Most Grievous Neglect

Oh dear.  I haven't paid any attention to blogging in a great while. I had several months of pet tribulations with my poor sweet childhood doggie, Honey, and we finally had to put her down before an inoperable tumor made her miserable. She was very elderly, and had cancerous tumors removed before, so it wasn't like this was wholly unexpected, but I still can't believe the grieving period and depression has been so intense. I genuinely feel like I lost a family member...maybe because other than my parents, she was the one consistent link to good memories with my brother, who is in a very hazardous part of Afghanistan right now and whom I worry about constantly.

SO. All the stress and vet visits and bills have kept me too busy for much sewing, but in the past week I have made significant progress on the striped en fourreau, which is not going to be a very attractive dress in my opinion. The fit should be fine, I just feel like the fabric is too coarse to be anything but a work-dress. I'm having to abandon my wishful pagoda sleeve and serpentine trim dreams, because they'd just look silly on this thing, sigh.  I'm trying to do actual robings for the first time (they're just tacked onto my yellow linen gown) and it's fiddly trying to decide how wide to make them. Don't think I will bother with a matching stomacher because I have some matelasse fabric that looks almost like some of the white corded/quilted stomachers in a few books.

OH SPEAKING OF BOOKS. I'm pretty sure I'm the last one to know about this since I haven't even been reading blogs, but, MetPublications put so.much.stuff online for free pdf download.  American Portraits in Miniature, Eighteenth Century French Drawings in New York Collections, John Singleton Copley in America, Period Rooms in the Metropolitain Museum, The Eighteenth Century Woman, and...I swooned with happiness... Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century. I am going to abuse the daylights out of my free printing privileges here at work. Yes.

Last but not least, the lovely Choll at Thread-Headed Snippet awarded me a "Versatile Blogger" award...I was so darn busy being versatile that I didn't get around to mentioning it! Thank you, dearest blogger of snark and awesome! Right now I can't do the requisite pasting and referring and so-forth (in fact I'm not sure there's much point in referring because everyone I would recommend has already been awarded, drat) but I am most honored, if unforgivably absent.