new scrubs

yesterday i sewed pair of pants. yes, for real. i've been looking for some new scrubs for work, hoping to find some that i would just love. so i fell back onto the old secret: if you want your clothes to be the way that you want them, you gotta make them yourself.

as a student nurse, i had some white scrubs and when i graduated i dyed them brown. the dye didn't take very well- which I sort of expected - as they were cotton-polyester, but i thought i'd give it a shot. they turned out a light, murky reddish-brown. i've worn them a few times, but i really don't like the colour. but they were so comfy! so how, thought i, can i have pants that fit exactly like this, but in a different colour? of course! what could be more obvious than this? i’ll just get out the ol’ seam ripper and rip apart my old scrubs, use the pieces as pattern pieces, pin them to the new (green) fabric, cut the new pieces out, and then figure out how to put it (the green ones) back together again. how simple! :)


so i did.

here is the fabric with the "pattern" pieces pinned on. if you look closely, you can see that i've written all over them with pen, adding notches and everything (i didn't want to get lost halfway through)

and here are the pants!

nice elasticized butt!

and a drawstring in the front. check out those front pockets!

on my next day off, maybe i'll make the matching top. I have enough fabric and then some. oh and the whole thing cost less than a nice scrub top would cost at an average uniform store. yippee!

my valentime

after a rather delicious sushi dinner at the new sushi restaurant in town yesterday (yes, our little mennonite city has a sushi restaurant run by a japanese family), my valentine and i had a low-key art date. i love our art dates. we sit downstairs in our art room working on some sort of art project(s) - either together or on separate projects, it doesn't matter. i love it. the first art date we had was when we were dating back at bethany, up in the stairwell by the mezz (aka the stairway to heaven). we were making art! i promise! ;) i think we made something with chalk pastels.

yesterday as R was refining an amazing cartoon character that he's created, and as i was punching holes into my almost-finished "highlights of 2007" scrapbook/album, (it's "almost-finished" because i broke the hole-punch before i got through all of the extremely thick pages. argh!), i began contemplating, once again, how fantastic it is to be married to an artist. first of all, we can spend valentine's day on an art date and enjoy it. but more so, i love that he understands my craving to be creative, my need to have some artistic outlet, whether it's with paper and photos, a sewing machine and some fabric, paint and a canvas, yarn and a crochet hook, etc. he gets it. and not only does he get it, but he encourages it. i couldn't be more blessed.

i can think of a few of my friends who are quite skilled. but for them, while their non-artistic husbands would never discourage them from pursuing creative hobbies, i can't see them ever saying to their wives, "hunny, i'm going to build us an art room so that you can go sit downstairs and let the creative juices flow, even if it means that we won't have room for a guest room and all our future children will have to share a bedroom."

if you would have asked me as a child what i wanted to be when i grew up, for the longest time i didn't know - i did know that i never wanted to be a nurse. but when i did have an answer, it was always either a teacher or an artist (preferably a cartoonist). i am now grown up, and i am neither (by profession), but i am married to both. God sure knew what he was doing when he made us for each other. how fantastic is that.