weekend links

Hello friends!

My time in the U.S. is drawing to a close, but it’s been great to be back and to spend time with family and friends. I’ve enjoyed quiet morning runs, shady bike rides, visits to the theater, and time to recover and regroup after an extremely stressful year. I hope you’ve also had a chance to take some time off and, maybe, do some travel.

Quite a few of you have already posted (adorable) first-day-of-school photos to the Facebook group, so clearly summer is wrapping up. We’ve still got a few weeks before school starts at our house, but keep those photos coming! I love seeing all those first-day outfits.

Speaking of travels and sewing, we stopped in to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum on our way to visit my sister a couple of weeks ago and I snapped this photo. So interesting to see how mother-of-pearl buttons are stamped out of a shell isn’t it?

Pinterest Picks

I couldn’t survive summer without a hat, so I’m always on the lookout for cute ones. After telling S I want to find a conical rice hat I stumbled across the one below, left, which is pretty close. And the black ribbon is quite charming, isn’t it?

Love these black and white quilts.

Here are two ideas for our Liesl + Co. Terrace Dress. This striped linen from fabric.com would be perfect for the dress on the right, wouldn’t it?

I wear my tropical wool City Stroll Wrap Skirt all year long, and if you lengthened the pattern by a few inches using the lengthen/shorten line on the pattern you could make it look almost exactly like this one, below left. Also, the dress on the right reminds me of our Lisette for Butterick B6482 if only I could find the right fabric. (Why is it so difficult to find oversized prints? When I design them the manufacturers never want to print them that large.)

How fun are these textures?

Weekend Reading

• Amusing photos of children having sunscreen applied.
• My sister is having a baby in a few weeks. Something tells me she and her husband are already tired of the questions.
• Here’s a great approach to personal style that we can all follow. Rather than buy what everyone else has, sew your own timeless, lasting staples that express your own style.
• I tasted my first hoji bubble milk tea while we were in New York (I recommend 30% sugar so it doesn’t overpower the hoji flavor) and now I’m fantasizing about making it when we get back to Madrid. (I’ve also been researching how to make the bubbles at home, since the dried bubbles never have the right texture when you cook them.)
• What are your thoughts about making vs. being creative? Here’s a thought-provoking piece on the topic.
• And speaking of creativity, this was my favorite read on the topic this week.
• How cool that you can reverse the yellowing on vintage plastic sewing machines!
• It’s not too late to sew a bucket hat for the summer, especially now that you know they’re trending…
• How do you think we should handle the question of size? Would you rather be a size H than a 14, for example?

Have a great weekend, and we’ll be back next week with some extra-special sewing tutorials and a few other treats. See you then!