Black and White, and Red All Over

Hello Everybody! Long time, no see. When I was trying to figure out what to write, I was thinking about all the reasons that I could list that would explain the big gap since my last post. I started to mentally scroll through my excuses, and almost immediately I thought of a long-time family friend who once commissioned my sister for a painting. When he called to check in about her progress, she proceeded to tell him why the painting wasn’t finished, to which he replied, “I don’t want to hear about your problems. This is business.” What is lost in reading this, is that this man is one of the funniest people I know, and his delivery of this line was made with the most perfect comedic precision. It’s a line that we imitate and repeat frequently in our family, indicating, yeah, we’ve all got problems, now get on with it. And we always laugh when we say it.

Thinking about our family friend calls to mind the many times that we attended New Orleans Saints football games in his Superdome suite. Many of those games were during the “Aints” era when we couldn’t win a game to save our life! In the midst of our collective depression about our repeated failures, our group would be zinging some of the most hilarious lines anyone has ever heard.

Now I know losing a football game is not the end of the world. But humor has helped me to process bigger tragedies as well. A few years ago, my grandfather passed away and it was a particularly difficult loss for me. But I can’t think about his funeral and how hard that day was without also thinking about my brother’s eulogy which was so funny that it actually elicited whoops from the congregation.

Like Truvy says in Steel Magnolias, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion”. There’s something about the contrast between those feelings that sharpens them both and somehow makes them even more meaningful. Life is complicated and I know I’m going to feel bad some of the time. The only way to get through it is to go ahead and feel it completely. But when I can also laugh in the middle of it, what a great gift that is.

Pattern, Tessuti Sadie Slip Dress

Fabric, Silk Chiffon, B&J Fabric

Photography by Santiago Vanegas

Now let’s talk about this dress. One of my goals of 2017 was to make a garment out of silk chiffon. Nothing like trying chiffon for the first time and cutting on the bias. The good news was that I could use the stripes of the print to stay on grain. The bad news is that I would need to match the side seams and create a perfect chevron shape with the meeting of those stripes. I did a pretty decent job with the matching, but I’ve got one side seam that is ripply (is that a word?) and one side that’s smooth. Learning curve! The dress pattern is the Tessuti Sadie Slip Dress and I am in love with this pattern. I made a size small with no adjustments except for fiddling with the length of the straps. Just to jazz things up, I added the ruffle at the bottom. The ruffle strip has a stay stitch at the bottom, hidden in the print pattern, and left unhemmed so the fabric will unravel a bit the more I wear it. I left the top part of the ruffle with a raw edge as well for a deconstructed look.

In closing, my heart goes out to those who are dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes, earthquakes, or fires. It’s been an intense season of natural disasters and a particularly difficult time for many people. My thoughts and prayers are with you.