I recently made a short dress and a long skirt. The short dress is the new Amarena Dress pattern from Liesl + Co. I found some heavily embroidered fabric on Etsy and the Amarena dress felt like the perfect pattern for it. I wanted to make something that could be a bit dressy but I…

Our weekend was filled with Christmas stuff from beginning to end. We started out with our annual Gingerbread party with friends on Friday. Saturday evening we had our Swiss Christmas celebration – complete with raclette cheese and presents. And then on Sunday we got to go to the Chicago Botanic Garden's light show. What a…

I've been taking a ballet class for a few months. I'm so happy to have found a great teacher and it just feels so good every time I go. My old shoes were ready to retire. 

Let me tell you about my most recent walk through the prairie at The Chicago Botanic Garden. The raindrops were like cold bulbs clinging to branches. The temperature was hovering right around freezing, and then a hazy sun came out, and it was like someone turned the lights on.  I've almost come to the end…

My sewing room is usually a disaster. I love it. Now and then the fabric piles get too big and I have to clean up. And by clean up – I mean start a project to use up all those precious fabric scraps. So I spent a bunch of hours over the weekend finishing this…

The past couple weeks have been moving very fast. Time for a catch-up.  First up – I had a birthday and Bea made a cake. I've been keeping up with my walks at the botanic garden and also the weekly photos of this spot. Bea and I went down into the city for a members…

I decided to go a little retro by covering our tree with tinsel this year. Sparkley!

Here are some photos of all the same things I photograph every week. But they're not the same really because everything changes with every bit of weather through every season. And I can't seem to not take photos of all the plants that are so interesting to me. Today there was frost covering anything in…

I made a shirt to try out a new dress pattern. Of course it's a pattern from Liesl + Co. For 99% of the sewing I do I use her patterns. I don't want to waste my time on a pattern that doesn't fit at the end. Or even worse a pattern that is completely…