Volume 14: Meet my new muse (she's a porch goose)
Porch Goose
I received the best gift for Mother’s Day! It’s a porch goose. Annnnd of course I already made her some clothes. I posted a video all about Lucy Goosey on YouTube yesterday and judging by the comments, a porch goose is the thing no one knew they needed until they watched it. Check it out here!
That video is also about how to read old school sewing patterns. Since several people said that was a sticking point when wanting to sew clothing, I hope some of you find it helpful. There are a handful of goose clothes sewing patterns on Simplicity.com right now and they’re on sale!
The Wedding Dress
THANK YOU to all of you who sent me emails and left comments after my last newsletter about sewing Natalie’s wedding dress (you can read that volume here if you missed it). You all had such good advice and encouragement. I can do it! One of you sent me the perfect 90’s pattern recommendation for the bodice we were looking for and I quickly found one on Etsy. I cut out the pieces today!
I also ordered several swatches from Mood and we chose the plain silk satin in whisper white. The swatch service Mood has is such a lifesaver for projects like this, since I would not want to order a large amount of expensive fabric without feeling it first. I now have my cart loaded with some Liberty Tana lawn swatches for my own dress for the wedding.
This weekend, I think they’ll have a Memorial Day sale, so I’ll be ordering the satin and also a silk lining. For the underskirt, to make it poufy, we’re going to buy a proper pettiskirt in the correct shape, and I’ll attach it to the dress, so that does ease the workload quite a bit.
Quilt Progress
I filmed the next portion of the butterfly quilt and I’m getting close to being done designing the top! That will be next week’s video, but the quilt is going to get sidelined for a few weeks while I focus on the wedding dress. I didn’t want to rush through finishing it just so I could move on, so it will percolate on the wall until I’m ready.
I will also need to slow down my production schedule a little bit this summer. I realized this as I was pondering how I was going to make a wedding dress, keep posting a video every Monday, and work on the beginner’s quilting course I’m planning (more on that at a later date). The answer is that I can’t, of course, that would be crazy. So I’ll be posted a new video every two weeks for the next month or two, instead of every week. I’ll continue to write a newsletter weekly, though! It’ll be such a good way to keep you posted on how the dress is coming along.
Other News
My golf lessons have gone great and I’ve been practicing plenty, so we’re playing an actual game of golf on Friday. Golf is fun!
I’ve been very consistent in exercise for about a month now. My favorite two resources are Mrs. Muscle on YouTube and the Runna app. I read a quote that said, “If you’re not strength training in your 40’s and 50’s, you won’t be caring for yourself in your 70’s and 80’s,” and somehow I found that highly motivating.
We used a local printer (the same one who prints my quilting books) to print Natalie’s wedding invitations and it was about HALF the cost of Vistaprint and other online sources, plus she got to pick the paper in person. So that’s just a reminder to try local shops for these kinds of things. I think we sometimes assume online is always cheaper and clearly that’s not the case.
That’s all for now!
Cheers and Happy Sewing :)