Category Archives: summer

sewing, summer, wedding

These Days

In my mind summer is a time for relaxing in the sunshine, preferably in a hammock, eyes half-closed against the bright summer sky, and perhaps a beer somewhere close at hand. In my mind time slows down in the summer. But in truth, summer (at least this summer) is buzzing, flitting from here to there, all energy and full schedules. I’m trying to embrace this summer reality, but right now, all I want is that hammock.

My time at CDL is coming to a close, which means I’m trying to wrap things up, train our programmers to be analysts, and make sure everything I leave behind is organized and decipherable by someone new. It also means there are going away lunches and parties planned, and that, sadly, short-timer syndrome just might be making my brain function on a fuzzier plane. Maybe.

Wedding preparations are in full gear. Invitations went out yesterday! So exciting!

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We got our first wedding/shower present in the mail yesterday, too, and I was surprised by how excited it made me. All along, I’ve felt sooo weird about registering for gifts, about this bizarre cultural expectation that weddings require gifts, about allowing people to plan me showers because it just felt like I was greedily asking for more gifts. I don’t know, it made me feel awkward. Nevertheless, it was exciting to open a wedding gift with Sean yesterday. It made me feel like this is all HAPPENING.

Also making me feel like this is happening: Sean and I decided to open a joint bank account sooner than we were planning. It just made sense, since I’ll be starting a new job and therefore having to fill out new direct deposit paperwork. I thought, why not just do this once? We sent off the account paperwork yesterday. Weird. Exciting! Marriage!

Speaking of marriage (still): Sean’s sister Stephanie and her partner Eddie got married last weekend. We went to Beaver Creek in Colorado for the wedding, and spent four wonderful days in the mountains, sitting by the pool, doing outdoor yoga (me), hiking (Sean), and eating delicious food. It was pretty special and Steph and Eddie’s wedding was beautiful!

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I had high hopes that I would finish sewing a dress for Steph’s wedding, but my sewing machine has been acting up, and this dress is proving way more time consuming than I expected. So it didn’t get finished (boo). This is the state it was in when we left last Thursday:

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Not quite ready to wear. I’m hoping to finish it in time for another wedding we’re going to NEXT weekend, but honestly? Looking doubtful. Sad face. Couture sewing is not for the faint of heart, and right now, I’m feeling a little faint of heart.

We’re going camping this weekend (I told you things are busy!), and I’m hoping that I manage to find some quiet, relaxing, hammock-like time out there in the woods. Because this pace doesn’t look like it’s going to be slowing anytime soon.

summer

Goodbye Bessie, Hello Sonoma State

I have been sadly neglecting my little homestead on the internet here, but I have some good reasons. Things have been above and beyond the normal order of busy here. We are, of course, planning a wedding, and seeing that it’s summer, our social calendar is much fuller than usual. And because I figured we didn’t have nearly enough going on, I went and accepted a new job.

Yes, once again, I am moving on. I’ve been at the California Digital Library for a little over two years, and have had the chance to work with some brilliant and wonderful people. But an opportunity came up that I could not refuse. I’m moving to Sonoma State University where I’ve accepted a position as the Web Services Librarian. This position will give me the chance to work on a wide range of projects, and to work with another great team of collaborators to create innovative and user-focused library services. The CDL does great work in this area, but I really missed being on a campus and having direct interactions with users.

Not to mention, this new job is a tenure-track faculty position, which is really exciting for me.

Things will be a little crazy around here for awhile. Sean and I aren’t moving right away, so I’ll have a much longer commute to look forward to. My “commute” right now is a four-block walk down the street, so I suspect spending two hours a day in my car is going to be a bit of a shock to my system. I know that a lot of my crafting, sewing, and cooking projects will be even more slow going than they are currently, but I’m consoling myself with the fact that it will be temporary.

Speaking of sewing projects, I’ve also finally come to terms with the fact that I have to say goodbye to Bessie.

Blue foam adjustable dress form

The fact is, I bought the wrong size, and although she’s adjustable she’s not adjustable enough. So I’m selling her to (I hope) a good home, and getting a replacement. If you’re looking for a dress form, and you live in the Oakland area, you can find out more about her from my post on Craigslist.

Things will continue to be crazy go nuts here in the laurapants household, but it’s all a good kind of crazy, so I can’t complain. Here’s to more chaos, change, and busy summer schedules.

crafting, home care, sewing, summer

Atomic Age Throw Pillows

I’ve been in a bit of a nesting phase lately. I think our apartment is about halfway to being pretty darn awesome, and I’ve been overcome with the urge to push it the rest of the way. I’m trying to take advantage of my enthusiasm and motivation to actually tackle some householding projects, and one of the first is something I’ve had in mind for awhile now: new throw pillows for our couch.

My parents bought this couch for me when I moved to Walla Walla, because my mom couldn’t stand the idea of me not having a place to sit and relax in my little house. And because my parents are unfailingly generous. It’s a lovely little couch upholstered in soft brown microsuede, and it’s very, very comfortable. But it came with two fairly boring, polyester throw pillows.

