summercraft: weekend sewing

Here is a new summer tradition for me, two years strong: sewing with Heather and Liesl in Vermont. I mean, come on, how adorable are these two:

Not only are they super-charming and relentlessly upbeat, they are kickass sewing instructors. And I’m realizing this is a very rare combination of qualities: people who are generous, big-hearted, laugh-until-your-stomach-hurts funny, and scary good at what they do. Heather and Liesl know the best way to do something -- but more importantly, they know how to teach you how to do it. And not just so you can do it with their help, but so you understand well enough to do it on your own (even though it’s way less fun without them).

Plus, the weekend takes place at a quintessential Vermont inn, complete with quilts on the beds, endless lemonade and chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen, a spring-fed pond ringed by blueberry bushes and Adirondack chairs, and a big wooden barn that we turned into a happy little sewing sweatshop.

This year, Heather hauled up her Orla Kiely teepee from New York. And decorated it with a working chandelier, a Denyse Schmidt quilt and sheepskin rug to set the mood for afternoon naps and cocktails (Heather does not have ideas in half measures).

There was also a visit to a neighboring barn stuffed full of amazing costumes and props. A townwide yard sale. Hiking to a secret Vermont lake. And beaucoup de sewing, surrounded by blazing greenery during the day and a chorus of crickets and bullfrogs at night. All in the company of a bunch of funny, creative and sassy women.

Till next year, Blueberry Hill.

You can see some of the projectrs and people right here.

weekend sewing bliss

So. As if my husband and I weren’t fortunate enough to finagle spending a month in Vermont, I capped it off by spending our last weekend at a Weekend Sewing Workshop with Heather Ross. She held the weekend due west over the Green Mountains from my sister, and I couldn’t stand to be so close without attending.

It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. Heather set everything up in a weathered barn-cum-cross-country-ski-lodge on the beautiful property of the Blueberry Hill Inn. We cut, and pinned and sewed with birds and rain alternating as our soundtrack. All that, plus plenty of time for pondside cocktails, picnicking at a pristine swimming lake, and four course dinners made from local ingredients.

Heather and Liesl, pondsideBut back to the sewing. Liesl Gibson of Oliver + S joined Heather, and it was such a treat to witness their expertise. They snipped flattering necklines into our muslin dress mock-ups and talked about things like shifted bias and whether a French seam would act like boning on sheer fabric. The quintessential Vermont inn plus dressmaker’s pins flying everywhere gave the weekend an air of Newhart meets Project Runway, minus the Darryl brothers and drama.

Just before the weekend kicked off, my sister and I went on the prowl for fabric and found some beautiful, gauzy Italian cotton at Delectable Mountain Cloth in Brattleboro. It was a little treasure box of a fabric store, with yardage tucked into every corner and small glass dishes holding buttons so beautiful that they made our hearts break a little.

My fabric was a little challenging, so I didn’t come home with a totally finished project. But I am absolutely in love with how it’s shaping up. Of course, after all that sewing, all I want to do is set up my own personal sewing workshop in my dining room and finish the goods. But a month of working a lot less than I’m used to (and the corresponding paycheck) means I can only act on my fierce sewing urge in the evenings. So I periodically break from the computer, stroke my half-finished dress and think back to sewing in the barn, where there were pitchers of fresh mint-lavender lemonade and amazing chocolate chip cookies to fuel our late-night stitching.

For a full play-by-play of the weekend, read Heather’s post. And it turns out she’s doing the whole thing over again in August and still has a couple spots open. Act now!

welcome, heather ross & book giveaway!

This week it’s my great pleasure to have Heather Ross join me. If you don’t know Heather, you should. Whether it’s through her fabrics or new book or blog – everything she creates has a lovely, breezy-but-strong and very evocative pull: I want to read more stories, see more fabric, try more of her projects. Not to mention crash her parties to hear stories in person about skidding up frozen driveways in reverse and plunging into the cold ocean at Coney Island.

Heather was kind enough to answer some of my questions below, and she'll be back on Wednesday to answer yours. So leave any questions that bubble up from this interview in the comment section below, and check back later this week. Plus, Heather's giving a book away to a lucky reader -- simply leave a comment or post and you're entered in the drawing!

