Hungry Caterpillar II

Ellery was seen at her baby sisters birthday in this. But what did the birthday girl wear?

 How about a white pinafore over a bright green dress?

 I found a perfect hungry caterpillar to embroider with my new machine and it brought the color to the bodice of the pinafore.

Should I use white ties on the side of the apron?

 Or colored caterpillar bites for ties?
I choose colorful ones.

 A Peter Pan collar?

Or a pleated small collar to match big sis's blue pleats on her dress?
I choose pleats. I do love my pleater attachment.
If you want to see Cossette in the dress along with some cute shoes that her mommy found, go here and see the whole party.
Looks like fun, huh?

Guardsman Pass

I am home at last for at least a couple of weeks. I'll hopefully get some pictures of projects that I've been up to, but for now I'll show some pictures of a hike/drive that Jonathan, Stephanie and I went on yesterday.

 Here is our tour guide and oldest child. Seems that Jonathan knows more places to go in the Utah mountains than even Grandpa Kelly or Hodgman. The names of rock formations as well as the science of all of those rocks is always right on the tip of his tongue.

 The clouds this time of year are white and fluffy for miles up into the sky during the day, and then often turn grey and ominous in the evening. One of the nights I was there we experienced a loud thunderstorm and high winds. I had forgotten about these storms and was happy I was safe and sound inside Stephanie's cute little house.

 Stephanie was able to come with us between orientations of her new teaching position, and volleyball practice with the AF girls who are already in love with her.

I have NEVER seen the mountains of Utah with so much green, and the flowers were full and fabulous. I suppose it has something to do with the wet spring and summer that the western US has experienced.
It was gorgeous. Really.

You should click on this picture to better see the Indian Paintbrush, Lupine, & Skunk Cabbage

There were also at least 3 kinds of Daisy's, Bluebells, 4 kinds of berries (we weren't sure if we could eat one of them and Jonathan smeared some of one berry juice on him arm to see if he'd get an allergic reaction which he did not), wild Delphinium, and other flowers that I didn't recognize.

 This is approaching Mary Lake at Brighton (ski area) up Big Cottonwood Canyon east of Salt Lake City.

 Overlooking the Guardsman Pass road that we have just ascended.

Down on the other side of Guardsman, headed to Park City. Can you see what I see????

I wish I had a different lens. The Hubby let me use his camera which was brave of him after what I did last week.
There were 6 moose. SIX! At least 4 males and 1 female. We didn't see the head of the other one, but I suppose it is mating season and they herd a bit during the early fall when they are mating.
I was so excited that I spotted them far of and Stephanie u-turned her little Honda around so we could get a closer look.
Very pretty day and fun kids I have.

Embarassed and Upset

I have trotted across the western United States once again to Grand Junction, Colorado. My mother had surgery and I came to see if I could help out a bit and throw some TLC toward my parents for the week.
I have gone on a hike with sister and family, swam at brothers house, revisited 1st ward, eaten some great meals, etc and all without my handy dandy camera which I LEFT ON THE PLANE or in the airport.
I am sick about it and can't quite believe how I could do such a thing. It's not a little itty bitty camera. It is a nice big camera and I am praying that when the lost and found(s) open at the airlines and in the airports at 9 am tomorrow morning I will somehow be able to recover my lost, unmarked D-200 Nikon.
Please pray with me for the honest people out there.

Hungry Caterpillar

DD decided to have a Hungry Caterpillar birthday party for her most darling one year old baby girl.
I was enlisted to help decorate the children for the event.

 Katz helped me choose the border fabric at least a year ago, and this b-day made me act on the promise to sew it up.

The older sister received a cute little sleeveless summer dress made from some material that goes with the borders of food that the caterpillar is ravaging. The different colored dots are representative of his bites of yummy food.  I trimmed it with some cute blue pleated ruffles and of course ... a bow in back.

 Ellery looks very cute in it.

 Smiling for GPa who is following her around the wax museum with a camera.

Aptos Gold

I have not disappeared off of the planet, but I've been doing a few non blogging things. I'm trying to figure out if we should/can redo our backyard along with refinishing our 36 year old plaster in the pool, and digging new drains for the patio so that we don't get flooded in the winter.
We have these wonderful huge ash trees in the yard. They provide cool ample shade in the spring, summer, and fall so we put up with the leaf, pod mess in the winter.

My closest guess is that they are Green Ash trees and should live 50 more years in the urban setting that is our back yard, so we sort of want to plan around them.

We do really need to fix a few things that are falling apart, so as long as we have a tractor back there, we have to figure out what else we can/should do.
I have never liked the bricks as pool decking because it can be so gritty and dirty when lying wet on the red bricks. They are super hot to the feet in midsummer, the grout in some areas is sandy, and the brick wall around one of the Ash trees is cracked. So should we replace all the brick for stone? or stucco?
The main patio off of the house is aggregated concrete circa 1975, is uneven and lifted up because of the root system on the Ash tree, so ... should we just repair and have it look patched? or actually replace it all. We have to dig up a good portion of it to replace the drainage pipes anyway.
These are some of the questions we've been trying to find answers to. How much $$$$.
Should we just re-plaster the pool, or use the newer Pebbletec? If we are changing the decking can we reroute the solar pipes through it? How 'bout the irrigation pipes?
Do you like this rock?

