Rachel Hobson of Average Jane Crafter interviewed me for her column on Craft Magazine's website. Thanks so much Rachel, you rock!
The dress is a sample that I made recently, but there should be about twenty unique dresses in time for the Bizarre Bazzar at Maker's Faire. Each dress is made from a vintage hand-embroidered pillowcase, and is fastened with vintage buttons. This is my first step away from hand embroidering items myself, and moving into producting garments that can be made faster, but are still special and different from other items usually found in children's clothing stores. As many of you have probably figured out by this point, hand embroidering isn't exactly fast, and therefore is not very cost-productive. I hope the dresses are a hit!
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Almost Famous
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Labels: Craft Fair, Press, Rose and Duke, selling crafts, sewing
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
DRUMROLL AGAIN!
Kim kindly declined an apron. Her comment on my post was not an entry into the draw :)
The actual winner is now......
Brook!
Brook's blog has some fantastic embroidery on it lately. I know she will look super hot in her new apron. Congratulations mama!
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Labels: Giveaway
DRUMROLL PLEASE!
And the winner of the vintage chicken scratch apron giveaway is......
KIM!
Kim, you didn't mention in your post which apron you want. I will e-mail you and find out.
There will be lots more similar giveaways in the future. I'm telling y'all that Austin is a treasure trove of inexpensive vintage goodness. I have to say that it was really a pleasure to get comments from people I never heard from before in addition to those whom I know. I am not that great at always responding to comments, but I sure do love getting them, and also discovering some great new blogs from commenters.
Sorry, but there are no photos in my post for the first time. I'm scrambling to work on clothing-making whenever I get the chance and the camera is sitting in its drawer. More exciting posts next week!
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Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Vintage Chicken Scratch Apron Giveaway!
Last weekend while doing some vintage-goodness shopping, I came across these two old aprons with chicken scratch embroidery on them, and could not resist. Once I got home, I remembered that I don't even wear aprons very often, and I knew that one of these lovelies deserved a home with someone who could really appreciate it. Since chicken scratch is all the rage in crafty blogland these days, I just know there is someone out there reading this who will want one of these aprons. Leave a comment saying which apron you want (I only will give away one) before next Tuesday, and a week from today I'll have Harlan draw a name at random from a hat. Be sure and comment with a way that I can contact you via e-mail should you win :)

Also in crafty goodness news: New curtains for Harlan's closet, sewn from Ikea fabric (forgive the lousy photo).


French knot details on bride-kitty's dress:
Some vintage 40's rayon crepe fabric that I'm going to make my next super lightweight TX style skirt with:
I'm a little unsure of how it will look once it's on me. It may too shear, and too unflattering, but I'm going to finally take the plunge and cut it up. I've had it sitting around since I got in Portland way back in the day.
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Labels: craftiness, embroidery, Giveaway, sewing, thriftiness
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Ladies, check their shoes FIRST!!!
OK blogland friends, I have been sitting on this juicy story for a couple of months now, and I can't keep it to myself any longer. To those of you ladies who are single, and to all of us who remember being single, what is one of the first things you check out when you meet a man you might be interested in? It's the shoes, right? He might be cute, but if he's just wearing jeans and a t-shirt or some other nondescript outfit, it's always necessary to see the shoes so that you know if he's going go home and put The Clash on his stereo, if he's more of a Dave Matthews kind of guy. Yes, there are other kinds of guys too, but I find that most young men fall into one of these two basic categories. Well, today I have to tell you all that a good friend of mine was out on the town a couple of months ago, and she definitely went a little too far "into her cups" as they say in the south. She brought home a gentleman whom she had met several times before, and the next morning, she saw HIS SHOES for the first time. Can you imagine the horror? That's all I'm going to say here my friends. I should warn any of you at work that when I sent the link to those shoes to a couple of girlfriends at work, they laughed so hard and so loud, that they had to share the shoes with everyone else in their offices.
In news from my home front, there has been a bunch of hand-embroidering going on for the upcoming Maker's Faire in October. We also celebrated Joe's birthday this weekend, with a surprise (that I arranged) visit from Joe's best buddy Neilson. Luckily Neilson enjoys good food, and so we spent the weekend doing the local gastronomic tour. First stop was at Torchy's Taco truck which recently merged with another truck called Shuggies (I think) in a larger space. Joe ordered the chicken fried BLT from Shuggies, and it was phenomenal. Cushioned in between a squooshy hoagie roll was lettuce, tomato, some green chilies, mayonnaise, and several pieces of bacon that have been fried in fried chicken batter. The bacon tasted totally crispy and surprisingly light.
We also got to sample some tasty jalapeno hush puppies. Oh yea. Of course some tacos were part of the meal as well.
I'm pretty sure this is the barbacoa taco with queso fresco, cilantro, avocado, and lime.
I baked a chocolate cake for Joe's birthday and got lots of help from Harlan, who is recently really into helping me bake. Any time he hears the Kitchen Aid mixer going and he's not already helping, he comse running in with his stool and slides it up to couter to help.
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Saturday, August 23, 2008
I've Been a Bad Bad Blogger
Last post June 1st? Eek, the summer went so fast. A month-long trip to NYC and having Joe home with us here the rest of time made the days just fly by. The only items I made over the past couple of months were a ton of shirts for Parts & Labour on S. Congress. They're a really interesting boutique that only sells locally made items. I've also had a bunch of custom orders that I have worked on in place of updating my long-neglected blog. The only thing I made for myself this summer was this skirt:


