Hello! Happy autumn, I guess!
For the first time in a very long time - maybe ever, in fact - I find myself not actively hating the onset of autumn and winter. I think it might be to do with the fact that I now live in a home that has central heating (our flat in Leamington was brutally cold in winter as the only heating was from two ancient storage heaters and all the windows were single-glazed and draughty) but it's probably some sort of autumnal denial because we have been enjoying some unseasonably warm weather recently.
Since I last blogged, life has continued to shift in interesting ways. The short-term job I had been doing from the beginning of June came to an end in mid-September, and I was offered a permanent job in the same organisation but in a different department. Working there had not been my plan when we moved - I had job offer for an assessment job somewhere else. But I enjoyed the short-term job so much that I was excited to accept their permanent offer. I started the new job at the end of September and I'm enjoying it a lot so far. I've also started working in the office two days a week, which feels a little weird (it definitely feels strange to wear a mask all day) but it's good. I can walk to work, which is wonderful. My colleagues are nice, the job isn't stressful and, importantly, the work canteen is superb and cheap.
I definitely had a moment of doubt of like... should I step out of the field I had been working in for 13 years. Does that mean I have wasted the expertise I have built up, is this a backwards step etc... the way we are taught to think about our work life is that a career is a ladder that you are slowly climbing up, and that up is the only direction you should be travelling. But it isn't that. We moved to improve the quality of our lives and work is a big part of that - my old job was very bad for my mental health! Taking a chance on something else feels like the right thing to do.
Here's what I wore on my first office day of my new job - mustard Flint pants, RTW blouse and vintage velvet jacket.
If you're here for the sewing, prepare to be disappointed. I haven't been doing much sewing. Well - a little, but not much. I'm working out what my new wardrobe needs are, so I'm not extremely motivated to do a lot of sewing.
Something I did spend time on, though, was making a replacement pair of denim Jenny overalls. The first pair I made - my first pair of Jenny overalls - were absolutely great and I wore them until they were no longer really wearable:
Look at this sweet summer pre-global pandemic child! I made this in October 2019 and wore them LOADS. Lots and lots. They were made from a stretch denim that ended up not wearing well - they shrank and faded quite badly so after we moved, I retired them. And I have numerous other pairs of Jenny dungarees now but there was a gap in my wardrobe for a denim pair so I bought some rigid denim from a shop in Dublin and made another pair:
There's not a great deal to say about these, but I made these in early September and they're great. The denim is an 11oz washed indigo denim, and it feels lovely to wear. I have ended up hemming them slightly shorter than they are in this photo now though because they were slightly too long. Anyway, they're great.
I had a birthday recently and I made an impractical birthday dress from some cute knockoff D&G fabric that I bought from Ali Express:
I wasn't going to make a special dress but we decided to have a couple of days away for my birthday, so I thought I might as well. I'd had the fabric for a little while and hadn't been sure what to do with it. I used the Emery dress by Christine Haynes and I just added a ruffle to the hem. Again, this is kind of a riff on something I've made before - the Majolica dress - which I made for my birthday in 2019 and was able to wear on holiday in the south of France:
I love this dress so much, you guys. And it's still very much in rotation!
We didn't go to the south of France - I'm not ready yet for international travel - but we had a couple of days in Cork city because neither of us had ever been before.
