Sewing for Estrella, and modeling for life drawing

Oh man, am I sore again. This semester I'm working with 6 different teachers of life drawing classes, and this week I modeled for each and every one of them. It was only about 16 hours of work...but imagine if you worked out at the gym for 16 hours in a week's time. Yup. My muscles are talking to me. Mostly whimpering, and asking for the hot tub pretty please. But I'm kind of stubbornly proud that I can help the learning process in this way, and that even at 44 years old I'm fit enough to do the job well. Also? There were two paintings of me on display at a professional art exhibit this week. How's that for kind of making for weird feelings?? They were evidently done from class sketches like this one:



(Hopefully that one is work safe enough not to freak anyone out.)

In and among the class work, I've been able to get some more prep done for the upcoming Estrella War. (estrellawar.org) I still need to write the documentation for the fabric I wove for the arts competition, but I was really pleased that the matching linen (from fabrics-store.com) came in today. The hand woven will end up being a nice warm over-tunic, and the linen will be the under-tunic. I need to enter a length of fabric ready to be made into something for the competition, so the actual construction of the outfit will wait until after I get back. But won't it be beautiful? I'm so pleased the colors matched as well as I thought they might.



My husband is kind of hard on his clothes, and I hadn't sewn for him in a couple of years. So I made him the fingerloop braids (http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2011/02/tutorial-basic-finger-loop-braiding.html) to fix the cuffs for one shirt, and then sewed him another one. This is from the McCall's M4864 pattern. There were some fiddly bits around the cuff and collar with getting all the gathers tucked in correctly, but I'm pleased with the way the shirt turned out. And the XL fits my husband beautifully, with plenty of ability to move. Since he's not a small man, and is very active, that makes this pattern worth the little bit of fiddling and hand sewing. Yes, I really hate hand sewing. But I'll be using this pattern again. (And it looks better on him than it does crumpled up on the ironing board. Really.)



This was an easier project. McCalls Easy Stitch 'n Save M5738, minus the collars because Joann's didn't have enough of the yellow bias tape to go around. The dog coats run a little large for what the measurements call for, and I had to shift the placement of the belly strap for the smaller dogs. But the pups didn't mind wearing them. Actually, when I tried to put a coat on Kaylee, Wash tried to nose his way in to get the pretties instead. He even did the roll over and show his belly trick as a way to beg for the coat. I think maybe he just wanted all the attention for himself, but it was still cute to see them jockeying for who got to wear the new clothes. Luckily, I made up three of them.



You can almost hear them saying, "Ok Mom, we're in our new garb. Is it time to go yet???"