The Vacation is Over.

There was beach time...

Time to let your hair down...

 Archery...

And horse riding...

But now it is time for laundry, bills, grocery shopping and buying new school shoes!  The kids go back to school next Tuesday, and we have weekend house guests coming on Friday.  No sewing on the horizon for at least a fortnight, sigh.

Hopefully, I can get a little time to go back over the last two weeks of sewing blogs.  That should keep my sewing addiction fed in the meantime :-)

Olympics London 2012

Not much sewing around here!  For the last week I have been the support team for all the family trying to run back and forth to different events.  I am knackered!  When it all ends we head off for vacation ourselves.  Packing for that is a job in and of itself.Meanwhile, my random thoughts on 2012 so far.  

• We can see the lit up stadium from our upstairs landing in the far distance, if we look South.

• After great fear, the transport system has coped just fine.  More than a million people in London are "working from home."

• Turns out, Jessica Ennis was not too fat.  He he.  

She won Gold!

• What's with all the b!tching about Gabby Douglas?  Apparently her hair is unacceptable, and she should have had the stars and stripes on her uniform.  Seriously? 

Talent

Beauty

• The whole family went to the rowing heats at Eton Dorney.  Including me.  The USA women's 8 were amazing, untouchable.  Britain is very strong in rowing.  4 golds, 2 silver and 3 bronze.  It's hard to get the chance to even try rowing unless you go to a private school on a river.  

USA Women's 8 win gold.

• During the heats we saw a wild card entry from Niger.  Hamadou Djibo Issaka.  He took a full minute more to complete the race.  He was beat.  The crowd gave him loud, generous, encouraging cheers.  There is now a debate raging about whether this is a good way to encourage new countries/people into the sport or weather it is just a patronising side show.

• My husband rowed a little in high school.  He was amazed by the Eton's facilities.  He wondered to himself, if each boy gets his own boat during an Eton phys-ed lesson.  

• Eton is a fancy private school here in the UK.  I've only known one man who went to Eton.  He didn't advertise it at all, and he was a very pleasant, likeable, reasonable person.

• After winning the men's 100 meters Usain bolt spent the night, "just chatting and playing on facebook" with the women's Swedish handball team.  Hmmm, not sure I'd buy it, if I were their mothers.

Looks pretty innocent actually.

• Every Olympics has a problem with empty seats.  Turns out it's members of the "Olympic Family" who are given accredited seats and don't use them.  It's not the sponsors.  The London Organising Committee has been calling the different sporting bodies everyday to figure out on an adhoc basis which seats may not be used so that they can be sold.  Thousands of extra tickets have been released to the general public each night.  Good job.

Where is everybody?

• With Michael Phelps' record breaking gold medal haul, there has been lots of chat about the greatest Olympian of all time.

Michael Phelps: 22 Gold medals is nothing to sniff at!

Jesse Owens: 4 gold medals.  But, context is everything.

• Britain is having an amazing Olympics.  The biggest medal haul, when measured by per captia!  Wonder if they will be able to keep it up in these times of austerity.

Vogue 8791

I could only find one pattern review for Vogue 8791 on Pattern Review, and it wasn't very positive.  I already had the pattern and the medium weight white linen, so I pressed ahead.  I had wanted to make the short sleeved version, but as usual, I hadn't bought quite enough fabric.  As it was, I had to patch the bias binding together for the arm holes and cut one facing piece on the weft rather than the warp.  Yes, I am cheap.

Vogue 8791

Still after initial, low expectations, I am pretty happy with it.  I sewed a 12 on top and a 16 on bottom. It should really be an 18 on me on bottom, but Vogue doesn't put enough sizes on a single pattern for me to ever get what I need.  It's very annoying.  I thought there would be enough wearing ease for me to get away with it.  There is not.  The front slit at the hips pulls a little when I am wearing it.  I cranked the hips in on the dress form so I could get the tunic on it!  The fuzzy surface of the dress form "grabs" the fabric and nothing slides.

Of course, I hope to reverse my recent weight gain, so if not this summer, then maybe the next, sigh.

Slightly bigger picture

I used a light pink marking pen on this.  The little drops of water that are suppose to make the marks disappear are not working!  When I ironed over the marks, they turned browny-orange.  Uh, oh.  I hope that a wash in biological washing powder will sort all this out.  I used the same pen, when making a white cotton top with no problems.  Strange.

My plan has been to get on with trying to make some desperately needed pants.  I don't want to.  I'd rather make a dirndl-skirted, summer sun-dress out of the cotton eyelet  that has been sitting in my stash for three years now.  Not really what I need, but likely to be far more flattering and much easier to fit and sew for me.