Obsessed with Embellishment

I have convinced John that chickens are a good idea!

It pretty much came down to this: we have been thinking of getting a pet for DD1 - she desperately wants a dog, but we both work full time.   Plus, she and her twin DD2 are super busy kids four nights a week, so a puppy would be sadly neglected.  I’m also allergic to cats, so after giving it some thought and remembering that I have past experience raising baby pet birds, it seemed that chickens that will satisfy my gardening/sustainability instinct, her pet instinct, and big bonus - chickens live outside year round.  Plus we get those beautiful eggs. 

That works for me! 

John’s thrifty Scots heritage did kick in and he quickly nixed the Eglu ($800 avec chickens), so I had to do some internet searching on chicken coop plans.  One thing I quickly learned is that there are two schools of thought on coop design: people who scavange materials from virtually anything (a total no-go in my toney neighborhood) and people who aspire to the gentleman-farmer-high-end-solution (lovely but there are no prices quoted on that web site - what does that tell ‘ya?)

Here is the coop of my dreams:

Pretty yes?  This design has all the feaures required for healthy birds, the plans are not expensive, we can build it ourselves, and it’s wicked adorable to boot. I actually love the goofy window box, and if you watch the ebay video (scroll down) you’ll see a hen sitting inside the window!  I’m such a sucker…

 Next challenge: where to buy day old chicks.  The big mail order hatcheries sell every breed but they have minimum orders  - 25 chicks(!) - and the Boston metropolitan area is not exactly teeming with Agway stores….stay tuned.

This morning I opened my email, and Georgene, a fellow Sewing Diva, had sent all of us a link to this blouse - fabulous, yes?  And not that hard to replicate either.  Pattern-wise, you could use any peasent blouse pattern such as Simplicity 3887, or  Hot Patterns Poetry in Motion Tops. The flounce is just some elastic on the sleeve.  A subtle feature of this peasent look is that there is no gathering at the shoulder and the lace insertion lies flat - I like that.

 What really makes this work is the seemingly elaborate embellishment, but if we break it down we can easily see what’s really going on:

• Notice the pearls are the same tone as the fashion fabric and lace insertion.  This is a great idea and is going straight into my idea notebook!   Pearl beads come in all kinds of colors, and this is easy to copy because you can dye fabric and lace to match the pearls
• There are only two pearl shapes: teardrop in one size and round in small, medium & large
• There are just four embroidery colors: a medium dusky green for the leaves, bright pink and dark bright pink for the flowers, and a lastly a pinky-beige leaf color that matches the fashion fabric and the pearls
• Only one embroidery stitch is used for the flowers and leaves:  a basic padded satin stitch. Georgene hypothosized that there might be some cording instead of padding under the satin stitching outlining the leaves, and I think that’s certainly possible too.

Pretty simple right?  So how does this all work together so perfectly?  It’s all about the transiton from one material to the next, and how they are used.  If you look closely, you’ll see the pearls are also used as centers for the flowers, and the tone-on-tone leaves  also act as a bridge between the brighter fowers and the fashion fabric.  Some of the leaves, both tone-on-tone and green, are outlined with pearls as well.  The transition between materials is hugely important to making embellishment work, and to keep it from looking “stuck on”.

The heavy embellishment is also mostly confined to the top half of the garment, and when you look at the other views on Net-A-Porter you’ll see the lovely drape created by the beading.

This blouse is a brilliant example of the sum being greater than the parts.   Thanks Georgene!

This may sound crazy but it’s true - I love chickens.  Years ago a coworker who lived in Pembroke MA gave me some eggs from his Plymoth Rock hens, and they were the most delicious and beautiful things I’d ever seen.  The yolks were so fresh they were dome-shaped in the pan, and the whites were thick and shapely.  Plus, when we paid him a visit I discovered that chickens are hysterically funny to watch, and ever since I’ve wanted my own, but we live in suburban Boston next to Route 128, which is not exactly farm country.  My neighbors are more likely to have tennis courts and in-ground pools over henhouses. We also have a mid-century modern house, and the coop designs I’ve seen are squarely vintage farmhouse.

However, the Eglu might be just the ticket.  It’s got a cool design, sort of an iMac for fowl and like an iMac is comes in different colors.  A late night search on my town bylaws indicates that residents are allowed to keep chickens for a modest fee ($10 a year), and I only want two - just enough for eggs.  A rooster is not in the equation because they are too noisy, have only one thing on their minds anyway and we don’t need to breed chicks.   All I need to do is talk John into it!

One of the things that really mystifies me about the internet is how many people don’t seem to understand what they give up, and can’t get back, when they blog about really personal stuff to a vast audience of anonymous strangers.  The internet is not a hippie commune where we’re all in this together, and you know everybody.  You can bet for every nice comment on my blog (or yours), there’s a couple people out there who think I’m (or you are) a total nutcase.  And aside from the Too Much Information issue, and my personal inability to understand why anyone would be interested in reading about home made sanitary protection (human or canine), it just floors me that so few people ever seem to realize that the internet is the most public of public spaces and what you blog about today, or post on a message board, could haunt you for decades.

Here’s an example of why I really try to maintain privacy on the internet when it comes to my personal life and my family:  I just got a new job, a great one, with a fabulous salary, great benefits and perks, and lots of income potential.  I also knew that my prospective employer, like most employers these days, would do a background check on me, and how hard would it be for them to Google my name?  Not hard at all.  And how good is the background checking software that companies use to screen candidates? Very good.   The last thing I wanted was for that employer to find anything, anything at all, that could hurt my chance for a job. A few years ago a woman who worked for Harvard University made the mistake of  bashing the University on her blog and she was fired for it and the taint of that mistake followed her for years – so my mantra is, just because you can say it on the internet, doesn’t mean you should. 

To paraphrase an old carpentry motto: Think twice and post once.