My morning sludge and some new new patterns!

(The first photograph of Lightning from the George Eastman House Collection)

Jennings, William N.

American (b. England, 1860-1946)

I woke up this morning at around 5am to a massive thunderstorm. That's one of the downsides of living in the lovely south. This is the time of year for big storms. We've been getting about one or two a week this year which is an improvement over last year where it seemed like we had one every day. This mornings weather was harsh enough to shake the house. My Beau got us both out of bed and went to unplug all the computers. We then had to relocate downstairs to the guest room. Apparently these types of storms can rip roofs off of houses, cause tornados and all sorts of nasties.

So needless to say the rest of the night was pretty rough and when it was time to get up and start the day I needed some serious energy. Enter my morning sludge!

I try to eat high raw food diet for most of the day. I normally succeed in managing two meals a day this way. The other meal (typically dinner) tends to be cooked because I still can't get over my addiction to hot food. These green juices, shakes and smoothies have become my new coffee. I fill them with some sort of leafy green and some kind of fruit. Most of the time it's some kind of red fruit making the overall color of breakfast a dull brown. The picture above is one of my rare green results and not a good example of a typical breakfast drink. Hence why I've begun to refer to my concoctions as my morning sludge.

I've offered to make these for my Beau several times, but for some reason he doesn't take me up on the offer. Our conversations about these things tend to go like this:

Beau: What is that?
Me: A smoothie. Guess what's in it!
Beau: Gross. Gross is in it.
Me: Actually it's romaine and banana...

But I needed a boost of extra energy this morning. Beau and I spent all weekend painting the dining room and it looks smashing! We did the tray ceiling and the first coat of wall paint yesterday. This morning I wanted to get up and finish the second coat before work. So I needed to get a move on. I threw a whole bunch of swiss chard, some frozen strawberries and some frozen mango in the blender. The overall color result was a bit like baby puke brown, but it was tasty! Really once you get past the color these things are fab.

With my new burst of energy I went to work on those walls. I wasn't able to finish one wall, but I have secret plans to finish that as soon as I get home. So there's my lengthy excuse for not posting anything sewing related this weekend. Painting takes forever. Especially when you're painting crown molding, a tray ceiling, a chair rail, the walls and baseboard molding. Yikes. What a project!

So onto the sewing stuff. I'm currently waiting patiently for some of recently ordered patterns to come in. I got a steal on some Butterick patterns this last week. They ran a three day sale where all their patters were $1.99. Being the cheap frugal gal I am I had to snatch up some of the retro reprints.

Butterick 6582 Retro. The black satin number really got me here. I love the criss-cross top and the cute little bows. I'm thinking this would be a great Atlanta look. If only my hair was more well behaved and did that nice little swoop and curl.

The famous (or infamous) Walk Away dress. I've been wanting to do this pattern for a while. Mainly because it is so un-flattering on a smaller girl like me. Even the sample dress on the Butterick website shows how unflattering this dress can be. Liking a challenge, the masochist in me thinks it would be fun to mess with this dress and make it work. The bodice needs better shaping, the sleeves need to be moved in and from what I've read the back of this dress is too heavy and pulls the whole thing out of shape. Sounds like an alteration that's right up my alley.

One can never have enough apron patterns... Butterick 5435

And lastly Butterick 5281. This dress is very charming and only takes 3 yards of fabric. Sweet. The lower the yardage the more fabric options I have. The short sleeved version is much more appealing in my eyes. I like the idea of belting it at the waist or using the tie the pattern includes. I love a nicely cinched waist.  I would ideally like to make this in a floral print. 

I'm very interested to see how these differ from actual vintage patterns and if their modern updates actually improve or screw up the construction. I'm also excited to be able to cut these babies up, rearrange them and man handle them in a way I don't feel comfortable doing with my 1950s and 40s patterns.  Fabulous!