A Makeover For Autumn

It's Sunday afternoon. The sun is shining, but it's not warm enough to go the quarry as planned for one last swim before fall descends. Yesterday I canned 24 litres of tomatoes (nothing beats the winter kill-me's like opening one of these babies up in January and making a tomato sauce that would make summer blush). Trying to mentally calibrate for the dropping temperatures; I've been finding it difficult to get dressed these days. I haven't organized my closet for fall yet and I've been resisting wearing closed toe footwear and heavier clothing and have been suffering through chilly evenings in my not-ready-to-give-up-summer-dresses stubbornness.

I do love autumn - I like crisp nights and changing leaves, but when you live this far north it is over far too quickly. It is more of a very brief, bittersweet interlude than an actual season. Over before you know it and then it's parkas and snow boots and vitamin D supplements. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In honour of the changing season, I decided to give the blog a makeover. I was never really happy with the original design (being a designer by trade means I tend to obsess about it in every area of my life) so I enlisted the help of the lovely and wonderful Meghan Murray to help with some graphic and web design. Blogger is not the most flexible platform for being really creative but I'm super happy with what we came up with. One element that I think is particularly useful is the Gallery we created. It's an easy way to organize all of my projects on one page and is a quick visual summary of what I've been up to for the last year or so (big epic props to Andrea at Four Square Walls who helped me figure out how to do it).

In exchange for Meghan's help, we employed the age old barter system. Not having any goats to give her, we settled on a dress. She picked Vogue 1102 out of my stash, and we did a preliminary fitting using a muslin before I made the final product out of a beautiful Egyptian cotton sheet. The dress was inspired by this beauty - I think it's a pretty good approximation and I think Meghan looks amazing in it. I shortened it quite a bit and lined it with cotton batiste. It's light and airy and will probably turn some heads when she gets a chance to wear it next year (unless we get an Indian summer: fingers crossed).

Off to cook brunch for some out-of-town friends. Hope you are enjoying the last dog days of summer.