KW: Welcome Heather, it’s really great to have you here. I know that you grew up in a one-room schoolhouse in Vermont. And I grew up in a renovated barn in Virginia. For a while, when my parents were turning the barn into a home, we didn’t have plumbing downstairs, and my mom would follow me and my sister up a hay ladder to take a bath. And instead of furniture, we had a big radial-arm saw on the second floor. I know that environment was a big influence on me. How do you think growing up in that one-room schoolhouse helped shape you?

HR: The schoolhouse was actually one of several very unconventional living situations that my sister and I like to blame for our inability to clean our own houses. But of course, it was perhaps the most lovely and the most special. It was also incredibly isolated, so we were really depending on our imaginations to stay occupied. And, for better or for worse, we had huge amounts of unstructured and unsupervised time beginning when we were quite small. For us, it worked.

KW: I have such a personal connection to your fabric and your book, and I think that’s because of all the stories you share about growing up in Vermont: river swimming and fireflies and wild chamomile. Now you live in the city – how do you reconcile your rural upbringing and now-urban life? Do you miss those toads and critters that appear in your fabric?

HR: Honestly, its hard. I don't think that a single day has gone by since I left Vermont 18 years ago that I haven't missed it. Leaving the tiny town that I grew up in was so necessary, but so heartbreaking. I think it drives so much of my art and writing because I remain so haunted by it. I do go back, occasionally, and its always complicated. There is always a piece of me that wants to rip up my return ticket or drive my rental car into the river and just stay. The landscape feels like its a part of me, but I could never really find my place in that community. I think I could try my whole life and never quite fit in. My friends were mostly imaginary, and usually four legged and furry.

Heather hanging up doll clothes in VermontThere is a great joke I love to tell: A man leaves Boston and moves to a small town in northern Vermont. Every day he stops by the little village store for food or gas and every day he sees an older man, a real Vermonter, sitting in front of the woodstove. Every day The Old Man finds a way to remind The Man from Boston that he is not a local, not a Vermonter... and he will never be. Finally, after two decades, the man from Boston approaches him and says: Look, Old Man, I know that no matter how hard I try you will never accept me or consider me a Real Vermonter, but I find a great deal of comfort in the fact the my children are, indisputably, Real Vermonters. They were born here, they grew up here, they live here. They love it here. They have never known any other place. The Old Man looks The Man From Boston in the eye for a while and finally says: Well, I don't know about that. If your cat crawled into my oven and had herself some kittens, would you call them muffins?

But the swimming holes and old apple orchards always felt like home. You can love a place as a child, especially if you feel like its yours, without being distracted by the concern that it might not love you back. Its a lot like first love, maybe.

Loving New York is more like second love. Like loving the guy who you fell for in college who you kept telling yourself you should break up with (and run back to that really nice boy, Mr. Small Town), the good looking drummer who isn't any good and spends your money and gets your car towed... but takes you to great parties and introduces you to amazingly talented people and incredible adventures and opportunities and new ideas and takes you to fine restaurants and galleries....until he dumps you for your room mate. That Guy.

You get the idea. I'm going to stick it out for a while. Living here inspires me in so many ways, not the least of which is that it has amplified my aching for the forests and the fireflies and the swimming holes, which consequently won't stop appearing in my sketchbook.

And of course, after a lifetime of wondering what it would be like to live in a city full of art and fashion and good food.... now I know. And someday I'll head back into the woods for good.

Last summer someone decided that my apartment needed new smoke alarms installed. I wasn't informed, and came home late to find a sleeping husband, and crawled into bed without turning on the bedroom light. For about twenty minutes, I lay in bed looking up at a tiny blinking green light, awestruck by the idea that a firefly had somehow found its way into our apartment. I was so thrilled. Finally I couldn't contain myself anymore and woke up TC, and pointed up at what I thought to be a sign that we belonged in the country but what he knew to be our new smoke alarm. "Oh Honey." he said, with a look on his face that was pure love. "I know. Its a lovely firefly".

Click here to read the full interview. Believe me, you won't regret it. The great stories keep coming, and then Heather answers your questions.