I'm Back!

Wow.  We've had quite the little dry spell, haven't we?  Sorry about that.  Besides not giving many gifts lately, I've just plain been busy with other stuff.

First of all, I received a gift that was amazing, but made life hectic for a while.  I babysit for my friend who's a painter so this is how I get paid:

Before

After

I love my new kitchen!  I bet I spend twice as much time in there now, and I keep it much cleaner than ever before.  It is incredible what a difference some paint (and someone who knows how to do it right) can make.

Then, I made a little gift for myself.  I come from a family of musicians.  We used to perform together all the time, but now it's been a really long time - like 10 years.  We were invited to do a sort of reunion concert and so I had to wear something formal.  Only problem is, I'm pregnant.  Very pregnant.  So where do you get a formal maternity dress that isn't either a wedding dress or $400 (or both)?  NOWHERE!  Ok, on to Plan B: find a pattern.  Oh wait, those don't exist either.  So my very patient and generous mother, who has sewn many a dress in her day, went to work with me creating our own pattern (a combination of 3 or 4 existing patterns, plus some good ol' guessing).  We made the whole thing out of a sheet first, made easily over 50 changes, and then finally did the real thing.  It turned out great!  I can't believe how hard it was, and I kept saying that I would never sew again, but now that it's done, I feel pretty empowered and even kind of want to sew more stuff.  Anyway, here's what it looks like:

(The best picture of the dress happened to be a really bad one of my face, so I just cut it off.)

Please note that the pleat in the front allowed for me to make the dress ahead of time, not knowing exactly how fat I would be when I actually had to wear it.  I thought that was pretty smart of us.  In theory, this dress could look good at various stages of pregnancy.  Maybe even post-baby?  We'll see.

Anyway, these things, plus some others, have kept me far away from blogging and reading blogs.  My RSS Feed collection totals 508 new posts right now.  Scary.  But I do have a couple gifts to post, so stay tuned...