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 