I'll be home soon

I've been travelling.  A lot.  First was a road trip from Montreal to the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia where I grew up and my parents now live again.  Two days and 1200+ km with two little kids.  We all survived, although I would only recommend this maneuver to Advanced Parents.  There were lots of snacks, stops, clean-up supplies and Pintrest-inspired tricks to keep the sanity.

Then we drove another 5 hours to our extended family's bungalow (cottage, to those of you not fluent in Cape Breton-ese).  We swam in Margaree Harbour, ate ice cream every day and set out lots of mouse traps.

After two solid weeks of fun and sun (practically unheard of in Nova Scotia (the uninterrupted sun, not the fun)), we drove back to Montreal just in time for me to unpack, repack and hop on a plane to University of South Florida in Tampa for a work trip.  

Something about trees covered in Spanish moss makes the heat more feel more intense.  Hell, I'm sweating just looking at this photo.

 This collaboration was born about a year ago, when I spoke at a colloquium about our drug discovery research.  I was selfishly hoping that the trip would have happened in January or February, when we are 3m deep in snow, but somehow it got delayed until the last week of July, when Montreal is also hot and steamy.  I know, I know....first world problems.  It's still a free work trip with all that entails:  meeting new people, training new students, exploring a new city, staying in a hotel with a pool and a room all to myself.  (you never appreciate the total freedom involved in DOING WHATEVER YOU WANT FROM 5PM-9AM until you have kids.  Even the flights were like a mini-vacation for me because I got to read my book uninterrupted.  But I digress.)

And believe it or not, through all this travel, I still managed to get a bit of sewing done.  I worked on a Mfengu inspired linen skirt while on the long road trip:

inspiration:  African Mfengu button blanket work

Sewing the buttons in the car brought on a bit of motion sickness though, so I had to do it in brief patches.  Then we stopped at an Irving Big Stop (Eastern Canadians will know what I'm talking about) for an awesome photo session:

I also found time to sew a super simple pull-over dress for my daughter that ended up being both too wide and too short (I guess she's tall and skinny for her age!) but still cute nonetheless.  Maybe she'll wear it with leggings in the winter?  I have to remember to add 6 inches to her dresses from now on.  These kids are going to be towering over me before I know it.

And to top it all off, I've also been invited to Promaballoona in August.  I gave away my two homemade prom dresses many moon ago (one made by my mother and the other by an aunt) but I'm sure I've got something hanging in my closet that is appropriate for the serious, formal occasion in question.  

Snort.

Damn, I've got a room overlooking the pool and a big, loud group of teenagers just checked in and are whooping it up outside.  Don't they know I go on business trips to avoid having to listen to kids? Sheesh.

Blue and white overload

 Remember this panelled shwe shwe I bought in Cape Town in May? 

 Here's how it looks all sewn together.  Insta-skirt.  (Well, insta if you don't include fitting, adding a waistband, zipper, hooks and eyes and hemming.  Kind insta.)

 I like this vaguely cowgirl look I have going here.  Full disclosure:  I used that belt because the waist needs to be taken in by the tiniest bit.  The panels are perfect trapezoids, and we all know that bodies are not trapezoidal.  

 Well, mine isn't.  

It sits on the hips and then gaps about 2cm on the waist, which is not enough to really notice, but it's enough for *me to notice* which is what really counts.  It's that tiny difference between being a well loved wardrobe staple and a not-quite-right-and-don't-wear-it-very-often garment.  (There is probably some tremendous compound word to express that in German, but since I only took intro German and have forgotten 99% of it, I'll leave that to you, dear readers, to figure out.)

During our last heat wave, I made this super simple tube dress with loops sewn into the top, so that the straps can be tied in lots of different ways.  Great except for two things:  I don't own a strapless bra, and the bottom hem is just slightly too narrow so I can't run.  And I run a lot.  There is an emergency in the family about every 30 minutes that requires me to quickly run to the rescue.  Both of those problems are easily fixed, but who has the time right now?  

I started using picmonkey for photo editing, and I like it better than anything else I've tried.  No more stitching together photos in powerpoint. 

 My three-year-old helped take the photos that week, and to tell the truth, they weren't half bad.  Here she is imitating some kind of "Who Me?  But I'm so adorable" pose. 

