first day of december vacation

Today is my first day of December vacation... the last vacation of the year. It will last about a week. It comes at a bad time for a few people at work - but we had to scrabble and schedule whatever time was left somewhere in late October.. and things that happened since then have made this a bad time. *sigh* I did need it, though! Hopefully they will all hold it together until I get back next Monday. My sick is not entirely gone, Mark is still coughing - but Esme seems good. We hope not to have to do a lot this week and just heal up.

I went to the store last night and used Nana in Minnesota's Christmas gift card to buy a few things for Esme, a blanket and stuffed animal and two games, all to put away for Christmas. Not out of the gift card, I bought a yard of cotton fabric and yarn to continue projects today. I plan to make a new 'Cinderella' type dress for Esme with longer sleeves out of the new fabric. I have some little projects I am preparing to send out in the mail, and a doll to drop off at work sometime this week for the auction for a coworker's mother's medical bill. And I have the bean seeds to learn more about. So, I have some things planned but nothing very intense.


'dragon front' dress
used McCalls 8001 pattern with alterations
her dragon pants had a hole in the seat,
so they ended up on the cutting table to remake...

got myself right onto this and now it needs sleeves, zipper and hem. That will take a few more hours but it should be done tonight if I keep on it. I went a little crooked on the neck facing tacking (ziggy stitching there) but it wasn't enough to redo it. For the sleeves I took the short cap sleeve that comes with the pattern and combined its shape with the coat sleeve in the pattern! Adjusting for the length of her arm the sleeves ended up very useable.... maybe not perfect but pretty close to it.

100% cotton brown fabric, mixed with Kona green cotton and the recycled 'dragon pants' to extend the skirt panels. I am hoping the Kona cotton (thicker, more nap) will keep her warmer this winter in the chest area. I had mistakenly thought the 100% cotton plain fabric would be warmer than the 65/35 polycotton blend... it actually seems the opposite. However, the 100% Kona cotton with its thicker weight and fuzzy nap seems warmer than either of them. The cotton fabric does wrinkle badly... but hey, she is four years old. Warm is more important and anything and everything she might wear would have wrinkles in it eventually ;)

dreams
I had that weird dream again last night -- the one where people come to me and tell me they did not have any food... We were searching for people after a disaster and trying to gather survivors and supplies. A skeleton fog said it had warned me of the 'oncoming famine' before...why had I not done anything about it... and it disintegrated. That nearly woke me up, as yes, I have had these dreams before. That was a 'brain pay attention and think as if awake' sign from my subconscious. Famine dreams are supposed to be very bad omens, sickness and business problems to come, if the famine is happening to you and you have helplessness over no food. But, in the dreams, it is always a survival situation where I have to help everyone, where I go find the food...make the food, scour the forests and the dead gardens and cupboards. In the dream I dug in a pantry and brought out an apple, and a potato, a can of soup and some beans and began to gather pots and equipment to make a soup. A big guy from work arrived and looked at the food in one of the pots. He was hungry but he commented to someone else who had gone to get me that he didn't want to eat that, wasn't there anything else? That was what there was - I could add some more water and another potato and make enough that everyone could have some.

In other recent dreams I am trying to collect seeds out in a dead garden and everyone else is just worried.. I am planning with the materials at hand while those things are still there. I was sorting through metal and useable parts, hinges and screws and nails in a ruined antique shop that had price tags on everything including the registers... all old as if someone had a last dash to make a profit and still had to abandon the place. It was as if I was looking through time at people arguing about if they were allowed to sell a piece of paper at one shop while there stacks and stacks piled in another corner that no one had remembered... weird games my brain plays... I wish I could write them all down and make sense of them, maybe a good book.

Anyway, they say cooking for other people during a famine is a good dream omen - of being able to help in bad times and offer encouragement to others. I'll take that. And I like that in those dreams I do not feel helplessness when faced with the situation, but instead take action. Those sort of 'mettle' tests are good to know which road you might travel... I take these kind of dreams as tests and preparations for life in general, that my brain somehow sees necessary to feel capable of 'getting going when the going gets bad' etc...