beatrice_otter (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} beatrice_otter) wrote,@ 2008-06-19 18:08:00 |
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No day is ever perfect, you know? But good is still good.
I had fun today. Grandma and I went up to Mill End Store in Portland to buy black wool for my Bunad, finally. A Bunad is the traditional Norwegian folk costume, worn for special occasions like Christmas and Syttende Mai (May 17, Norwegian Independence Day). I grew out of my last child version at least ten years ago, and we've been procrastinating on making the full adult version ever since. (The dress pattern is fairly simple. The embroidery is not.) I already have the bunadsølje (silver jewelry), bought when I spent a semester in Norway for a study abroad program in college. Here's what it's going to look like when it's done:
Except I'm not blonde and blue-eyed. The silver jewelry (sølje) is interesting. Norwegians have been very poor for the last thousand years or so, and Valdres (where my family is from) was not one of the more prosperous areas of Norway. So how come they traditionally wear bling if they're poor, you ask? It's the woman's dowry. A woman would go into marriage with a large sum of money (dowry), and it would all be spent on jewelry, so her husband could not use it or spend it and it couldn't get absorbed into the farm or what have you. This ensured that if he died or lost the family farm, she still had something to live on, and if all went well she had an inheritance to pass on to her daughters that the men of the family couldn't touch. It was a good way for a woman to protect herself financially in a highly patriarchal world.
By the way, did you know that two areas of Norway have officially registered tartans? One of them is the area my family was originally from. My last "child" bunad (I was a teen, but not quite fully grown) was in this style. Looked something like this:
Except I was older, and the red stripes were larger. And I'm not blond.
So Grandma and I had fun picking out the fabric for my bunad, and while we were at the store we found some cool patterns for fashionable dresses/jumpers/jackets/etc. that can be worn over a clerical collar blouse. Two of them we paid full price for, and the other five were in a box marked "two for $1.00," which was cool. Now, we're obviously not going to get all of them made before I have to go back to PA ... but I have a Cunning Plan. See, Grandma's style choices leave something to be desired. She likes to give clothes to people for Christmas and birthdays, but since she retired twenty years ago and doesn't get out to see what people wear these days, her choices have been, well, the less said the better. But! If she has a pattern, then all she has to do is get fabric to make it with, and that's within her abilities. She's an excellent seamstress, the sewing isn't the problem. She gets to give clothes (which she likes) and I get clothes I can actually wear. By the way, the icon used here is a picture of me taken as a senior in High School (taken by my parents, of course). The dress I'm wearing in it is one I made with Grandma. Our sewing together is a longstanding tradition.
Tomorrow, I go with my future sister-in-law and her bridesmaids to pick patterns and fabric for the bridesmaids dresses. It's going to be a destination wedding in Hawaii, so they're thinking sundresses instead of formal wear, and there are a couple fabric stores in Salem that would probably be fine for what we need, so I don't have to go up to Milwaukie twice in two days. Should be fun.
What keeps it from being an ideal summer day: I just got a notification from LJ that my extra icons are going to expire soon (which probably means my paid account is going to expire soon), and do I want to purchase more time. No, I don't, as I'm going to be switching to Dreamwidth Studios as soon as they're up and running, and I don't have money to pay for both LJ and Dreamwidth, and it's only going to be a month or two before I can switch over, probably. Which means a month or two with only six icons. Ah, well, I suspect I shall survive the deprivation.
I had fun today. Grandma and I went up to Mill End Store in Portland to buy black wool for my Bunad, finally. A Bunad is the traditional Norwegian folk costume, worn for special occasions like Christmas and Syttende Mai (May 17, Norwegian Independence Day). I grew out of my last child version at least ten years ago, and we've been procrastinating on making the full adult version ever since. (The dress pattern is fairly simple. The embroidery is not.) I already have the bunadsølje (silver jewelry), bought when I spent a semester in Norway for a study abroad program in college. Here's what it's going to look like when it's done:
Except I'm not blonde and blue-eyed. The silver jewelry (sølje) is interesting. Norwegians have been very poor for the last thousand years or so, and Valdres (where my family is from) was not one of the more prosperous areas of Norway. So how come they traditionally wear bling if they're poor, you ask? It's the woman's dowry. A woman would go into marriage with a large sum of money (dowry), and it would all be spent on jewelry, so her husband could not use it or spend it and it couldn't get absorbed into the farm or what have you. This ensured that if he died or lost the family farm, she still had something to live on, and if all went well she had an inheritance to pass on to her daughters that the men of the family couldn't touch. It was a good way for a woman to protect herself financially in a highly patriarchal world.
By the way, did you know that two areas of Norway have officially registered tartans? One of them is the area my family was originally from. My last "child" bunad (I was a teen, but not quite fully grown) was in this style. Looked something like this:
Except I was older, and the red stripes were larger. And I'm not blond.
So Grandma and I had fun picking out the fabric for my bunad, and while we were at the store we found some cool patterns for fashionable dresses/jumpers/jackets/etc. that can be worn over a clerical collar blouse. Two of them we paid full price for, and the other five were in a box marked "two for $1.00," which was cool. Now, we're obviously not going to get all of them made before I have to go back to PA ... but I have a Cunning Plan. See, Grandma's style choices leave something to be desired. She likes to give clothes to people for Christmas and birthdays, but since she retired twenty years ago and doesn't get out to see what people wear these days, her choices have been, well, the less said the better. But! If she has a pattern, then all she has to do is get fabric to make it with, and that's within her abilities. She's an excellent seamstress, the sewing isn't the problem. She gets to give clothes (which she likes) and I get clothes I can actually wear. By the way, the icon used here is a picture of me taken as a senior in High School (taken by my parents, of course). The dress I'm wearing in it is one I made with Grandma. Our sewing together is a longstanding tradition.
Tomorrow, I go with my future sister-in-law and her bridesmaids to pick patterns and fabric for the bridesmaids dresses. It's going to be a destination wedding in Hawaii, so they're thinking sundresses instead of formal wear, and there are a couple fabric stores in Salem that would probably be fine for what we need, so I don't have to go up to Milwaukie twice in two days. Should be fun.
What keeps it from being an ideal summer day: I just got a notification from LJ that my extra icons are going to expire soon (which probably means my paid account is going to expire soon), and do I want to purchase more time. No, I don't, as I'm going to be switching to Dreamwidth Studios as soon as they're up and running, and I don't have money to pay for both LJ and Dreamwidth, and it's only going to be a month or two before I can switch over, probably. Which means a month or two with only six icons. Ah, well, I suspect I shall survive the deprivation.