T-minus Seven Days!

Only one week to go until we are out of here!

Caleb survived his time in the woods; he said it wasn’t that bad.  Now he’s doing stuff he can’t really talk about and he’ll be back this weekend, just in time to help finish packing, load the truck, finish out-processing and drive the truck with car-in-tow across the country.  Poor Caleb.  I’ll bet even all that hassle is probably sounding pretty good to him right now.  He told me the sweetest thing when he got back from the field: when he was out there sharing small animals with several other men for food, he was thinking about me and all the good food I make for him at home.  :-)

I’ve been keeping busy here between all the packing, cleaning, babysitting, and other diversions I’ve created to entertain myself.  Last week, I modeled in a charity fashion show on base and that was a lot of fun, despite the major hiccups that occurred during practices and the shows, such as the set-up staff forgetting to turn on...the spotlight on the runway.  I accidentally forgot to turn the flash back on for my camera before I gave it to my friend to snap some pictures, so with no flash and no spotlight...you can imagine the photography challenge.

Here I am in my “casual” outfit.  You can kind of see how they made the runway look like...a runway...with the white rope lights and big blue lights. I thought that was cute.

This was my “career” outfit...

And, after the show, with the flash restored, my “after five” outfit:

Considerably less fun than the fashion show was the other project I’ve been working on for the past three weeks: sewing a dress.  

Each year Columbus has “Pilgrimage”: antebellum mansions open for tours and base ladies help give the tours dressed like a Southern Belle.   Last year they had seventy or so volunteers.  They create new dresses each year, from donations like curtains, sheets, and old formal dresses, to replace the less desirable or more tattered pieces from the collection.  

I volunteered because I had free time and I thought I'd cut out patterns or maybe sew some nice straight lines piecing skirts together but instead I ended up constructing a dress almost entirely on my own(with much instruction, of course).  The result:

I ran out of time before I could finish the hem or do closures.  Heck, it took me the first two weeks to learn how to cut the fabric from the patterns and trace markings and pin stuff together.   In hindsight, I should have spent more time selecting a simpler pattern.  Oh well.  

For people like me who like projects that take a few minutes, not a few weeks, I also refurbished this darling old mirror tray that I took from my mom when I moved out--with her permission, of course!  

You can sort of see in this picture that the edges were getting pretty tarnished:

So I took out the mirror and applied a coat of one of my favorite crafty products: metallic gold spray paint:

...and I also cleaned the mirror. :-)  The gold paint really made this tray look like new.

Anyway, that’s a little of what we’ve been up to.  Next post will probably be from our new home(!!) and therefore not for a couple weeks.