Resistance Is Futile . . .

I will be assimilated. At least if I want to earn a degree.

I started in the fashion program at SLCC because I could sew.  I can seeeeewwww. And I wanted to gain some finesse, learn to make patterns, and I wasn't averse to learning other skills—like hat-making, or drawing.

This semester I am in all these classes that are trying to make a designer out of me.  My first assignment in Illustration is to tell/show why, what, and who I design for, "show what inspires [my] designs," and draw three outfits. I have to say (in pictures or words) who I am, why I design the things I do, who I'd like to work for as a designer, what my life goal is (as a designer)...

In my Outerwear class I have to make an inspiration board—a poster that shows what inspires my designs.  And the coat I make has to reflect that inspiration.

In Entrepreneurship I have to figure out what inspires me so I can write out a business plan.

Well right now nothing inspires me! Nope. Nothing.  I am sick, I am super-tired, I am maybe just a little stressed out by Bruce and me both being in school, and my house being a wreck, and other personal/family messes.  I honestly do not find anything inspiring.  Cuddling up on the couch with a good book or two, several of my favorite movies, my warm, snuggly robe and a big blanket, a fire in the fireplace and maybe a space-heater in the room, some warm, creamy, savory comfort-foods at hand, and the kids in another room playing together quietly . . . That is all I want right now, and all I've wanted for the last two weeks. There's an uplifting thought!

I never set out to be a designer!  School is making me think and, no, I don't think I like it!  It has me constantly wondering who I am and what I really want.

Since I got married I have always wanted to be a great wife, a stay-at-home mom, a fabulous cook, and a good housekeeper.  And I was. Sheeesh! I didn't even need to go outside much—my home was my world and I was happy. I liked my little orbit.

Then, for various reasons, I got this bee in my bonnet about improving my skills and maybe being a little marketable—maybe being able to work from home.  I went to school just to wet my toes and maybe earn a fashion certificate—that's all they offered when I started. But my ambition grew when I found out that they were going to start offering an associate's degree program the very year I enrolled. And when I realized that my work was generally admired and I was getting straight A's my secret little competitive streak grew to about a mile wide. And, of course, getting a degree of any kind sounds like a good idea. But the degree was the goal. I hadn't really thought it out any further than that—I guess I'd have hung my degree on my bedroom wall and if someone asked me to make their prom dress I'd do it.

My Illustration teacher, last semester, said that I could sell anything—for a company, or my own designs—with my "professional" illustrations.  The teacher I admire most says that I've really grown, that my designs are marketable to all ages, and that they are well thought out; on every big assignment she's said that buyers would probably "buy [my] entire line."

But I don't feel like that.  I don't see the world around me in terms of fashion; my inspirations come from my instructors telling me, "Design something that____________."

On the other hand, being home doesn't feel the same as it used to. Sadly, my kids keep growing up as I while away my days at school; they have become very self-sufficient and I sometimes think they'd prefer to not have me around. Housekeeping loses a lot of its charm when I'm not there to do it every day—it can be pretty overwhelming. (They may be self-sufficient, but they still don't keep the house very clean.) Cooking isn't so much fun when I come in the door tired and hungry but can't start preparing the meal until 5:00. Most evenings I just rattle around the house wondering what to do with myself. I am realizing that after four years of full-time school, life at home probably won't be the same as before I started. And should it be?

So what DO I want? Am I a designer—or could I be? Do I want a career? Do I want to be a stay-at-home mom? Is there something in-between? Who am I? What inspires me?

If I can't answer these questions then school becomes very tedious and . . . futile!
And home isn't so much fun either.

Fickle! . . . Or Practical?

Not that it makes any difference to you, but I changed my school schedule.  Yep, I did.

After one morning in Portfolio, I decided that it would be better to take that class at the end of my whole ordeal.  Lots of people take it early in the program, but I think I'm right on this one.  Instead I am taking Fashion Entrepreneurship (another required class). It's at an ugly time of day—Thursdays from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.  :-(  But it used to be a 7 to 10 p.m. class, so I guess this is a little better.

I also added an Internship. I'll be working with my friend Cherylene, who has designed and is making the costumes for SLCC's production of Romeo and Juliet (in outer space). 90 hours of sewing costumes gets me my Internship credit.