Of course there have been about a hundred things that I have been meaning to blog about, but I have come to realize that a more realistic approach for me will be to post about one thing each week. That's my "new year's resolution" for this upcoming school year (yes, I still think of time in terms of school years. I suppose that I will think of time this way for a long time with a teacher husband and a child). Here are some snapshots from our summer:
Dreamy days at the beach:
A boy and his love for baby lions (t-shirt made with transfer paper and access to flickr) and old tractors:
A visit from Joe's mom, and a dinner out at the Biergarten in Wahlburg:
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Labels: personal junk, sewing
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Me me me and more about me
Here is my flickr mosaic created for Spiralling's game. I'm determined to win.
1. Jessica Simpson, 2. Dark Bordeaux, 3. Leg it, 4. Tiffany Blue Washers, 5. Bad liver and a broken heart, 6. mr. imagination's bottlecaps (149), 7. Overhead, 8. Box of Macarons, 9. Today menu: Colorful fruit, 10. Love and affection, 11. Lazy Cow - Flatford, Dedham, Essex, England - Sunday June 10th 2007 - Highest Explore position - #1 on June 14 2007.WOW!!.:O):O):O), 12. Rose, Duke & Hayden
The way the game works is that you answer the following questions (I put my answers after the questions below) and then you type each key word into the search engine on flickr and choose one of the photos from the first page that comes up. I made the mosaic over at fds flickr toys.
The Questions:
1. What is your first name? - Jessica
2. What is your favorite food? - See's Candy
3. What high school did you go to? - St. Ann's
4. What is your favorite color? - Tiffany blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? - Tom Waits
6. Favorite drink? - Lime Ricky
7. Dream vacation? - Hawaii
8. Favorite dessert? - French macaroons
9. What did you want to be when you grow up? - A writer
10. What do you love most in life? - Love and affection
11. One Word to describe you. - Curious
12. Looked up my flickr name and found something about me: I wasn't too sure what this one meant so I typed Violette Crumble into flickr and got a great shot of Hayden wearing a Rose & Duke shirt.
Harlan was home from school all of last week and I have to say the poor guy had a rough few days. One evening he burned his fingers on the stove top (I gave up on locking him outside the kitchen gate while I cook because I couldn't take the shrieking). The next night we set up his much anticipated big boy bed. Like an idiot I didn't put a guard rail on its side, but set up some sheepskins on the floor next to the bed instead. Well, insomnia struck me that night and I ended up taking a big dose of anti-anxiety pills to knock myself up. I awoke to the sound of my poor guy screaming, and wandered deliriously into his room to find Joe holding him, blood everywhere.
Somehow Harlan fell out of bed with his blanket wrapped around his legs. We figure he stood up on the sheepskins and then face planted onto the wooden floor, smashing open his lip and busting his nose. The swelling is finally going down, but in the photos below you can see his fat lip and his slightly Joan Riversesque swelling around the nose and under the eyes.

I can not take credit for these great photos. They were taken at the zoo by new favorite Austinite Mark. The picture of me tells me that my hair is indeed pretty bright in the sunlight. I think that I'm going to mix my current red dye with some dark brown and see where that takes me, despite the fact that Joe's students all really love my hair color (another sign that it might be time to tone it down a bit). I'm also stuck in the place where my hair is no longer a cute Katie Holmes bob, nor is it the standard Jessica long hair that only gets cut every ten years. I'm at a crossroads people. Either it's getting cut again or it's not getting cut for ten more years. I'm leaning towards cutting it one more time in the next couple of weeks only because I want to look good at Mike & Desiree's wedding in NYC at the end of the month (for some reason it's more important to look good at weddings even if they aren't one's own, right?) I'm also planning on magically fitting myself into a dress I got at Anthropologie while I was pregnant. Do you think I'm kidding that I bought shit I couldn't fit into when I was pregnant? I'm not. I was lucky enough to not have to wear maternity bottoms the whole pregnancy because Harlan planted himself pretty high up in my ribcage. For this reason I was certain that as soon as he came out I'd be back in a size 6 or 8. No one told me that the ribcage might not go back. I was prepared for my shoes not to fit any longer (the majority still do). I was prepared for crazy stretch marks (didn't get a single one although there are some crazy spider veins on my back and today one showed up on my shin. If only they'd showed up on my elbow in the shape of a cobweb. And while we're on that subject I recently saw a guy with the spiderweb elbow tattoo that was in the shape of Texas. I'll have to do a whole separate post about Texans' love for everything Texas.) However, the ribcage expansion I was not prepared for. I'm still going to stuff myself into the unworn fancy dress however, and I think I may be able to do it by just moving the buttons over. No one will know, right?
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Labels: mothering, personal junk