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The pillows just felt lost and sad; their muted colors ensured that they practically disappeared into the couch. And they weren’t very pleasing to the touch, either. I wanted something with a little more style and flair, and finally I decided to bite the bullet and order some new fabric. I bought some matching piping at Britex one afternoon, and as soon as my fabric arrived I got to work. These pillows were actually very easy to make (so why it took me over a week to finally get both pillows done is a mystery), and while I didn’t quite get the piping on the corners right, I’m calling that a design feature.

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Isn’t this fabric fun? I love the way this robin’s egg blue pops against the brown, and the colors modernize the otherwise very retro print. These throw pillows make me happy, and I actually have enough fabric left to make a third.

Couch Cushion

Close Up Couch Cushion Fabric

I really like the texture of this fabric, too. It’s a printed cotton, but there is a bit of roughness to it which I think is a good contrast to the smoothness of the couch fabric.

This was such an easy and gratifying first project in my grand apartment-polishing scheme. Both Sean and I want a new rug, and some new art to hang on the walls. And I’m right in the middle of an epic 30 Day De-cluttering Project (which I will definitely be sharing soon). It feels good to purge some of the stuff I’ve accumulated, and to make our apartment feel a little more pulled together. It’s a small space, and I’m trying to make better use of it than we have been over the last two years.

Of course, it will be all-too-predictable, in my peripatetic life, that as soon as I get our apartment all fixed up and perfect, we’ll have to move… (Did I just jinx myself? Doh.)

goals, Right Now, summer

May Wrap Up, and 30 Things for June

Me-Made May was more of a success than I thought it would be! There were only three days when I stepped out in non-me-made outfits. Admittedly, things got a little boring for me, but I did end up with three new tops by the end of the month. That probably would not have happened if I hadn’t been aspiring to fulfill a Me-Made goal.

Still, I was pretty grateful in June 1 when I didn’t have to get dressed with that arbitrary limitation on my garment selection.

I am pretty excited that it’s June! It’s already promising to be a full and busy month, bookended by a trip up to Ashland with my ladies next weekend, and a conference in Chicago at the end of the month.

I took some inspiration, as I so often do, from Elise, and drew up a list of 30 things I want to do in June. These aren’t goals so much as dreams for the coming month. I think it’s going to be a good one.

  1. Laugh with my ladies in Ashland
  2. See some Shakespeare
  3. Drink a delicious beer in the sun
  4. Finish some wedding crafting
  5. Bake some cookies
  6. Make some pickles
  7. Finish my 30 Days of Decluttering project
  8. Make a dress for Steph’s wedding (and finish my Craftsy Couture Dress class in the process)
  9. Have a picnic or three
  10. Grill on our patio
  11. Try out some new recipes
  12. Write more
  13. Ride my bike
  14. Eat lots of fruit
  15. Go to the farmers’ market
  16. Spend an afternoon in San Francisco
  17. Sew up a little linen jacket for summer
  18. Fix my Sencha blouse
  19. Decide on wedding shoes
  20. Plan our rehearsal dinner and reserve a spot
  21. Take a day trip to Sonoma
  22. Work on our photo album
  23. Work on some Drupal/linked data projects!
  24. Eat ice cream
  25. Run
  26. Do yoga
  27. See my cousin and her husband in Chicago
  28. Eat some deep dish pizza in Chicago
  29. Take pictures
  30. Read a few novels
sewing, summer

My Pollyanna Summer Dress

Pollyanna Summer Dress

It might still be spring by the calendar, but in Oakland, it feels like glorious summer. It’s been a stunning week here, and my latest sewing project was completed just in time. This dress took a bit longer than I anticipated. I hit a few snags, and it turned out a little, um, asymmetrical. But it works, and I learned a heck of a lot in the making.

I used Simplicity 2886 for this dress, and some navy cotton embroidered fabric I picked up in LA’s Garment District, at some random little hole in the wall shop. The cotton is super light, which makes for a very floaty, very comfortable summery sundress. Also, it has pockets! Well, it has pocket, thanks to a fitting error and a rank amateur’s sewing mistake.

I actually made a muslin for the bodice of this dress, and when I was fitting it, I realized it was going to be too tight. Evidence of my lack of attention to detail and lack of facility with numbers shows in the fact the finished dress was HUGE. I suspect that I meant to add a mere quarter inch to each side seam on the front only, but instead I added a half inch to each side seam on both the front and back bodice pieces. So what should have been only half an inch larger became two inches. Yeah. I don’t know what I was thinking.

The bodice of this dress is fully lined, and this was the first time I’ve done that. It took me a few hours of puzzling over the pattern instructions and flipping my bodice pieces back and forth and inside out to figure it out. Then, the front has that lovely embroidered panel sewn in, and the pockets are stitched into the skirt and the skirt is stitched to the bodice, all before sewing in the side zipper. I finished my waist seams with bias tape, and had the whole thing constructed before I realized how big it was.

