happy birthday, julia!

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Julia Child's birth, I made her Reine de Saba (chocolate and almond cake) or as it's known at our house, the-best-cake-I-ever-had.

It's been so hot here that the mood for baking didn't strike until 9:00 pm--the earliest you could even consider turning on the oven. I frosted it with her Glacage au Chocolat, but because we were far too impatient to wait for the cake to cool (and it was already after 10:00 by that time) I over-cooled the icing and spread it on the hot cake. You can see it melted and ran down the sides and created a pretty cool ganache kind of vibe.

Making french cake at 9:30 at night seemed like a very New York/Julie and Julia thing to do!

(Thanks to Frances for the great photo.)

dress to tunic

I think the look on Frances's face pretty much says it all. This is a failed dress attempt from a year or so ago. The fabric was some I bought without a project in mind several years back (back when that was unusual for me!) but then I found a sundress pattern I thought was so-o-o cute. Beware the cute pattern with only a drawing, not a photo, on the envelope. Maybe it would have been cute if I had drawn the dress instead of sewing it.





But what to do with the two-thirds-finished dress. Clearly NO ONE was ever going to want this, so it didn't make sense to finish it, but there was so much fabric there, it seemed a waste to just throw it away. So how about a fresh, fun tunic for yoga class?

Given the overwhelming largeness of the dress, it was surprising that it took quite a bit of creative cutting and pasting to get the pieces for the tunic out of it.

Now all I need is a quick trip to Forever 21 (I never thought I'd say that) for a pair of coordinating leggings and I'm ready for yoga class!

Fabric, fabric everywhere...

Sometimes you go shopping for fabric and sometimes it just lies down in front of you. I took Frances to Forever 21 to look for some shorts and found this skirt in the buy-1-get-1-free section. The skirt isn't a good shape for me, but 2 of them (for $12) will give me about 3 yards of really cool cotton broadcloth to make something else with. Maybe a nice simple A-line skirt...

Not the new outdoor fabric

This is not the laminated Anna Maria Horton I ordered for the back porch. It is what was in the package from Fabric.com when I opened it up. The nice folks at Fabric sent the right stuff and told me to keep this 1.5 yard length of really nice slub cotton. Yum! I wonder what I'll make with it?

Hey, how about this? I thought this fabric
looked awfully familiar!

Aloha!

I made the first of several aloha shirts for Bill from my new Hawaiian stash. Looks like with a big pattern and such an obvious repeat I should have matched the fronts. Matched the pocket, though--you probably couldn't even tell there was a pocket!

Bill tried it on and declared it a perfect fit. That's good since I needed a spread-collar pattern for him. This one will make more aloha shirts and I can adapt it for the bowling-shirt style with a contrast panel in the front. Maybe the boys' XL in the same envelope will fit me!