A little bit of this and a little bit of that! Getting ready for Design 1 class :)

Life has been quite busy! I am feeling mostly back to normal after all my health issues. I have found that I have had to made some permanent alterations to my diet but all have been for the good! Good for my health and diet. Harder part has been re-training my taste buds to like these changes! So much harder than I had anticipated. 

Worktravel has picked up, home life had been lovely (I just love being a grandma!) and sewing time has been efficiently used to create garments. All of this means that my blogging time has gotten squeezed a bit as well as getting photos of myself in my sewn garments! 

I have another great blog post all written and in the que... Just waiting for photos to be inserted! Photo delay partly due to time constraints and partly due to weather. It seems the couple of days when the weather was nice I was very busy and when I had the time the weather was too cold! 

This week I am in Atlanta for work until Thursday and then I am off to Design 1 class at Sarah Veblen's home studio. I am very excited about this week long class. My friend Wendy Grossman from Couturecounsellor.com and I are attending the class together. I left home this morning with 2 suitcases packed to the max. Suitcase number 1- 2 weeks of clothes and toiletries and suitcase number 2- all my supplies for Design 1 class! Almost filled to the brim with some of my favorite fabrics, trims, buttons, colored pencils, markers, other drawing supplies, patterns and design swatches and ideas. As well as several muslins. Of course I left some room in this suitcase to add a piece or two of beautiful fabric from our planned visit to Michael's fabrics (A Fabric Place)! 

We are also heading in a day early to share a day of private time with Sarah. 

I have 3 muslins sewn up and ready to work with Sarah on. Plus I have another in my suitcase to sit out if I have time! 

The muslins I have are:

- Cropped/short princess seamed short sleeved jacket with interesting sleeve detail. (See photo near end) This is a varaition of my master jacket pattern. 

- Vogue 1404 dress - love the details! Although I will not be making this of faux suede as suggested. I have a nice bright linen picked out! 

- Cynthia Guffey top T-2025. This top may be my undoing... I am onto my 4th muslin of this top. (Of course it doesn't help that I have lost 40lbs between muslin 1 and 2!) I think it may be finally close to being done and ready to be sewn up. I hope or I may literally take it into the backyard and light it on fire and move on. I love the detailing of this to and the very interesting seaming. 

- and possibly a new muslin of my master pattern princess sheath dress. Depends on whether I have time during the week to get it cut out!

I'm hoping to have at least 3 of these muslins in final fitting stages so I can proceed to the fun part! The sewing and the detail designing! 

In the meantime:

Last week during work travel I cut out a pair of linen pants and batiste underlining. I had time to hand baste the layers together and sew the darts. That was about it. A project to come home too when I return home in 2 weeks.

I was playing with my embroidery machine and stitched out these 4 embroidered postcards on old manilla envelopes. Added a magnet to the back and gave a couple out for Mother's Day :) 

Planning a new summer jacket to go with the black linen pants. Here is the yellow/black/white fabric from emmaonesock.com with vintage chezch yellow glass buttons.

The plan is to create a short sleeved, slightly cropped princess seamed jacket. I only have 2 yards of the fabric so I believe this will be collarless. In-progress muslin... Still need to make final decision on the sleeve design.

In other news my Dad has been busy making these beautiful pin boxes that he makes out of reclaimed wood and sells through me and at craft shows in lower Delaware. The boxes are unique, no two are the same and they are approximately 4inch square. 

My mom made this beautiful quilted wall hanging. Originally meant for her bedroom but looks too beautiful in their family room! I need to point out that my mom is NOT a quilter. She practiced this Bargello technique on a small square that she made into a couch pillow and then tackled this project. She pieced, quilted and bound it all herself. It truly is beautiful! Now she is getting back into garment sewing. She taught ,e so much when I started sewing and now it's fun to passing more advanced learning back to her :)

I hope that everyone had a lovely Mother's Day weekend! 

Happy Sewing!

Princess Victoria getting as close as she could to Blue. Blue is a big 75lb scaredy cat and if V got an y closer she would bolt!