The Historical Sew Fortnightly Challenge #23: Generosity & Gratitude is due tomorrow, and I’m a bit frantic about it.  I’ve been so busy the last few weeks with the university semester ending and marking to be done, and parties to plan, and new sewing classes starting and planning to be done for the next round of sewing classes and everything else that I haven’t had any time to sew. I’ve gone trawling through all the tutorials that I’ve saved for inspiration, and everything that I really want to do is extremely time-consuming, and at this point I’m time poor.  I’m still working on my frou-frou  française, which is based on numerous online tutorials, but it needs another 12 hours worth of work.  I want to make Jen’s Easy Italian chemise, but I haven’t designed a whole Italian Renaissance costume yet and don’t want to end up with an orphan, plus it mentions the phrase “obscenely time consuming”, so that’s not viable!  At this point I’m hand sewing all my pre-1860s shifts, which I really do …

I don’t have a bucket list.  Not really.  But I do have some random things I’d really like to do in my life.  One of these is to drive as fast as I possibly can in a really fast car (I see a 3am trip on the autobahn in my future).  Another is to make a croquembouche I’ve been obsessed by them ever since I read an article about a pastry chef when I was 10 or 11. Unfortunately I couldn’t attempt croquembouchery at the time.  Hawai’i is not croquembouche country.  Choux pastry won’t raise properly in the humidity, and caramel starts dissolving within hours. When we started planning the Fairies & Dinosaurs at Versailles party I decided it was time to attempt a croquembouche.  I know they are a little too recent for ancien regime Versailles, but you still can’t really get a better representation of a fabulously decadent French dessert.  And they are quite volcano-like too… So, I learned to make profiteroles (perfect ones on the first try!) And then I made profiteroles. …