Ciaooooooo - and oooooooooh it is cold!!
Hi my dearest friends and Hive community: I'm writing to you from my beautiful-but-super-cold tent, in the gardens of this (dysfunctional!) rental house up the Portuguese glen near Cojâ....
Luckily I've repaired the tent, after a big storm forced the central pole (in the top photo) through the top of it: I had to resew through several layers of canvas and plastic, to get the stability of the form again.
We're feeling slightly better, since partially vacating the property, and pulling Vincent's mattresses plus all our winter blankets down the steep xisto steps and under the gorgeous canvas dome... This was our first night out of the house, and we don't intend to sleep there again!
Long story short, this has been an extremely challenging week, between keeping the house warm versus not dying of carbon monoxide poisoning; and negotiating with a landlord who is negating everything we're telling him (about the myriad serious problems in the house). Hmf. Last time I ever rent anything, ever.
Meanwhile, I've tried tried to focus on my needework, and have found it very difficult to concentrate (what with the emmissions from the stove), or to make progress on any projects, what with most of the contents of the house being in a state of flux... We have booked our journey back to Italy, and are counting the days until we get on the long bus-ferry-train-taxi trip back to the Arthouse.
But I managed one great achievement this week: my old red pinafore dress, one of my first big sewing projects a couple of years ago, from an old bedsheet - I transformed it into a pair of magnificent trousers!!
I've been imagining these kecks for a while, but was very nervous - as you can imagine - to cut into a favourite, handmade dress... It took some serious courage to make the first cut, taking off the pinafore bib and the straps, but I did it!
The remaining top edges of the now skirt were half good and half needing a new waistband, so I used the cut straps (which were pretty long) to make a nice waist border for the back of this new (temporary) skirt, to match with the front.
This involved keeping the elesticated waist until I'd sewn the new waistband in, then cutting it out after, which helped me not have to reset the gathered fabric. I took a rough measurement of my waist where I wanted the new trousers to sit, then a measurement of the waist-to-gusset and the back-waist-to-gusset.
This led to the - huge! - cutting of the legs! Huge in two ways: both gigantic new trouser legs, and a great leap of confidence in my making the cut. Phew: a messy and nerve-racking procedure, but I did it!
From there it was all about the details, and the proving; my first try-out felt like having a wedgey (hehehehe!) but then I remembered a great 'crotch fix' which 
Then onto the ankle finishings; by which time I was really focussed and into it, knowing that my brand new super-trousers were tantalisingly close to existing.... I'm going to tell you more about that in the next post, which should also have me frollicking around in the final trews: it has been too cold and chaotic to do a photoshoot, but 
