Christmas Dress Blog Party

After ten years blogging I'm finally participating in something! Edelweiss Patterns Blog has been on my bloglist for a while, and this year Katrina is hosting a Christmas Dress blog party. I don't do vintage, but I did have a Christmas dress this year, and an event to wear it to.

I wore the green linen/cotton Regency dress I made this fall to wear to the Omaha NE Fezziwig Ball. It closes with hooks and eyes up the front, then has a bib front that buttons over that. More details on the dress here(so glad I made it ahead of time!). I love that it's so much easier to get dressed with  front-closing gown, but I'm not sure that I like the bib part.

Caleb's uniform is so epic. I love uniforms, and wool, and uniforms made of wool.

Every year putting on the Fezziwig Ball consumes vast amounts of my time, but I guess I like it enough that I just keep doing it! Next year, though, I'm definitely recruiting a personal assistant. This year we maxed out the building and almost covered expenses, and everything went well except Jacob Marley got strep throat, and now I know why actors have understudies.

Introducing the cast for the 2014 Fezziwig Ball. 

Every year our volunteer cast of actors improves and wows the crowd with sparkling renditions straight from Dicken's novel "A Christmas Carol." I'm so thankful for these people who give of their time for the joy of others.

Now that the Ball is over, I'm strictly on vacation, which means if I can work up enough motivation to get off the couch I can start work on that long list of sewing for me, which never gets done during the work week!

Christmas Cheer

Last week I attended the Christmas party for volunteers at the Fort. It's always really fun to go to private events at the Fort: the atmosphere of being in a log structure with no electricity and a wood fire is just fun. There was good food(salmon and buffalo, and chocolate pie!) and a great deal of generous partaking in Christmas cheer, of the alcoholic and tobacco type. Now, I am used to drinking in the Presbyterian sense of generally male-exercised Christian liberty, involving moderate to heavy drinking and cigars/pipes only. But the haze over the Christmas party was a bit more than Presbyterian, if you know what I mean.

It was still fun, though. I drank like a Presbyterian and even though I smelled like cigarette smoke afterwards, I'm glad I could make it this year. There was also live music. Sorry, no pictures: firelight makes for really bad phone camera photos.

Saturday I took a day trip with a friend down to Weston, MO. It was a neat old town all decorated for Christmas. We've decorated for Christmas, too: Mom and Dad tend to take an relaxed approach to Christmas decorating(or decorating in general). When we do put up outdoor lights, it usually looks like a fire-breathing dragon threw up on a section of our house.

The shops in Weston were a little high-end for me: lots of clothing boutiques and home decor. There was a nice liqueur store, and a Polish pottery shop, both expensive, but I bought some small things. The gentleman above was in the Celtic gift store. It's not every day that you come across a shirtless painted mannikin wearing a cargo kilt, so I got my picture taken.

Ten Eyck Coat Complete

 The Ten Eyck Coat is finished.

What I do, since I don't have a male mannikin, is I take my items to Church on Sunday, find a guy the right size, and take pictures. It looks a lot better than using my oh-so-female mannikin in my poorly-lit sewing room.

 Once I got all the buttonholes done on the front of the lapels, there was just a lot of basic stitching left: all down the back pleats and the hem, and down the raw edges of the lapels.

The little arrow-pointed part of the lapel gave me the most trouble; trying to get it to lie smoothly against the small collar over the slope of the chest and shoulder was finicky. Everything else came together fairly well. If I feel motivated you might see pictures of the inside, eventually.

Giving Thanks

My Thanksgiving week was filled with amazingly stressful, costly and dangerous car troubles, and several days spent cheek-by-jowl in a tiny apartment with eight other members of my family.

What happened with my car, you ask? The Ladybug tried to kill me. The throttle jammed and the engine kept revving, and so pushing the brakes to the floor wouldn't stop the car. Being a woman, I didn't know what to do, so I called Dad's cell phone(while driving in non-stop circles around a residential neighborhood), which he had left at home. Mom, also a woman who didn't know what to do, called Dad at the office while on the cell phone with me, and finally Dad told Mom to tell me to just put it in park and kill the engine even though it was still moving. It sounded awful, it was smoking, and I was probably closer to complete panic than I've ever been before.

$432 later, I have my car back and the mechanic told me that it should be fine now. Still, I'm afraid to accelerate. What if the car won't stop? I imagine it's something like falling off a horse and not wanting to get back up. Though I've never been on a horse, just a plastic donkey when I was three and that was bad enough to keep me off all quadrupeds for the rest of my life(somehow my parents thought the whole plastic donkey thing was funny).

Anyway, to tie things in with my post headline, I am thankful that the issue with my car was fixable and within the realm of affordability. I'm also thankful for the break of Thanksgiving and not having to work on Black Friday. It's been a year since I started working retail, and with the exception of my two months at Dress Barn, retail hasn't been what I would call my dream job.

The Ten Eyck Coat: I did the buttonholes on vacation. It's getting photographed and shipped early next week!