Then I remembered that the weekly theme for July 4th over at The Sew Weekly is Red, White and Blue.  Well, I'm pretty much white and blued out for now.  Maybe I'll try to finish up some UFO lying around here while I'm off work tomorrow, even though I should be preparing the family for our long road trip.  

Nah, sewing is more fun than packing and housecleaning. 

Kids are jerks.

Son:  "I don't want to wear clothes today.  It's too hot."
Me:  "Yeah, me too.  Let's be nude-nick all day."

Pause.

Son:  "But then when you go to work, they will think you are wearing a really ugly dress."
Me:  "........"

Jean-Paul Gaultier dress worn by Gael Garcia Bernal in La Mala Educacion

Catching up

I haven't posted anything in 3 weeks?  Guess that means I no longer have all the free time in the world (AKA back home on parent duty).  I have been doing lots of planning and a little bit of sewing, but first here's what's been going on in my world:

 My green double-sided shwe shwe dress was chosen as a featured Sew Weekly project in May.  I actually didn't find out until the week was almost over because I was travelling and didn't have a good internet connection.  That's a nice surprise!

I finished Me Made May without too much trouble.  Here are the last few days:

Soaking wet from an afternoon spent fabric shopping around Cape Town.  Sadly, I tore the back of this skirt on a rusty bolt when trying to squeeze my way out of a combi with a huge package of fabric, jammed between two huge Mamas.  It's repairable. 

Wearing my leopard print mini when giving a talk to a bunch of synthetic chemistry graduate students who had no idea that I didn't study chemistry past first year engineering.  I threw in a bunch of structural diagrams to keep them awake when the "soft science" of traditional healing, indigenous knowledge sharing,  and biological screening made them fall asleep.  Note to self:  work on a more authoritative posture when lecturing. 
 

Doing science in my Cape Town Switcheroo wrap dress.  

 Sculpture installation behind my residence (had to set up my camera on a bench and take automatic photos while lots of confused looking law students wondered why I kept repeatedly walking back and forth between the statues)

Warthog ribs at the Hussar Grill!

And finally back home again.  I cheated and wore my Thank You Zoe outfit on June 1st because I was travelling on the 30th/31st and wore what I've now come to call my Travel Survival Outfit.  It was fun participating and seeing how people all over the world were using similar fabrics / patterns and coming up with such diverse creations.  I was also interesting to see everyone get more comfortable with taking photographs of themselves as the month progressed.

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I made a dress from 100% mystery fabric.  It wasn't quite the look I was aiming for, but it's a pretty good dress in its own right.  I was trying for a much more fitted bodice, but in the end, this was the best I could do.  Looking more closely at the pattern cover, it appears that the models have the same fit, and just bring the waist in with those ties / belts.  Note to self:  always check the model fit.

It was based on Zoey Deschanel's red dress worn in the opening credits for New Girl.

So here's my weird Picmonkey / Photo editor / Power Point hack.  I'll never have the Zoey hair again (no time in the mornings when there are 3-4 people to prepare for the day) and I'll never live in a loft apartment with three men (THANK JEBUS), so here's the closest yer gonna get. 

Mad Men Shocker and some Fabric Pr0n

Spoiler alert!  If you haven't watched episode 11 yet, please close this window now.

OK, so we've all watched it?

WTF? 

And as soon as I saw this scene with Peggy meeting Tom, I thought, "Why is she wearing such a Joan outfit?!?".  Oh wait, yeah.  I see the parallels they are drawing. 

But I have to say, I love this.  If we have another Mad Men challenge over at TSW, I'm doing this one. 

And didn't you all love it when Joan wore her Wave Dress from the previous season?

Anyway, now that I got that off my chest, I wanted to follow-up from yesterday's pattern treasure post with this fabric treasure post.  Gaze upon the haul I'm trying to stuff in my medium-sized suitcase:

De Gama cottons and wax prints. 

 Double sided shwe shwe

 Some scratchy mystery fabric, made with what appears to be linen warp and tinsel weft.  As soon as I saw it, I had to have it.  It reminds me of something from long ago that I can't quite put my finger on.  I know it looks tacky, but I just had an immediate gut reaction to it.