And I'm dropping Millinery.  :-(  I have really wanted to take that class ever since I knew it was offered, but it's not required, and it never fit into my schedule.  This semester it fits into my schedule but it pushes me to eighteen credits, and gives me a ten hour day on Wednesdays (seven hours at school and three commuting).  If I drop Millinery I can be home between noon and 1:00 on Wednesdays.  So weighing how much I want to learn hat-making vs. how much I want to be home . . .

So, there we are. Another semester in the works.

Do Ya Love Me?

The results of the body poll are in. I learned a few things.  First of all, more women than men read my blog—or at least more women are willing to answer my polls. But the numbers are the important part:

As you can see, twenty-two percent of men love their bodies, twenty-eight percent are neutral, while fifty percent of men like their bodies. None of the men polled hate their bodies. Overall, I'd say that men are pretty satisfied with their bodies. Yay men!

On the other hand, only sixteen percent of women love their bodies; twenty-four percent are neutral, twenty-seven percent like their bodies, and thirty-three percent of women hate their bodies. That means one-third of the women polled hate their bodies, and that is sad. (I am going to continue this poll at school, to see how that varies the results.)

You may know that I am kind of obsessed with my body. Well, I'm kind of obsessed with bodies in general; I think they are quite fascinating. But I am one of the thirty-three-percenters; I am not kind to my body—or at least I don't think kindly of it. And, yes, it is something I think about a lot, and have since I was probably about ten or eleven.

I'm not really positive—it was a long time ago—but I think I was OK with myself until I started taking dance lessons. Suddenly there was a  HUGE emphasis on being thin (including, at one point, weekly weigh-ins). Then I have a mom—and an aunt, for that matter—who say things like, "So & so has gotten so fat!" And then, of course I have lived with what every woman in our society lives with: Image after image after image of the "beautiful people;" along with diet campaign after diet campaign thrown in our faces daily.

Actually, you've got to love those women's magazines that show the latest androgynous super-thin woman in her panties and polo shirt (?) on the cover, with teasers that say, "The Last Diet You'll Need—EVER!" and "50 Delicious and Easy Recipes!" and "Try This New Fitness Routine!" all on the same cover. Even better are the ones that say, "Lose TWELVE Pounds in One Week!" and "Best Diet Ever!" while they show a huge, beautiful cake on the cover.

Um, yeah.

Anyway, I have slightly high cholesterol and I am overweight. This is true. But is that really a reason to berate myself daily? Because I do.  I get up in the morning and my face looks puffy and pale (morning, right?) and I think, "Wow. I look awful.  I am looking old." Some days I might say (mentally, or out loud), "I hate my hair!" There's almost not a day that goes by that I don't tell myself that I am fat, or that I hate my body, or that if I could just change (belly, thighs or . . . behind—or all three) then I'd really look great."

Now, I'm not telling you this to garner any pity. Rather, I suspect that all of us thirty-three-percenters behave in the same way. OK, maybe you are the opposite of me and think you are too thin; maybe you are too short or too tall, or you have weird toes, but whatever the reason, if you say you hate your body chances are you don't speak, think or treat it kindly.  I mean, really, would you ever talk to anyone the way I talk to my body?

How do you see yourself?

Every now and then, while I am disparaging my body (that's another weird thing—why do we talk about our bodies like they are separate from us?) . . . while I am being rude to myself, I will have a little flash of inspiration.  The first lightning bolt was five or so years ago; I was getting into the shower and noticed myself in the mirror. I said, "I hate my body," and suddenly a new thought flashed into my mind. Satan wants you to hate your body. (A little LDS doctrine: We believe that our bodies are actually a reward for "keeping our first estate"—following what God wanted us to do in the pre-mortal life. Satan did not keep his first estate, so he was cast out and, consequently, didn't get a body either. Being jealous and wanting to make us as miserable as he is, it would make sense that he wants us to hate our bodies.) This gave me something to think about for a while. But it didn't take long for me to fall back into thirty-year old habits.

Maybe two years ago I was at the temple and I was looking around at the people there. They were all ages, shapes and sizes. And guess what? I thought they all looked amazing! I could see that the man across the way was definitely very heavy, but I didn't think less of him or his looks; he looked beautiful. At that point I thought something like, It doesn't matter what my body looks like; that is not what makes you beautiful. That was my philosophy for a week or two, before I was back into old ways of thinking.

