Happy holidays to all my lovelies! As decoration for today’s holiday archives entry, you’ll see what passes for a Christmas tree around here.
Yes, it’s a vintage wire dress form adorned with lights and giant microbe tree ornaments. [I have a soft spot for those because if that company owner had come to me wanting a professional assessment, I would have said their idea didn’t have the proverbial snowball’s chance.] The “tree” frame is a microphone boom, a section of pipe and a hardware connector from a garment Z rack. The star is two layers of pattern paper taped together. Beneath you’ll notice that the gifts are wrapped in standard kraft paper and tied with sisal twine, laying on a couple of yards of red wool (the wool is horrible, bleeds like crazy and the grain isn’t stable either). It looks very pretty in real life, the brown with red. I haven’t had a real tree in years if for no other reason that trees and a half dozen or more cats, don’t mix. Well. Said tree would require more maintenance than is normally warranted as this will attest.
Anyway, I hope your holiday is warm and loving. Enjoy your family and friends. Now I have to go make dinner. We are having spinach lasagne, salad, rolls and apple crisp for dessert. We made the crisp yesterday which was not such a good idea in hindsight because there may not be enough left to serve our guests.
If you should have time to kill, here’s this week’s archives entry. Happy holidays!
December 14, through December 20, 2005
Knits are evil
Pattern puzzle: Julian & Sophie
You have got to see this
Batch product development
Slavery or Bravery. Pick one.
The eight deadly sins of waste
Marketing only gets you so far
How to get from a 7 to a 10
Which fashion school is best?
Engineers gone wild
Batch product development 2
Get off your lazy butt
December 14, through December 20, 2006
Fix this: mitten contest pt 3
NASA’s sizing problem
Product storage problems
Shorten a separating zipper
Workplace Management
How to select commercial pressing equipment pt.2
Kathleen in French Vogue!
December 14, through December 20, 2007
I bought a dress form
Leather pattern making and sewing class
Sock wars and Handmade
5 Questions all designers must answer
Pop Quiz #471
December 14, through December 20, 2008
CPSIA: How to move forward, coping with crisis
CPSIA and tracking label requirements
Being sued by a client
Twitter?
December 14, through December 20, 2009
Promising news in textiles
A return to wool
Pattern puzzle: propellers
What’s an idea worth?
How to compare fabric costs: handy new tool
December 14, through December 20, 2010
Refine My Line: Asymmetrical Wrap Dress
Refine My Line: Asymmetrical Wrap Dress pt.2
Industrial sewing instructions
Always nice to see we’re not the only ones with giant microbe tree ornaments on our tree! We went with a living tree this year — smaller, but it will get planted in the windbreak outside, and have a long and fulfilling life.
Merry Christmas, Kathleen. I hope you have a wonderful day. Your tree is lovely. All we have for a Christmas tree is a Charlie Brown tree like this one: http://www.target.com/p/Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree-18/-/A-11278170, but it suits us just fine.
Love your Christmas tree, Kathleen.
Traditional Christmas trees are incongruous for a southern hemisphere mid-summer Christmas. I have been planning (for a few years) a decoration theme suitable for an African Christmas and was delighted to find a wire-fashioned “baobab”-style tree made by some budding wire-work artists from an empowerment NGO (ticks in all the right boxes as far as I am concerned!). I hooked all the silver baubles I already had onto the ends of the branches, wound some tinsel around the trunk, and it looks stunning; beauty in simplicity. I am so thrilled!
I hope you, and all members of the fashion-incubator community, had a blessed day, and wish us all a Happy New Year!
I love your tree! I understand about the cats and real tree – it took a few years for ours to get over trying to climb it. Now they simply try to lay on the bottom branches. I hope your Christmas day was a good one!
Joyeux Noël from France Kathleen; I love your xmas tree.
Thanks for the link with the pictures of the cats climbing the Christmas tree, that was very cute. I passed it along to someone who I knew would appreciate it.
Fashionarium had a bunch of cool designer christmas trees. I’m behind on my feed so I didn’t know it till now….
I think you are very brave to have a tree with 6 cats. I gave up on the idea as 2 would chase each other up & down the tree, the other would be so frightened he would not come into the room. I put a wreath instead.