 Mandela border print shwe shwe.  (Funny story:  when the lady was cutting it, she accidentally cut through Mandela's left ear, and then she stopped and cried, "Sorry sir!  Sorry sir!", while rubbing the cut portion!)



 Linen in basic colours for trousers / dresses.



 Shwe shwe panels for making skirts.  You cut along the white dashed lines, align the panels and add whatever binding / closure you want to the waist.  The ladies at the shop measure your waist in centimetres and calculate how many panels you need.

Twill for making trousers. 

 Venda prints.  The one of the right is to make my friend a Venda skirt like my orange one I wear a lot.  Shhhh...it's a surprise.



Cotton voiles.

All this (plus some fabric I got for a friend) added up to about 40 metres and I believe I spent about $100.  The prices in Rand are about equal to what I would pay in Canadian dollars, so with the exchange rate being 8:1, I had a hard time saying no to anything.  For example, at one shop linen was 15R /m(~$1.90) and I would pay between $12-20/metre in Canada.  It's very, very tempting to go overboard.

Thanks to Jill over at The Sew Alongs for leading me to Focus Fabrics, the shop that caused me to hyperventilate slightly.  (Turns out that by some strange six-degrees-of-separation thing, her husband works with someone I work with at UCT, but I'll save that story for another time.)  Right next door was a shop I hadn't visited before either, called something like "Exciting Ladies Fabric Shop" (I would have put an apostrophe in there somewhere, but whatever).  The fabric cutter kept dropping the price whenever I tried to verify the cost per metre.  I really wasn't bargaining, but just trying to calculate the damage!

So I think I've eaten up my travel allowance.  I know you're supposed to use your per diem to pay for food and transport, but C'MON!  Who amongst you wouldn't skim a little off the top for shwe shwe and Venda prints?!

Thrift (charity) shopping in Cape Town

I learned my lesson last Saturday about the opening hours of small storefronts in Cape Town.  They open from about 9am-1pm, then they're closed until Monday.  If you sleep in until 11am because of jet lag, you're out of luck.  So despite having spent Friday night with friends at a vinyard / orchard / spa / restaurant and drinking my way through not one, but two bottles of Pinotage, I was up early to hit the thrift shops of Mowbray.

Mowbray (on the backside of Table Mountain) is a alternately gritty and student neighbourhood, full of junk shops and cheap department stores.  I had seen lots of promising places from the windows of my morning combi rides, so I had them all scouted out.  I even thought that I'd be able to write an interesting post about all the shops. 

In reality, it was pretty slim pickings.  When you think about the incredible level of unemployment and tight budget most families are living on in these neighbourhoods, it shouldn't be surprising that things are pretty well picked over.  The Value Village in affluent West Island Montreal this ain't.

A bit disappointed after dragging my corpse out of bed early, I passed by Help a Rural Child book shop sale and thought I may as well check it out.

Jackpot.

Up in the attic, behind the non-fiction section, I found four boxes briming with sewing patterns.  I plunked myself down in the corner and got to digging.  I ended up only buying the best ones because my luggage is already stuffed with fabric (post to follow!).

Cheryl Teigs modelling a bridal gown by Belinda Belleville, a disco era Herbert Kasper, and a few basics from Donna Karan.  While I have no plans on getting married anytime soon, if you look closely, this is a pretty good '60s shift.  And come on....how often do you get a Vogue Couturier Design pattern for R2 (25 cents)?



Some '50s and '60s gems:

This beauty is exactly my size

and I love this overblouse pattern, but I have no idea why Green Lady is giving me the finger.

'60s wrap dresses.

Some '70s patterns I've never seen before.  We don't get a lot of Style patterns turning up in Canada, so I wonder if they were ever sold there.  

Lastly, I got some '80s patterns.  Yes, '80s.  I don't know what came over me, but in my defence, they aren't too "out there".  Well, maybe the split-back jumpsuit is a bit OTT......but that draped sleeve Butterick 3790 reminds me of the dress Adey made for the Mad Men challenge. 

So the charity shop venture was not a complete waste of time.  The internet in my hotel is so incredibly slow that it's taken me a couple of hours to upload these photos, so you'll forgive me if I go to bed and recover from my overindulgence.  If you're ever in Mowbray, please stop by the Help a Rural Child charity shop, climb up to the attic and look in the back corner.  There are still 100s of patterns there.....