Funnygrrl & I
My fellow Cow Town citizen, Funnygrrl, who blogs at Falling Through Your Clothes, and I first met up (after a LOT of missed opportunities) last spring, for a very exciting fabric-shop and coffee date, where she gave me a bit of rather pretty fabric and I talked her into buying a rather expensive serger.
Now, my fairly intense enabling aside, Funnygrrl first presented two pieces of fabric, both lovely linens with an identical embroidered border motif—one in black with white embroidery, one in white with black. I would take one, she would take the other, and at some point in the future we would have lovely “twin” dresses to remember each other by.
Meeting
Well, as they say, The Future Is Now. A little while back, as the panic of my impending move descended, I realized if I wanted to have the twin dress meetup, as fantasized, before hundreds of kilometres come to separate us, I had better get stitching. So I put on my big girl panties and started cutting Simplicity 5549. By some miracle, Funnygrrl’s head was in the same place, and when I emailed her to let her know I was cutting fabric, we wound up being able to schedule a quick coffee to catch up and photograph our dresses together, as nature intended. Now, I actually have a whole post written up about the dress itself, but when I tried to glom the meetup onto it, it was just getting long, so I’ll post that one tomorrow. Or maybe after the Promaballoona dust settles.
I am an angelic presence, apparently. My camera really did not like the lighting in there.
Funnygrrl and I met up at a local indoor garden (actually the top floor of a mall) called the Devonian Gardens, where us pale, sun-starved northerners can go to pretend we’re somewhere, well, other than the cold and frozen north (which isn’t cold and frozen at this time of year, although it was chilly and rainy, hence my tights.) I was all excited by the name, and while the garden itself is beautiful, I must confess to a teeny, tiny bit of disappointment that none of my favourite transitional fossils were making an appearance.* But other than that it was lovely, especially since it was pretty grey and chilly outside.
Big Wall Of Green. Funnygrrl’s camera handles my dress somewhat better than mine.
Very big. Very green. Very wall.
Fun in the (artificial) sun
It’s probably just as well you can’t see my dress very well—I’d been wearing it all day and was definitely sporting the rumpled linen look, although it didn’t get quite as bad as I had feared it might.
Funnygrrl & Tanit-Isis
Funnygrrl even brought spanky blog shoes to change into for the photos—clever woman! I am wearing my ubiquitous, desperately-need-to-be-replaced ballet flats. In fairness, they didn’t need to be replaced desperately until last weekend, when I forgot my water shoes and wound up spending the whole day wading in the river, wearing them. Oops. Do you have blog shoes? I confess, I have a whole box.
Thanks, Funnygrrl!
Photo credit for these goes to Funnygrrl (except for the one where my dress is looking truly angelic), since a) her camera’s better than mine, and b) it’s silly enough having one person running around working the self-timer, never mind both of us. So I mostly let her do it.
Oh, aside from taking photos like a pair of tourists in oddly complementary outfits, we sat and talked. And talked and talked. Until it started getting dark on us, basically. I love hanging with sewing peeps.
Acanthostega, a Devonian tetrapod with gills, toes, and a tail-fin.
*Er. It occurs to me that that was probably even more obscure than my usual run-of-the-mill science jokes. So the Devonian Period is a stage of geological history that happened roughly between 400 and 350 million years ago. It was marked by the evolution of the first full-canopy forest ecosystems and, most interestingly from a vertebrate-centric point of view, the first land vertebrates. Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, and Acanthostega are progressively less fish-like examples of the fish-tetrapod transition, which happened in the late Devonian and has to be one of the neatest “events” in evolutionary history. And Acanthostega had eight toes. Does it get any cooler than that?
Tanit-Isis Sews 
You both look very pretty and I love the colors you both picked it is very well done. Great job.
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How fun! And what great dresses on you both!
Fun twin dresses! Can’t wait to read about yours. I love the piping.
Your twin dresses are gorgeous! I love both the black on white and the white on black… I’m such a sucker for embroidered linen. I’m envious you got a fun day chatting with a like-minded gal about sewing and such stuff 🙂
I’m so jealous of that fabulous fabric (and the fact that you have someone to do a cool meetup with!). I’m going to have to see if I can hunt down some embroidered linen in my price range….(I don’t have high hopes of this).
Love the dresses and can’t wait to see the post with more info on how it was sewn up! 🙂
What great dresses, you both did a great job. I’m still a little unsure of boarder prints, I don’t trust myself to sew the pieces in a way that has a truly even hem.
I do not have blog shoes, mind you half the time I forget to put shoes on for indoor pictures.
I have a very different picture of the temperatures in your neck of the woods. The one time I went (for work) it was February and a chinook was in and I spent all 3 days carrying a coat I didn’t need. How about we trade a little of our humidity? 28C felt like 40C today.
Ooo, I forgot about these matching pieces of fabric. I like what you both did with them! Sounds like you guys had a great meet up!
And yay! SCIENCE!!! GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE!!!! WOOOO!!
Oh… you found me out. Me with my secret cupboard full of blog-shoes. They are kind of like house-cats – elegant and delightful to look at, but have led a cosseted life and wouldn’t last 5 minutes on the gritty, wet streets of London.
Ahahaha! So glad I’m not alone. Your description is perfect! 🙂
I’ve never yet managed to meet up with another real life sewer/seamstress/sewasuarus rex/whatever — it sounds lovely.
Also – I totally got the science joke. (do crocodiles count as being from the period? I’ve heard they are the only dinosaury creatures left)
and, as if it needs to be said — the dresses are fabulous.
I’ve been really unexpectedly lucky to meet the ones I have! It is pretty awesome, if I do say so myself…
The Devonian is well before crocodiles (like, 100 million years early), although a creature like Acanthostega probably occupied a similar niche as shallow-water predators. Except they were presumably eating fish still because the only land animals at the time were scorpions, spider, and millipedes and things…
If you want to get technical, birds are dinosaurs… but obviously a lot changed from the ancestral from (although it now appears that lots of dinosaurs from the group birds are descended from had feathers, including velociraptors and tyrannosaurs.) Crocodiles are much closer to what their ancestors looked like—although before the dinosaurs took over, crocodylians were much more diverse and included long-legged running forms and lots of other shapes. But birds and crocodyles are the “only” living representatives of the archosaurs, the group that included dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and plesiosaurs (as well as a few others…)
… and this is why my kids ask science questions at bedtime when they want to stay up longer… 😉
HA! I was reading that whole crocodile/bird explanation finding it quite interesting. I would have asked science questions at bed time too. Any and all stalling techniques were used.
I second Seraphinalina — although long legged running crock-type creatures sounds a little terrifying.
I love both your dresses, and the fabric, and the beautiful shots! …. how blessed you are to have IRL sewing buddies! ^_^
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