New Orleans

We are finally back after our bout of travels. I love to travel, but I was beginning to feel like I would never get home after so much time in the car. Patrick's grandmother passed away, so no sooner had we returned from our Savannah adventure, we were back in the car heading to New Orleans. I must say that it was an interesting trip. Fortunately it lacked the type of adventure that had interrupted our Savannah vacation, but it was still in adventure in its own right and I am not sure that it was entirely good. Patrick and I stayed just outside the French Quarter in a beautiful hotel in the arts district. It had Chihuly chandeliers! Very cool. I am kicking myself for not taking a photo. We stayed from Sunday to Thursday, so part of it was taken up by family responsibilities, and part of it was just fun stuff.

Arriving into New Orleans was definitely a different experience from when I came for the first time in July of 2006, less than a year after hurricane Katrina. I still remember the weird, moldy smell, and the many miles upon miles of desolate neighbourhoods, abandoned and rotting. I honestly will never forget that. However, the drive in this year revealed significant improvements. A lot of the abandoned buildings still remain and are succumbing to overgrowth and dilapidation, but many more buildings have been demolished or rebuilt. Where many destroyed buildings once sat, there is now nothing more than a cement foundation. But perhaps things are moving in the right direction. I remember one particular neighbourhood, just outside of the garden district, which was full of beautiful old Victorians. In 2006, heaps of trash lined the roadsides. Coloured X's still marked the buildings, indicating the number of survivors found. This time around, most of it was gone. Still the occasional X marking, but for the most part, everything was painted over and scaffoldings were prevalent.

We spent most of our in-town time in the French Quarter, since we did not have a car and streetcar was the only way to get around. St Louis Cathedral is gorgeous, and a merit to American cathedral architecture. We managed to putter around Jackson Square before they closed it off to prepare for the Jazz Fest.

We enjoyed beignets (French donuts) from Cafe du Monde - three times! Mainly because as vegetarians, we had so few options available. (New Orleans is not a vegetarian-friendly city by any means) It amazes me how they are so consistently delicious. I love the sidewalk cafe atmosphere of the place as well. There is usually a band of some type busking right outside the cafe so it is fun to listen and the more sugared and caffeinated you get, the better it is.

We took the streetcar all the way down St Charles Avenue into the Garden District, which contains many rows of large, elegant homes built as an 'escape' from the squalor of the city. The architecture is incredible - many of them look like wedding cakes or a doll's house.

On Wednesday night, I had high hopes that with the Jazz Fest gearing up, we'd see some great street performers and musicials. I must say, it was a bit disappointing. The hippies we'd seen walking around town with juggling gear did not deliver (just a little fire spinning? pretty please?), nor did the many raggedy runaway kids with beat up fedoras plucking badly at their guitars and bangos. On Wednesday morning, there had been a fantastic couple of jazz bands on Royal Street, but that was about it as far as good "New Orleans Jazz" was concerned.

I want to love New Orleans. It is a really beautiful place full of amazing architecture and a rich history. I really believe it could be a beautiful place to go on vacation, but it still feels like it has a ways to go.

Spring sewing

Now that things have started to settle down a little bit (for now...a funeral in New Orleans is on the horizon for next week, unfortunately), I am ready to start getting back into the swing of things. I could tell you all about how much fun doing taxes for a small internet business is going to be. But I would much rather tell you all about all the wonderful sewing I have done and am going to do. I love fashion, but I am horribly picky about clothing, and will almost never buy brand new clothes for myself. I go into stores and immediately sentences like "I could make that myself" or "that's not pretty, I guess I just need to make my own things" begin flowing out of my mouth. I love vintage styling, but I also love comfort and natural fibers, so while I have quite a few vintage clothing items, I really prefer to take the styles and make them myself out of softer, more movable fabrics like homespun cottons and muslins.

I made this little jumper last week before the Savannah trip/fiasco. I have been loving jumpers a lot lately. When I was 9 and when lived in Europe, I remember taking family vacations to Austria. In Salzburg, there would be shops full of the most adorable traditional women's dirndls, and I always wanted one. Of course they were extravagantly expensive ($300 upwards), since I am sure most of the ones I saw were handmade locally. I loved the feel of the fabrics and the rich looking stitching they possessed.

So a lovely black homespun cotton was commandeered from my fabric stash and I created the jumper over the course of one afternoon. The fabric has a really wonderful weave to it - almost like a lightweight wool, but much cooler and breezier. I do feel like maybe I made the skirt a little too full, because when we were in Savannah, it was intensely windy and I kept having to hold my skirts a la Marilyn Monroe. How embarrassing! Still, I enjoyed wearing it. It's so straightforwardly simple, especially paired with a pretty white muslin blouse. Hopefully not too beermaiden-esque, but still highly fun to wear.

I also threw together a second little dress made of mustard yellow cotton broadcloth. The pattern (a hybrid of a store-bought one and my own massive alternations) didn't turn out to be quite right, but it's still wearable. If any of you remember me posting a while back about a massive acquisition of vintage lace from an antique store in North Georgia, that is where the cream coloured eyelet lace for this dress came from. I love ruffles around the neck, so I took a couple of different lengths of cream eyelet lace, each with a unique pattern embroidered into it, and sewed the lengths around the neck, creating a charming ruffled collar. This dress looks really cute with a cardigan, but I was also thinking ahead for summer because it will be quite nice on its own as well.

Last but not least, I had some fun with hand dyeing a much loved bright yellow cardigan that mistakenly met with a pair of indigo jeans in the wash sometime last summer. I've been meaning to dye it for a while, because the cardigan has such a lovely fit to it and I couldn't bear the thought of getting rid of it just because it had some unsightly splotches on it. I went with a dark blue dye, not really know quite how it would take to a bright yellow cardi. I was quite amazed when it ended up turning a perfect, even shade of sage green. Not quite the blue I was expecting, but it could not be more lovely. I replaced the yellow buttons with some vintage glassy (not opaque) black buttons that really pick up the reflections of sage. A very happy conclusion!