So here I am. I want to lose weight, I'm not particularly happy with the way I look or feel; I think about this way more than normal people should (although I may really be pretty average on that score). One day a couple weeks ago I am driving my van, minding my own business, when I glance at the dashboard and as my eyes move I notice my gloved hand.  I didn't have a specific thought—just a feeling. The flash was this: My body is amazing! My hands do amazing things. My body does amazing things. I should love my body.
Perhaps someone is trying to give me a message.

So how do you change a thirty-five year old animosity into something better? What will that do for you—or for your body? I am trying to figure this out.

I have to say, at least, that I do love my blue eyes. Always have. Maybe that's a start.

Answer Truthfully...

I am posting a new poll on my sidebar. When you "vote," mark your first, gut-reaction answer; don't give it a lot of thought. If you want to say anything more about it, come back to this post and add a comment.

Thanks!

Spring Lineup

Spring semester is upon us. That's why we just got eight inches of snow, I guess.

Anyway, it's going to be hectic around here for the next three months or so.

On Mondays and Wednesdays I have Digital Patterning. I guess I'll be learning to use a computer program to make and scale patterns. Cool. Required. Probably not anything I'm going to buy (the program). But it should be interesting.

Monday afternoons will be Illustration 2. The teacher is pregnant, and due in February. I wonder how this class will go?

Wednesday afternoons I'm taking Millinery! Finally! Already my kids have made requests: Brandon wants a cavalier hat (think Three Musketeers) and Michael wants a bowler hat. :-)



What do you think?
Brandon?



Michael?

Thursday mornings I'll have Fashion Portfolio.  Really, I can't imagine why that is a three-hour class, but OK.

And on Friday afternoons I'll have Outerwear—learning to make coats.  I wonder if this will be more cost-effective than buying coats?  We buy a lot of them in our house.

The hard days will be Mondays and Wednesdays.  Taking public transportation, as I do, means that it's pretty close to an hour-and-a-half each direction.  So for my 9:00 a.m. classes I have to leave home around 7:25 to catch the bus. My afternoon classes on those days start at noon on Monday and 1 p.m. on Wednesday; there is no time to come home between classes, and I won't get back home for the day until 4:30 or 5:30 p.m.  Loooooonnng days! My plan right now is to attempt to do ALL my homework during those between-classes hours. That way I can be home when I'm home.

And, just to make the mix more exciting, Bruce has been accepted into a master's program, and is starting next week. He's going for his MFT (marriage and family therapy) license.  We're pretty excited about this—a chance to move forward, at last! But I'm a little nervous too; we will be trying to run our household with both parents in school.    Thank goodness we have big kids who are capable and immensely helpful!

Bruce's classes are on Tuesday and Friday evenings from 6:00 to 10:00, and a few 8:00 to 5:00 Saturdays. This means I should be home when he's not. I went to his student orientation last Tuesday night and his classes—his whole program—sound teeeedeeeeous. Bleh! Better him than me! Bruce is in a rigorous, strict two-year program (meaning he takes the classes when they tell him to. Period.), so he should finish up about six months after I do. That will be awesome!

And, yes, I have finally made up my mind that I really will finish my program. I've hummed and hawed for so long that I am now three-quarters (or more) of the way to my degree anyway; I might as well do it. Only eleven classes left! I will try not to moan too much when mid-terms come around.

So that's what's coming up for the Norths. Wish us lots of luck!

For Me and My Girls

I don't know about you, but I HATE bra shopping!

In the first place, you walk into the store and are met with a dizzying choice of brassieres. Every color from nude, black, or white to hot pink, teal, or zebra-striped. Minimizer, push-up, demi-cup, full-cup, convertible, underwire, no-wire, padded, soft-cup, plunge, T-back, sports bras, front closure, back closure . . .

If you are fortunate enough to find a style that looks like something you might want and in the color you want, then good luck finding your size among the rows and rows of undergarments with puzzling sizes like 28AA or 48DDDD (but with surprisingly few sizes in-between). And even if you've been to Victoria's Secret to be properly fitted, and have been buying the same size for years, and you know exactly what your size should be, and you actually find your size in the store, you still have to try them on because they never fit the same. You can't just pull one off the rack and buy it.

