Girls' Weekend

So in addition to going to the Mecca of Medical Care last week (I wore the black pants - thanks for your help), I also stopped to see old friends in Alabaster and spent the weekend in Gatlinburg with my housemates from the college days. I was tucking Lucas in on my last night before leaving and spotted this....is it a dead gerbil? What bad timing! But they're supposed to live around 2 years, and mid-October will be Renewal time. ("Carousel is a lie!" - name the movie!)

No, he's just a heavy sleeper and really fat - whew! Disaster averted!

So we 6 ladies rented a cabin north of Gatlinburg and commenced to hot-tubbing, wine-drinking, and mountain-hiking.

We didn't do all that at the same time.

It's an interesting group - 2 Methodist ministers, 2 professional types (a doctor and a lawyer), and 2 educators, to paint it in broad strokes.

Or to be more shallow, 2 blondes, 2 brunettes, and 2 red-heads!

Totally Self-Centered!

Quick - what should I wear? I'm going to the Mecca of Medical Care for my state tomorrow to meet the people I refer my patients to and they're giving me a tour of the joint. So what do I wear? Don't want to look slouchy, but don't want to be too edgy either (that's me, you know, so edgy with the manly clothes). So I think the white untucked shirt is just a tad slouchy, though it was the most tailored shirt I could find at the mall yesterday. (Should've finished that Betzina shirt - would've saved $45!)

Pants look pretty good from the back....

Tried a more feminine green knit shirt with an interesting neckline....

Hmm, I like the back of these pants better with an untucked shirt - still don't like that back center seam.

Tried it with the black Dolce and Gabbana pants I bought at some sidewalk sale in Soho when we were in New York...the shoes are too manly - I want pointy! But I don't to wear my Nuncio heels for a tour of a hospital - that's a little over the top.

So I was leaning toward homemade brown pants with green shirt, but the black seems to pop, but the shoes - eh! Help!

My Stalker

As promised, Jake in the closet.  "Whatcha doin' Mommy?"

"Wait, are you seriously going to wear THOSE shoes?  Can I smell them first?"

"How long does it take her to unload the dishwasher?"  (Notice the tell-tale lack of eye contact.)

"These boys are big enough to pick up their OWN laundry, why does she take it to their rooms?"

"Finally her chores are finished - time for a nap!  Wait, Mommy, where are you going?"

So I've been getting a creepy feeling lately from Jakey.  Does your dog follow you around and need to be in physical contact with you at almost all times?  I've been wondering if I'm going to drop dead soon, because he CANNOT be away from me.  This is just from 8 PM until bedtime last night.

Lucas and I play Uno at the kitchen table.  He lies down behind my chair.

I put clothes in the dryer. This is the only time he'll eat - if I'm doing laundry or someone is standing nearby for a significant period of time. 

I check email at the kitchen table. What is UP with this sad face?

I tuck Lucas in. (Hey Jake, give Lucas a kiss....or just stand and stare at my leg.)

I clean off the kitchen counter.

I sit on the couch to watch TV.

Yes, I'm taking your picture baby, because you need help. Or I do - not sure which.

Tomorrow I'll try and catch the times he walks in the closet with me - it gets pretty crowded but he insists on being there!

The Pants are Finally Finished!

Okay, I'll start from the beginning, because there are 2 separate issues here. This is a Frankenpattern using Kwik Sew 3614 shorts and the legs from Jalie 2909. I've been working on the pants upstairs in my sewing room, but my full-length mirror is downstairs in my bathroom, so it's been hard to make adjustments and check them quickly. I resorted to taking pictures like this upstairs to get an idea of what I'd done. The wrinkles were all I could see (plus the poor posture and flat derriere), and I'd get very depressed.

But then I'd check downstairs and feel better about things - I like the legs, even if they are wrinkley.

So I finally bought a full-length mirror for upstairs and that will hopefully get hung today. Then I'll work on my picture quality, because lighting is a little tricky there. But now I can slap these things on and quickly check them, which speeds up my sewing and doesn't interrupt the mojo.

So that brings us to last night, when I realized that even if I can't get these things to be perfect, they're certainly good enough to wear and deserve to be finished. So I'm comparing them to a pair of pants I bought at Dress Barn and wore once before deciding they feel awful and are way too tight to wear to work.  Check out all those wrinkles - bleh.

Now compare my muslin, which still has some wrinkles, but nothing like the RTW's.  And I actually could make the crotch wrinkles go away if I lift the waistband up. 

 Side view - I hope you're not eating lunch - I get nauseous looking at this.  Sewista - I don't want to bring back your morning sickness - maybe you should bail out now!

 And the muslin - still with those hip crater wrinkles, but I don't even care about those anymore.  (Funny how crotch problems can take your mind off hip problems.)

