I’ve been gone so long.

I had a dream one night where we were all becoming mindless robots.

I’m worried about that. Worried about living a life without meaning. I think we all should be at some level. I believe that’s part of what it is to be human. Many things that I won't go into here led up to this realization, but I'm deciding to do something about it. I have to.

So I’m readjusting my attention to things that are more grounded. Instead of trolling the internet looking for humans, I’m meeting them in person. There’s a group of like-minded moms that meet for coffee and support. Reading blog after blog looking for something to make me smile has been replaced with a running conversation through the day with my sisters (love the internet for that).
I catch myself when I’m bored or annoyed turning to facebook or the blog reader and am making a conscious effort to turn it off and deal with whatever it is that I am avoiding, spending time with the family, neighbours or making some art (or bread) instead. I’m even reading a real paper book for the first time in a long time. And, yes, it does feel better than the shallow un-focused existence. I just didn’t know how to get here before.

So where does that leave this blog and my shop? I don’t know yet. I’m sure I’ll return to blogging. I’ve always enjoyed doing it for myself, not the readers. It really bugs me that I can’t put lots of pictures on here and do it properly, though, a problem that I’m sure technology could solve if I threw some money at it.
The shop, maybe not. I can be creative without the hassle of listing and promoting. I always thought it would be a good back up if I got laid off – I could easily throw it into high gear – but this doesn’t seem like quite enough anymore. It challenged me creatively, that I will miss for sure, but I’m sure I can find that passion elsewhere. I keep going back and forth on this one.

So that’s where it stands. I’m having trouble articulating all of this because I’m still in the middle of it. And this is, of course, the abridged version. If you have any thoughts, please comment, I’d love to hear it.

gisele