Trying them on is delightful too. In a nicer store (which I would recommend) the dressing room is usually near the lingerie section; in a store like, say. . . Walmart (which I would definitely not recommend for a purchase like this), you might have to hike for a while with your basket full of goodies before you find the dressing room. Once you are an old lady like me this isn't nearly as embarrassing as it was when you were eighteen, but still . . .

You go into the dressing room with half a dozen of the silly things—if you're lucky enough to find that many in "your size"—in the hopes of discovering at least one that you'd like to take home. Of course none of them is just right on the first trip to the dressing room. If the band fits, the cup is too big or vice-versa.  Or the cup mostly fits, except for this excess loose bit of fabric right at the bust point so it wrinkles and shows under your clothes. (Does anyone really have breasts shaped like that? Or . . . ouch! . . . is it just that mine are so old and have nursed so many babies that only mine are not shaped like that?) Or the cup is smooth but the upper edge cuts into you, making you look like you now have four breasts, but the next cup-size up (in the same style) is way too big. Or the cup is so nicely molded that even with my forty-something-year-old bosom the bra will hold its own shape; it will keep that shape no matter how or where you move, whether you're standing or lying down, whether it's hanging in your closet or on your body.  No thanks.

After trying on that first cart full of brassieres, you have to get dressed again, take a deep breath and start the search all over. Sheesh! Three times this morning I almost put my coat back on and forgot my shirt! That's how frazzled this makes me. And I still left the store empty-handed.

And on top of all that frustration, I have to say that there is no use in trying to look good when you leave on a bra-shopping trip because after you've pulled your shirt off and put it back on five times, there is no hope of having nice-looking hair. No, not even with a button-down shirt. No. hope!

But bra shopping is one of those necessary evils in life. I know what you are thinking, and my answer to you is, "No, I can not just go bra-less." After all, difficult though it may be, I want to give my girls all the support they need.

Hurricane Ginger

I did it. I attempted to make a gingerbread house with my kids, even though we are officially looking at the Ghost of Christmas Past. And I learned that gingerbread houses are obviously only meant to be made before Christmas. And I mean something like one to three weeks prior to Christmas, not eleven months and three weeks before. I know this because I survived the gingerbread apocalypse at our house. It was gruesome, but I am here to tell you the tale.

First of all Lindsey designed a very cute house, and we spent most of one afternoon drawing the patterns.  Here's what happened next:

I used the one and only, very exact, self-same recipe I use for our gingerbread houses every year. After baking every piece twice as long as usual, the gingerbread was still too soft. I had to leave the pieces out on the table for a couple days so they would dry up and be hard enough to use for home construction.

baked and left to dry

Once the house pieces were cooked and dried I made the candy for the windows, and I burned it. It wasn't terribly burnt, but definitely amber-colored. I figured that, with white lights inside the house, it would look like our gingerbread people used incandescent lights. I could live with that.

Traditionally, I always put the first wreath on the door before we build anything else.

building the fancy windows

Then the very exact, self-same frosting recipe I always use didn't work. No matter how much I used to glue the house pieces together, it was just not going to stick. I started out by gluing box windows and gables onto house pieces and leaving them to dry while I worked on other construction areas. The house was sort of holding together OK, although not as well as I thought it should.

the first walls go up

two more walls—the candy-cane pillars were not
part of the original design

The two candy canes were put in place in an attempt at supporting the box window that fell off.   You can see me working on putting up a support to hold the inside corner roof that goes over the door with the wreath.

After an hour-and-a-half of building, I added the box window piece to the construction site. This held up for about five minutes before the box fell off and knocked down some of the other walls. Well, I thought, the original house plan is wrecked, but maybe we can still use some of the intact pieces to make a three-sided to decorate and light up.

two walls left standing and unbroken (temporarily) after the roof collapses

No. The roof of this smaller house fell in, knocking down one wall and it, too, was destroyed.

devastation after the storm

all that remains of one family's dream home

So I told my kids to frost and stick candies to the house pieces and eat them. (Yum! Stale gingerbread with stale candy glued to it!).  They ate all they wanted, and the rest made its way to the trash can.

disaster cleanup

cleanup crew at work

I have learned from this experience that gingerbread house construction is not to be attempted on a whim, and should only be done in the appropriate season.

You have been warned.