I don’t ever plan on taking the summer off from blogging and somehow it always seems to happen. This year was partially due to a move across the country and partially due to losing my camera remote, but also just wanting to enjoy summer and sewing for hours and not worrying about (mostly self-imposed) blogging deadlines and whatnot.

But now I’m missing it again so hello from California!

Things I’ve been up to:

• Saying goodbye to Boston and the lovely Crafty Foxes and moving back home to California. Hello drought and heat waves and having a backyard!
• Sewing all the things. ALL the things. I have such a backlog it’s ridiculous. Forgive me if my next 15 blog posts start with “So I sewed this back in xxx month so I don’t remember how I did it.” If you follow me on Instagram you might have seen that my mom got sick of my sewing stuff rapidly infecting the entire house so she cleared out our storage cottage thing in the backyard and I now have a tiny little sewing studio. It’s small but so easy to disappear into for hours. If the lighting weren’t so terrible in there I think I’d sew through the night.
• Visiting Boston because my sister now lives there. No joke, she moved there for school a week before I moved back here. We own all the same furniture and appliances though, so we pretty much just traded.
• Taking a flat pattern class at a local CC. This has been SO much fun. I was introduced to the sewing machine by my mom and then mostly self-taught from there so it’s been so refreshing to learn “the right way” to do a lot of things that I’ve just sort of guessed at. Also I’ve learned that darts aren’t scary. And that it’s super fun to move them around, especially to weird places. (And no, there will not be a Peneloping pattern line anytime soon. Talk to me in many years when I get tired of my day job. This is purely for fun!)
• Getting ready to move again! Boyfriend and I decided we’re finally going to tolerate each others’ presence (just kidding) and move in together. Just as soon as we find an apartment. Which is super fun and not at all difficult in the Bay Area. Nope.

I also sewed this skirt! I bought Simplicity 1366 when it came out because it has a giant bow across the crotch, and when Boyfriend *finally* graduated from his program I decided it was the perfect occasion to wear it to. I was also deep into my “I’m about to move so I can’t start sewing a dress that will probably require a total of upwards of 50 yards of fabric” angst so I chose a very Cinderella-esque periwinkle for it. It’s coming off more blue in the photos but in person it’s more purpley and a bit paler.

I was originally going to do the top in the pattern too but all the fabrics I found that had the right stiffness looked too polyestery. Plus there was the issue of the one skirt fabric I fell in love with also being sheer, and me not wanting to deal with drafting a lining, which led to me deciding to just make a Nettie dress to wear under the damn thing. It worked out great! (It’s usually not quite as obscenely short as it looks in the photos..) The only downside is that I can now only wear this skirt with that dress, unless I decide to go back and make some sort of slip, which I kind of want to do just so I can wear it with some kind of cropped top.

Anyway, it’s super fun to wear (I felt slightly like a peacock with all that extra fabric hanging off my bum) and I definitely want to make another one but it’s one of those skirts where you have to stop yourself and think, do I really need this in two different colors? And then the answer is always yes. But hesitantly yes.