Here we are three days before Christmas! Three days. My goodness. How came it to be Christmas time already? Wasn't it just last month we were taking down our Christmas tree? Last week we were plucking luscious heirloom tomatoes from our green viney jungle of a garden (and speaking for myself, sweating ourselves to a sizzle in the kitchen canning the tomatoes with some sort of desperate heroicness)? Just yesterday we stuffed ourselves with a huge Thanksgiving feast?

One of my favorite pictures from this summer. Malachi enjoying a mud puddle after a heavy summer rain.

 

I truly don't know how the time went by so fast. Everyone tells me to enjoy life now because the older you get, the faster it goes by. I am twenty five now. It's scary to think the next twenty five years may pass as quickly as these last ones have.

 

But, we are ready for Christmas. David picked up the last item we needed to complete our Christmas table just today. A lovely, enormous, smoked Amish ham. The trick will be abstaining from slicing off tiny pieces of it "just for a little taste" before we sit down to our Christmas dinner. Unlike the Cratchitt's, we have opted out of having a goose this year - they are just SO fatty - although David is particularly set on having a real steamed pudding with a little alcohol-fueled flame around it as the grand finale.

 

After my last post, my interest in the 1840's clothing I have been working on went out with a grand snuff. I have tried to work more on my bonnet. I truly have. But I see myself so much in the behavior my five year old son has been exhibiting when we sit down to our schoolbooks lately. When he knows he needs to concentrate on something, he seems to find and cling to something - anything! - else to avoid the question at hand. Do we have to study how a spider web is made? He wants to know how birds make nests. What about how water turns into snow? He wants to know what its like inside a volcano.

 

And so it is with me. Whenever I have sat down to work on my bonnet my mind leaps up with a fury of different ideas. 14th century cotes. Ideas for a new gown for the Jane Austen festival next summer. A sudden desire to make tobacco pouches. A passionate obsession with the cut of Edwardian era skirts. Reading. A lot. I just finished Jane Eyre and a biography of Charles Dickens. And when I read, I don't eat. I don't sleep. I don't sew. 

 

I have at least cut out the cover. I ran the shirring rows and tacked it to the frame. I trimmed the edges to match the frame and bound the edges in bias strips of the silk. (thanks to Elizabeth Aldrige for this scrumptious silk - I was ecstatic to realize that there was plenty left over to cover my bonnet after laying out the pattern pieces for the waistcoat it is intended for). I covered the tip of the bonnet. So all it really needs now is a curtain, a lining and facing and some ties. Maybe a few flowers inside the brim at cheek level.

 

I think I will take a break from sewing though until the New Year begins and just try to finish the bonnet and enjoy the rest of the holiday season without any stress or deadlines for getting things done. Jan. 7th starts off our costumed events with an SCA 12th Night Party and I have the most amazing, gorgeous new accessory to complete my outfit. I will have pics of it after our event, but in the meantime you can read about it and see photos of it here: Edyth Miller

 

Have a wonderful Christmas dearies!

 

Love,

Sarah