A Year In Review, Part One: Revolutionary Heroine or Disturbed Trouble-maker?

Interesting non-conformist or irritating agitator? Charming individualist or borderline sociopath?

Hmmmm....

Last weekend was a five-day vacation for me: five days of sweet, sweet freedom from the hellish nightmare of endless toil and sufferin-- er.  I was off from work.  And I knew that at least some of that time I would spend sewing.  Or I hoped so.  I had two pairs of jammies, a shirt-dress and a blouse all half-sewn on the table.  I also had two knitted skirts, completed up to about row 8 and two knitted earwarmers,completed up to about... row 8.  (Row 8 seems to be pivotal for me in some way.)  These were all, of course, supposed to be Christmas gifts.

By December 24 at 4:00 pm I had completed one earwarmer. 

I did, however, complete the jammies and the shirt-dress by my last evening off.  And once again, I went whizzing around on the "Why do I stress myself out about a leisure pursuit?" merry-go-round.  I know, I know, we all take a spin on that particular ride now and then.  Usually my little trips are pretty uninformative.  (I do have an amazing ability to combine deep introspective thought with a pathological refusal to acknowledge or alter my self-destructive behaviors. I'm special like that.)

This time, however, I actually came to some conclusions. It's amazing how cogent you become when you've actually had some sleep for three or four days in a row.

Conclusion #1: I think everyone should wear unique and interesting clothes. Or at least my kids should.

Conclusion #2: I actually do have to make TLo's clothing. And in that case I should really make at least some of The Big One's too or she'll get a complex.

Conclusion #3: Artistically speaking, I am a colorist. I always have been. Apparently in garment-making, this translates into wanting to make simply-styled clothes with lots of funky, bright fabric combinations and not highly-detailed, complicated designs with muted, subtle fabrics.

Conclusion #4: I feel compelled, in the interest of keeping myself interested, to make clothes that are either challenging to design or challenging to construct.

Conclusion #5: Conclusions number 1-4 do not combine well with making uniform-appropriate clothes.

Conclusion #6: I really really really hate the school uniform policy.

Hmmph. I don't like my conclusions.

But of course in typical fashion, I did not decide (as perhaps a more mentally sound person would) to just stop making clothes I don't want to make.  No, instead I resolved to even further attempts at twisting and torturing completely inappropriate patterns into something that I could at least nominally call School Appropriate.  Regardless of their actual appropriateness.  I told you I was special.

Which is all to say, I had an idea and I'm not sure it works.

So what do you think? Can a surplice knit dress have a collar arbitrarily added to it and look... Not Crazy?   Because The Big One has some serious surplice love since way back and I thought I might try to use her favorite pattern to make a school dress. 

Please vote.

 

edit: Thanks to everyone who commented and voted so far (and everyone else, please keep voting!)

Uniform Policy Refresher Course:

GARMENT	RULE
shirts/blouses/dresses:	collar, sleeves
	solid color (any)
jumpers/pants/skirts:	navy, brown, black, khaki
indoor jackets/sweaters:	solid color (any)
socks/tights:	solid color (any)

Fluff.

I don't watch Late Night. In fact, I don't know that I watch anything on network tv. However, I found this both funny and sort of impressive: Jimmy Fallon (as Neil Young) and The Boss (as himself) singing Willow Smith's highly-annoying "Whip My Hair".

(Sorry, can’t embed a copyrighted clip without the commercial at the beginning.)

That's one good impersonation.   Which I realize is a somewhat dubious distinction, but still... gotta hand props to Jimmy, right?

edit: I did look up the “History of Rap” and it was funny!  I love Justin Timberlake, he never seems to take himself too seriously.  I might have to start DVRing “Late Night”.

Ahhh… Don’t You Just Love A Fanatic?

I do.  This year we’re having a smallish Christmas with (as far as I know) just the immediate local family—which is to say myself, The Husband, The Evil Monkeys, The Parents and The Grandparents (the only two of my original six that remain).  We hold all such gatherings at The Parents’ house because, quite frankly, their house is a veritable mansion and mine, veritably, is not. 

We’re having a very casual meal for Christmas Eve Dinner and I decided to bring some additional sides.  So I chose green bean casserole and ‘some type of bread product’.  I had originally intended to just make my standard (albeit tasty) whole-wheat loafs.  I even contemplated making lefse, inspired by Joy’s fabulous foray into the making of krumkake.  But then it occurred to me that I hadn’t made soda bread in a long time.  A really long time.  So long a time that I couldn’t remember the recipe.  And thereby discovered that I also couldn’t remember where I’d put the written version.

Doh!  And yet…. there’s a reason Google was put on this earth, right people?  Surely I could find a nice, simple, traditional soda bread recipe.  We just put “soda bread” into the search engine and….

Good.  Grief.

I have never seen such a jumbled and confusing mess of useless links.  Maybe nobody makes real soda bread anymore.  Perhaps they’ve all been seduced by the siren-song of “honey-glaze” and “dried mangos”, which seemed to crop up disturbingly often in my search results. Perhaps we were doomed, doomed to eat plain old yeast-risen bread after all.   I despaired. 

And then, I saw it.  A web address tantalizingly called www.sodabread.info.  Wow.  Seriously?  They have their own website?  This I had to see.  And I was not disappointed.  I now have proof that there is someone emphatically-to-the-point-of-bordering-on-maniacally endorsing literally every possible thing on the face of this planet.  So meet my latest discovery: The Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread.

You heard me.  A flippin’ society, people. 

Now I will say, they do have a point that some of these new-fangled ingredients (Sun-dried tomatoes?  Garlic? Chiles??) are not traditional.  Plus, they provide a seemingly exhaustive quantity of information about the history of soda bread.  I personally never in my life expected a soda bread to be desert, but apparently there are heretics out there who do.  And the Society does have a nice, simple, traditional soda bread recipe.  Which I fully intend to desecrate by –gasp– adding raisins.  And possibly a tablespoon of sugar. 

Don’t let the SPISB know.  They’ll probably hunt me down and beat me with a ten-day-old loaf wrapped in a sock.

I’m so glad I didn’t decide to make lefse after all.  I shudder to think what a Society For The Preservation of Norwegian Lefse website would look like.  There’s only so much gastronomic zeal I can take in one year, however well-intended.  Plus, I’m too lazy to rice all those potatoes.