Martin

I have been waiting for spring for many reasons. One is that i would like to have a duck running round in my garden.
On friday night i had a dream that i had three eggs. The first hatched one normal sized yellow dove and the other two hatched one inch tall yellow chicks.
I woke up Saturday with new purpose and rode my bike straight to the IFA farming store. I rode home a few minutes later with a duck and a chick and a heat lamp.
It has been an adventure figuring out how to take care of a duck and a chick in my attick apartment urban homestead. but it's quite fun!
Unfortunately, the chick died last night :( but the duck is as alive and cute as ever. Its name is Martin. It loves to run fast on its tip-toes, chase your feet around the house, and jump high. It also does not stop squeaking...

but look how cute little Martin is:


Here are some videos of little Martin running round.

Mushroom party

Hello, it is my birthday on March 18th.
I will be 23 years old.
I like to have mushroom parties for my birthday and this year was no exception.

I made hazelnut and pistachio mushroom log cakes filled with coffee and cardamom cream :)
Annalisa made a really great mushroom decorated cake (thank you!)
As you can see, we all ate a lot of delicious food:


My home teacher came!



Zina and Mariana (in mirror) came:


Briana and Cassie came:

My *boyfriend* Adam came:

the cakes all came:

And handsome Ruel came :

Other friends came, too. And we all watched beautiful mushroom slideshows.

I really love mushrooms.

March

I love March :)
for many reasons.
Here are some of the things i have done so far in March:

My sister came to visit:


And we made lots of food:



I checked on my winter garden:


and it is doing pretty well:

I made squash raviolis:

I went to my first rugby game, and i liked it:

I went to girls' night:

I saw the first crocus flower of spring:

I saw a beautiful art exhibit:

I love this!

I hung out with little Elijah. He gets cuter and older everyday.

This is brie in my bed:

The show:

Finally I will post about the show.
We didn't finish everything; actually, we finished barely half of the outfits we began...but we pulled together a few good pieces that followed the same idea.

So you can get a feel for the scene i was working with, check this out:
coca-cola hair station


here are our things!



Annalisa is very talented at making hand-felted wool hats. All the models wanted to wear them :)


Tess, Alejandra, Hailee, Aiko, Marikh, and Rachael.

Thank you for a great show and 10-day sewing adventure!

Tess and Annalisa: sewing friends!

denim seams

When recycling jeans into something new, usually just the main part of the pant leg is used. This leaves behind the gnarled, fat, needle-breaking and otherwise unsewable seams. Annalisa had the great idea of trying to make something entirely out of these seams.

We requested on freecycle for any ripped or worn out jeans and got a pretty good response.
Here is Annalisa cutting the seams out and saving the rest for later projects.


They look appealing with the yellow stitching and faded parts, huh?

Annalisa used these denim seams to follow the curves of a siver princess-seam dress. Very pretty. Unfortunately i don't have a picture of it right now.

I used the short pieces to create a wide belt. I like how the colors and textures made a new fabric.


We are going to develope this further...more to come :)

doily skirt

About two years ago I began collecting antique doilies to piece together into a beautiful skirt. It was such a time consuming process to get the right doily of the right size, shape, and weight in the right spot, and to get it all into a three dimensional form, delicate but sturdy enough to wear...that two years later, it was barely half complete. Annalisa and I decided this doily skirt was the perfect combination of recycled multiples plus good design to finally finish it and include it in the show.
Also, this skirt is nearly $250 in doilies (oops!)


Zina Bennion helped pin and sew lots of doilies together (thank you Zina!!)


We planned to have a pale blue dress under this skirt, but ran out of time. After looking at this picture, I decided it looked alright over grey pants. Good enough.

Tree skirt

Here is the idea:



Here are the materials:
salvaged linen scraps from former skirts, garage sales, thrift stores, and my grandma's collection.




I made a six-panel skirt using the different colors, weights, and textures of the linen.




I carefully drew branches on the skirt using pencil. This was the most time-consuming step of the entire process. After, i used Annalisa's batik wax (she is an amazing batik artist and also taught batik in Africa for several years!) to fill in all spaces i did not want to be dyed.

This also took some time, but it created a beautiful, translucent image.

After the dye bath, the branches were more red than expected, so the skirt was dyed again with a blue-brown dye. This turned out great and made the entire design more complex. The stiff, waxed sections of the skirt cracked when crumpled into the dye bucket, which made more intricate branching than i could have drawn.

Here is Rachael at a fitting. I love how the skirt turned out.

"The tree skirt"