Annnnd the idea of taking the whole thing apart to take the extra inches out of the back seam or both side seams just seemed exhausting. So I did something kinda dumb. I took all the extra inch and a half out of the right side seam, where the zipper is. Little did I know, oh newbie that I am, that this would NOT WORK, and would result in the dress pulling very weirdly to the right. You can kind of see that here:

Asymmetrical neckline

I had to do some weird finagling to make this even slightly manageable. The zipper was way too high up into my armpit after those extra inches where removed, so I cut off the top of the zipper about an inch and sewed in some makeshift bars to act as zipper stops at the top. The right side pocket is pretty much sewn closed because I didn’t want to take the pocket out and move it further into the skirt (again, LAZY). The neckline is still shifted a little bit over to the right, but not as badly as it was at first.

Despite these…deficiencies, this dress is super comfortable. And I almost always wear cardigans with anything sleeveless, so the asymmetry is really hardly noticeable. Durh. I am thinking of this as a major learning experience.

Up next? Several months ago I bought a few yards of a very loosely knit sweater knit fabric, with the hope of re-creating a sweater that I wore in my twenties and LOVED to pieces, literally. I found this knit pullover pattern at Burda and am in the midst of cutting and prepping the fabric for sewing. This feels like a crazy project. The fabric is tricky to work with, and Burda patterns are notoriously lacking in instructions. For example, the pattern instructions quite simply say “set in sleeve” to, you know, add the sleeves. I have never done this before, so I’ll be scouring the internet for tutorials. But if all goes well…

It’s Me Made May, by the way. I didn’t officially sign up because, well, we’ve talked about my trouble with challenges and resolutions before. I don’t even know if I have enough me-made garments to make it through a whole month. I’m wearing this dress today, so I’m off to a good start. We shall see.

I’m hoping to update more often. There’s been a lot going on lately, and a lot of my mental space has been taken up with library-related work, so some of the crafting and cooking and homemaking has been on the back burner. But wedding crafting will be starting up in earnest soon, so expect to see more of those projects!

What summery garments are you making? Is it summery yet where you live? Yay for May!

Suggested Servings, summer

Simple Dinners for Busy Times

Everyone has these pockets, where time seems to speed up and we can’t catch the rhythm of the normal, smooth-running routines we’re used to. September seems to be a magnet for this kind of chaos, as last minute summer vacations are squeezed in and the school year is beginning. The seasons are changing and I’m hoarding the last of the tomatoes and cherries and peaches, while simultaneously getting weirdly excited for potatoes.

Continue reading Simple Dinners for Busy Times →

goals, summer

Summer Bucket List Check In

An image of the beach and ocean, box with text that read Summer Bucket List

In early July, at the prompting of Joy the Baker and Tracy Shutterbean, of the Joy the Baker podcast, I created a Summer Bucket List. I thought long and hard about all the things I wanted my summer to be, the things I wanted to accomplish and the laziness I wanted to indulge in.

It is hard to believe summer is almost over. It went so fast! But it was full of all the wonderful things I dreamed up when I created my list, so I can’t even be sad. Let’s check in, shall we?

Continue reading Summer Bucket List Check In →

Right Now, summer

Right Now

I stole this idea from Alison, a.k.a. Spinstah. Here’s what’s going on right now.

Making: A baby blanket for my new niece, Julia
Cooking: Merquez sausages, tomatoes, eggplant, corn, honey bread
Drinking: White tea, East Bay wine, Spoonbender coffee
Reading: Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wanting: A sunlit open space for sewing, cutting, pasting, painting, photographing, and maybe some yoga
Looking: At beautiful craft papers
Playing: Does dancing count?
Wasting: Time
Sewing: I’m trying to decide between my first quilt and a skirt
Wishing: For next steps
Enjoying: The imminence of fall
Waiting: To get on a plane and touch down in San Diego on Thursday
Liking: Being busy at work
Wondering: If I’ll ever go back to school again
Loving: My growing family
Hoping: That I’m making the right decisions
Marveling: At how much I love Oakland
Needing: New cross trainers, and more running
Smelling: Someone else’s lunch
Wearing: A new polka dotted shirt that I love
Noticing: Moods
Knowing: That love is a decision that you make
Thinking: About linked data and library holdings and making libraries better
Bookmarking: Recipes. Always recipes.
Opening: An account online at Gaiam Yoga Studio
Giggling: At the ridiculousness of Dawson’s Creek
Turning: The calendar pages over to September, one of my favorite months

recipes, Suggested Servings, summer

Suggested Servings: Eggplant and Smoked Mozzarella Pasta

Most nights I throw together dinner based on what’s in the refrigerator and the pantry, cooking by the seat of my pants without a recipe. Sometimes these are the best dinners I make, and I want to share them with you. There are no proper recipes for these dinners and what I share is merely a suggestion. If the idea appeals to you, run with it and make it your own. Share your variations and the unique spin you put on it, and have fun in the kitchen, cooking without a book. 

We’ve been getting a lot of eggplant in our CSA this summer, which initially presented a bit of a challenge. Sean has never been a big fan of eggplant, so I had to find a way to make this sometimes tricky vegetable appealing to him. I’m pleased to say, I think I’ve succeeded in making him, if not an eggplant fan, at least a passing acquaintance. And this pasta might have had something to do with it.

Continue reading Suggested Servings: Eggplant and Smoked Mozzarella Pasta →