Our friend, Stine, a teacher here in Monument Valley, took us on a sunrise hike around the Mittens. This was by far, my favorite hike of all that we have taken in Monument Valley
As the light dawned on the mittens, the immensity of the mittens dawned on me.
Living in Monument Valley has spectacular views. There are other, less spectacular things. Like very spotty cell service and frequent power-outages. Usually the power is only out for a short time, but this Saturday it was out for about 24 hours.
The power outage interrupted my weekend sewing project.
A few years ago, I made a wedding dress. There was some lace left over, and I promised to make a baby blessing dress for the bride’s baby girl.
Baby girl is on her way here, so I got out the lace. There was far less lace than I remembered.
First panic.
I finagled around and got all the pieces I needed cut. I did some sewing and put the project away for the next day.
A week or two later, I finally had time to get it out again. I could not find some of the pieces. I looked and looked, but they were lost.
Second panic.
I considered cutting the skirt shorter to replace the pieces. I called my sister, and she talked me off that ledge.
Then I found the original pieces. They were the pieces I had already sewn together, and they had been right in front of my face the whole time. My sister suggested medication. I decided I had better finish the dress that day rather than lose pieces/forget what I had already done yet again.
The pattern instructions confused me several times. I read them and re-read them and re-read them again. Finally I figured out what the pattern was telling me to do. This dress has a bodice front and back, a lace overlay front and back, and a lining front and back. I was confusing the bodice and the bodice lining. 3 layers. Not 2. I had to cut out more bodice pieces. So now the skirt lining is shorter, because I had to get that fabric from somewhere, and Jo-Anne’s is 3 hours away!
I sewed the bodice together wrong two different times before I got it right. I really hate unpicking lace.
Finally, the dress was all the way sewn, except for the sleeves and buttons. Then the power went out. Forced sewing break.
Did I mention that it’s hard to do a sewing project when you live almost 3 hours from the fabric store?
I had to get creative a couple of times, when I didn’t have what the patterned called for (interfacing—replaced it with fuse-able hem tape), and I almost gave up when it got time to put button holes in. My machine is a tiny bit broken on it’s button-hole function. I tried elastic loops for the buttons, but they looked terrible.
The resident captain came to my rescue and suggested hook and eye closures and to let the buttons just be for decoration. Quick as a wink, I applied his genius idea. Also, I managed to break a hand sewing needle, as well as stab myself and bleed all over the dress while I was sewing on the buttons, because that fuse-able hemming tape turned out to be really hard to sew through.
Now it’s been a week since I finished the dress, but it isn’t mailed yet because another quirk of Rez life is that the post office is only open from 9 AM to 1 PM (fairly frequently it closes earlier than the posted hours.) So I can only go on my lunch break. Additionally, the post office only takes cash. So it took me several days to get cash and several tries of not making it to the post office in time. Tomorrow will be the magic day, I’m sure of it.
Our friends, Mark and Shannon, took us hiking in Corkscrew Canyon. It is not in a tourist area, and only people who live here can go to it. (You gotta know someone.)
It was beautiful and fun. We had to carry a ladder with us, and Shannon’s 25-year-old son had to scramble up and down a couple of tough places to place the ladder for us oldies.
Corkscrew Canyon is super cool.
It is our first time ever of living in a neighborhood where kids come to trick-or-treat. We had so much fun, we almost fought over who got to answer the door. We did not run out of candy, so I feel like the night was a great success. Maybe next year I’ll decorate as well.
I took a quick trip this weekend. Thursday, I drove to Phoenix. The scenery on my drive was beautiful. Flagstaff is a beautiful city. There are so many tall pine trees that you don’t see many of the buildings, just glimpses, here and there. It reminded me of Portland, OR. Also I did not know Arizona had so many beautiful mountains. Phoenix looked so strange to my eyes. If I looked at the city, it reminded me of Cancun and the Yucatan peninsula because it was so flat and full of palm trees. Yet if I looked at the mountainous backdrop, I felt I was looking at Orem, UT.
From Phoenix, I flew to Springfield. My lovely sister-in-law, Amy, picked me up and I stayed the night with her and Peter. The next day, all my Missouri siblings and Mom and Dad, came up to Peter’s house and visited with me. It was just what I had hoped for and so nice of Amy to go through all that extra work.
Then at 5:30 came the big reason for my trip: I attended the wedding of Hunter and Alex Bartelt. It was a lovely sunset wedding with reception afterwards.
Alex had a most beautiful peachy dress with long sleeves and lace, and Hunter wore a cream colored suit with a pale green shirt. True to their personality, the frame for their wedding arch was printed on a 3D printer.
They had a celtic hand binding, using a rope Hunter made himself, and henna wedding tattoos. It was gloriously nerdy and the whole thing made me very happy.
Hunter and Alex have pretty healthy attitudes towards life and working as a team, and I think they are going to be wildly successful as a couple.
Just like every outdoor October wedding I’ve been to, it got pretty cold and dark fast, but all the guests made lanterns with their phone flashlights and water bottles, and there was a bonfire. The catered dinner was really excellent. I chose the vegetarian saffron-rice-stuffed-pepper, and it was delicious, as was the salad and the buttery oven potatoes and the candied green beans and carrots. When I commented on how good it was, Hunter told me that he and Alex decided that food was the key to a successful reception, and that they had spent the bulk of their budget on the food and drinks. I think they made a wise choice. I visited with Hunter’s mother and grandmother, and it was nice to hear about what is going on with them.
Friday night, Ana, Gwendolyn, and Renata came up to Springfield and stayed the night at Amy’s house also. (Good luck some of the kids had gone camping with Peter.) In the morning, they took me to breakfast at Van Gogh’s Cafe downtown.
It was super cute and fancy, and I really enjoyed talking with my girls.
Then they took me back to the airport, so I could catch my flight back to Phoenix. It is nice that there is a direct flight from Phoenix to Springfield, and the drive is a pleasant one, even though it is almost 6 hours. I did not calculate my arrive home time very well, because I forgot to account for Arizona not being on Daylight Savings Time. So, I thought I would get home about 8pm, but I actually got home at 10:30 pm. My kids were all happy when I arrived and promised me that they did not have any fighting while I was gone.
Monday was a day off school, and I took full advantage of the time to get laundry done and tidy up corners that had begun to gather piles of homeless books and papers. I also found the floor of the Twin’s bedroom and sorted all the legos (again). Those little turkeys had piles of dirty laundry hidden under blanket forts and pokemon cards. I have just been avoiding their room for a couple of weeks, and clearly, avoiding it is not a good solution. It feels good to have it clean.
We share our small story with Lift and Love because we hope it is helpful to others. We appreciate the stories at Lift and Love, and they have helped us.
“It is a mistake, perhaps, to think that, to do one thing well, we must just do and think about that and nothing else all the time. It is our business to know all we can and to spend a part of our lives in increasing our knowledge of Nature and Art, of Literature and Man, of the Past and the Present. That is one way in which we become greater persons, and the more a person is, the better he will do whatever piece of special work falls to his share. Let us have, like Leonardo [daVinci], a spirit ‘invariably royal and magnanimous.”
Charlotte Mason, vol 4 pg 48
The resident Captain announced the football game for homecoming. Our team lost, but the view was spectacular.
About half the school royalty wore traditional Navajo dress and about half wore modern formal gowns. The traditional Navajo dresses looked far more royal to me.
Marvelous Pigs in Satin 