S3 - day 1, + wishful Wednesday

Today begins SelfStitchedSeptember, which feels a bit more like Sew Not Ready For It September! All the elaborate planning, which sometimes feels like the most fun part, has not resulted in a closet full of completed garments. Never fear, there are clothes to wear, just not the abundance that had been initially hoped for. Nonetheless, there are thirty days in which there will hopefully be more sewing time tucked in amongst all the other daily life tasks.

This morning was delightfully cool, so wearing a jumper over a dress worked quite well. The under-dress is a lightweight greyed blue cotton Ikea ikat. (Ikea in particular is a source of interesting fabric at bargain prices, this was originally a duvet cover from their as-is department, new, undamaged, $5) The jumper is heavier indigo ikat, bought from the back of a truck on the Monday after OCF last year. The underdress pattern is my basic self-modified dress pattern, bias front bodice, gored skirt, ¾ sleeves; there are at least six of these in my closet, all basically the same, in different fabrics. The jumper is based on my "Shapely Viking Apron Dress" draft, where my SCA clothing and my modern clothing intersect. For fun, I curved the top edge into a wavy shape, added double spaghetti straps instead of heavy Viking brooches*, and of course, pockets! Our ancestors managed just fine without pockets, but my life requires them. Added a necklace of self made glass beads and that was a good way to start the month.

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Finished the enameling yesterday, now there are settings to be made, for the Pelican medallions, and for an assortment of other enamels finished earlier in the year. The experimental technique yielded a suitable branch-y looking nest:

It is damnably difficult to photograph enamels, and to get the color to look right online. That background is actually a nice deep royal purple. But why, you may ask, does the Pelican have a belly piercing instead of a drop of blood? Well that is the other XP design challenge, there will be a setting fabricated, to be attached to the enamel through that very spot, to hold a small teardrop shaped stone. Never boring here at the Acorn Cottage workroom, that is certain...

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Though my progress in changing my eating habits is glacially slow in yielding results, it would be easier to know if there are results if I could actually see the markings on the bathroom scale. Those tiny tick marks are just at the boundary of sight, and though one online friend suggested using the zoom function on my camera to get a closer look, my wishful Wednesday is for a scale with numbers I can see, with the eyes that I have now, not the eyes from decades ago.

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*(like the ones halfway down the page here)