Oh, did I actually go through an entire day at work with these pants?  At least I was wearing an untucked shirt.

Okay, these actually do fit much better.  I don't know why I got the little indent at the center back seam, but I'm okay with it.  And I see that I have that back leg wrinkle no matter what pants I wear.

So this is the total picture, and other than powering out a couple of wrinkles near the knees where the fabric was folded, I'm happy with them.  I even did a nice hem that works with these flats or the Nuncio heels Sheila made me buy (she's very persuasive when it come to shoes).

 I believe I shall have 2 glasses of wine before I hem anything from now on, since that's what I did last night.

So, from here I've decided that I'll try the crotch curve from the Betzina jeans on the next pair, except I've got to figure out if a jeans crotch is the same as a trouser crotch - anyone?  Will it fit too close?  And I'm going to try a different leg possibly.

But maybe I'll make a quick shirt first....

Oh, I am just giving you a heads up that tomorrow is going to be exciting! Not only did I stage a Cub Scout popcorn "show and sell" from 8-12 today (which means you show up at the local grocery with 11 cases of popcorn, a cooler of water, 2 tables, and some signs, then stand for 4 hours making conversation with strangers and telling the rowdy children to stop playing their DS's and no rough-housing or you'll call their mother!), but I also FINISHED my plaid pants muslin (I am SO going to wear this muslin)! And by "finish," I don't mean my usual "finish," which is done except for hemming and closures, I mean "finish" as in I did a blind hem and sewed in hook and eye!

 Yes, I hemmed these pants by myself in the new full-length mirror I purchased at Al's 5 and 10 to go in the sewing room. I also bought a large hand-held mirror just like Pati Palmer told me to in the pants-fitting DVD. (My mother is in Auburn cheering the win over Mississippi State and the fact that she may not have to hem any more pants for me.)

Anyway, I took a few pictures, but given the wine I drank to give me the courage to hem pants by myself (I even took pics for a blind hem tutorial - eek!), I'll hold off on further pictures till tomorrow. I may wear these suckers to Sunday school tomorrow! Anyway, just so deliriously happy with my accomplishment tonight - hopefully I won't find in the morning that everything is caddy-wompus....or however you spell that. Till tomorrow...

So I've been lacking mojo, but Dean has not. He finished the tree house last week and it's seeing plenty of use....when there's not a tropical storm around, that is.

Lucas has already hauled up a wrought iron chair and built a pulley system to bring up stuff.

And I did get a little mojo back at the beach - something about that little room with a huge window to watch the storm. I actually ripped the upside down zipper out of the pants muslin I started...only to find that it was a zipper for a purse or something. It's a non-separating zipper! Oh well. I got the waistband cut out, interfaced, and sewn as far as I could without the zipper in. So maybe when I sign off here I'll head upstairs to work on those. Oh, and I hit the Hancock Simplicity sale to get a couple of patterns - this is one of them.

Anybody made this one yet? I didn't see any of your reviews on PR, but it was a 2010 Best Pattern and I only checked the first page of reviews.

Okay, sorry sewists, I'm now going on one of those mind-bending jaunts that my sister (Junior) said made her dizzy last week. Siblings, stick with me here. This weekend we saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Pure awesome. It was an entertaining movie (the guy who played Malfoy showed up!), but afterward Drew helped me put a lot of things together - like they mentioned a manned mission to Mars and that they lost contact with the spaceship. That buzzed right over my head (I thought, oh, they're showing us they're in the future). Well THOSE were the astronauts who find themselves on the "strange planet" in the original movie! Brilliant! And the altered virus that makes the apes smart actually kills humans, and they show the beginnings of that at the end of this movie - don't walk out during the credits or you'll miss it. So now we see how we ended up in the original mess - thank you for making it accurate, screenplay writer!

On the ride home I got to thinking about the movies I loved in the 70's, and I remember lying in the floor of our den with my dad watching what must have been the Apes TV series, or maybe they showed the movie on TV.

Then I thought about how this new movie is actually a prequel, like they did with Star Wars. You go 70's movies - you're like bell-bottom pants.  Give it enough time and you'll come back again!

Then I thought about I Am Legend with Will Smith (love this movie, and while I'm on Will Smith - have you seen his best movie called Seven Pounds?  Get that movie tonight if you can.  But I digress.)...

which is not a prequel, but is a remake of Omega Man, another one of my favorite movies from the 70's.  Wait a minute...did you say...

Did your brain just make the connection? Do you get it? Charlton Heston was in Planet of the Apes AND Omega Man!  (Are fireworks exploding in your head like they did in mine?  Did your world just turn upside down like mind did?)

Now what did I just prove? Anything? Maybe just that Mad Cow is a bitch to live with.  But the Dr. Fun family WILL be watching the 1968 Planet of the Apes tonight (pity my children).