It is called Aptos Gold. It's from Arizona.
 Or this?

 More for the walls and fireplace.  Or this?

Should the wall rock and the decking be different?
Should we use concrete?
How about coping around the pool?
Replace the pool tiles?
Put in more lighting?
What about a new sound system?
Electricity?
Maybe consider natural gas line to the new outdoor kitchen?
I always like fireplaces outside?
Natural gas to that?
Built in heat lamps for cool California nights?
We could spend as much as we bought the house for. Maybe we should try to spend something like we bought our last house for. Maybe we should spend something like we bought our 1st Portland house for in 1981. Oh, but then we couldn't re-plaster the pool.
Decisions, decisions.
I'm going to go make some cookies.

Barelegged or Hose?

Yesterday as I was perusing my followed blog list, I ran across a survey that I had voted on last week. I usually don't make a comment when looking around, and if I do comment is is a very short snippet of conversation because I am too lazy to spend much time on comment forms, but I will often take the 3 seconds to check a voting box and SUBMIT key.
Anyhow, now is the time that I have to admit I have started following a blog called "What Kate Wore."

I am slightly intrigued that the now famous Princess Kate is wearing dresses that are generally modest and classy, and I really like that because perhaps the fashion world will begin to make lower priced modest dresses for me and mine. 

Well the poll was all about her hosiery, or as the English call them "tights" and whether or not people might start wearing them again now that they see them on her.
All the comments were about being a throwback to the 80's and I thought,
 "It was way more than a style of the 80's that we were referring to."


I remember my mother talking about drawing a line down the back of their legs when nylon's were hard to come by during WWII and that they tried to fool people by making a fake seam down the back of a womans leg with eyebrow pencils. Apparently nylons made, out of the miracle new fabric, had just been on the market starting May 15, 1940 and were quickly a huge success selling 64 million pairs within the first year.


Women started wearing the far more comfortable panty hose in the 60's. Spandex had been introduced in 1959 and the extra stretchy bounce of that material made nylons fit much better and being able to lose all of the other undergarments and just wear nylons up to the waist was a much more comfortable fashion.
Skirts became shorter probably because of the new pantyhose. (I had never thought about this before, but it totally makes sense to me)

I have 2 personal childhood stories about nylons. 

1.   When I was in 6th grade my mother bribed me by letting me buy nylons if I would choose the lower healed dress shoe. I gave in and felt older even without the higher heel.

2.  When I was in 7th grade, the same cute mother let me buy a garter belt and 3 pairs of colored opaque stockings to wear with my various school dresses. I thought it was really cool to be able to wear an old fashioned garter belt that had hooks on it to attach the thigh high stockings, but now that I think about it, perhaps that was to prevent me from hiking my skirts up too high as the fashions were very mini in 1970. 

That Joyce Kelly was one smart (or tricky) mother.

Okay, now for the purpose of my post.
As I was polling about nylons, I was reminded about an older woman at my church now, who is prone to ask me inappropriate questions from time to time.


Example: "Did you know that that style of skirt makes your back side look wider than it actually is?"
Yes, she really said that to me a few years back.


Another time she asked, "When was it that you decided it was okay not to wear stockings to church?"
(I should have answered with, "When was it that you decided that tacky and rude were going to be part of your personality?")
This is the question I was thinking about as I read the article. Apparently I was not the only woman who had decided it wasn't necessary to wear "stockings" to church.


FYI, I have modified my stocking wearing the past few years. During the cooler months I wear them and the warmer months I don't. 


I am unsure what the rest of the fashion world will do, but for now that is my decision, and I'm sticking to it.

The Met

When we were in NYC a couple of weeks ago I made the Hodgpeople gang go to the Metropolitan Museum to see the Alexander McQueen show that is there until next month.

Austin and the little people went to other areas of the humongous museum and looked at armor or something because there weren't any strollers allowed in the overly crowded McQueen display.

So Aust sacrificed and stayed with the kiddies.

......And got to see cool things like Medusa's head in the hand of Perseus?

Anyway back to Lee Alexander McQueen.

This English clothing designer who first designed for his sisters and then the theatre, was best known for his controversial catwalk shows, low riding jeans, skulls, fantasy, and dramatic influence on the fashion world.
He was the head designer for Givenchy design house int he 90's and left for his own company in 2001.

Looking at this Met show entitled Savage Beauty, it becomes apparent to the viewer that, "He was a troubled soul," as Katz would say as she roamed through the display with The Hubby and me.

 This piece is from his 2006 "Widows of Culloden," show. I actually kind of like this one, maybe because of it's name and my affinity for Diane Gabaldon's books about Scottish history, or because I just like tartan. Such an eclectic mix of fabric.

And his shoes were out of this world.

 What would you say if you walked past someone with these on the end of her legs?

This particular dress caught my fancy, because there was a McQueen quote next to the dress that stated he used live flowers because they die, and he wanted to show that everything dies. Weird.
Most of the mannequins showing the clothing were faceless, or their heads were covered in odd hats. My cousin tells me he influenced her hats and costumes for the dance shows she has done.

He lived 40 years, then ended his own life last year. His brand will live on as celebrities and princesses wear it today.

Crazy world we live in.