Last of the Three: Book Review of Chasing the Sun

I was finally able to read Kaki Warner’s third book in the Blood Rose Trilogy, Chasing the Sun.  This book focuses on the youngest of the three Wilkins brothers, Jack, and his love affair with a saloon singer from Canada/San Francisco.

This isn’t Warner’s best book in the series, but I still devoured it in about three days.  By the third novel, the reader is pretty familiar with the general plot lines.  Different danger, different bad guys, different lovers, same general outcome.  There’s also now so many characters – all the main characters from the first and second books plus a few more – that the protagonist characters seem to get less depth than their forerunners.

The historical setting is excellent and well-researched, as always.  This novel takes place in the 1870s, after the Panic of 1873 and after the US has stopped using silver to mint coins.  This sets a background for the Wilkins family to encounter some financial issues as their silver mines become nearly worthless and debts they incurred for investments in the mines come due.

A nice surprise and change from the other novels, Chasing the Sun starts out in San Francisco rather than on the Wilkins ranch.  Much to my delight, San Francisco is accurately depicted as a cold and grey place bustling with a wide variety of people crowded into a tiny little space.  The transfer of the main story out to the Wilknis ranch presents a nice comparison between the ranch’s wide open spaces beautiful landscape to the busy city.

My favorite part of this novel was the descriptions of Jack’s travels around the Pacific: Australia, Hawaii and other Pacific Islands.  It’s really neat to think that even nearly 150 years ago, people could still travel the world and come back to their families.

If you’ve read the other books in the Trilogy, Chasing the Sun provides a nice follow-up and a sense of closure with the characters.  If you haven’t read the other books, I’d recommend not picking this one up first.  It’s a bit difficult to understand without background from those books and contains some spoilers.

An Arrrr-dorable Dress

Sometimes you’re walking through the store and you see this fabric and you just have to make something out of it.  That’s what happened when I passed this adorable blue, pirate fabric.  “Oh my goodness! I have to make something for Munchkinhead out of that!”  So I picked up the fabric and then started pouring through the pattern books.  It’s a little backwards than the way we were taught growing up, but it worked.

Munchkinhead looks great in natural-waist dresses.  I found an adorable pattern, with a rouched accent waist, knee-length skirt and thick-strapped, sleeveless top.  For the accent fabric on the waist, I used scraps from Mr. Trizzle’s Barristers’ Ball suit.  It matched the pirates’ pirate hats and boots nicely.

It turned out super cute!

The white lettering on the dress says “Aye Aye Cap’n.”

 

Pattern: McCall’s M5876

Ndili Mukuwa, and It’s Ok

I’ve always been acutely aware of my “whiteness.”  In kindergarten, it was benign, meaning only that I couldn’t do as much fun stuff with my hair as some of the other girls.  By first grade, it was that other people’s not having as much or being downtrodden was my fault as on Martin Luther King Jr. Day we were taught “white guilt.”  By fourth grade, I was evil, inhumane, cruel, for beating all those slaves before the Civil War. 

In high school, added to all this was that I simply wasn’t cool enough to talk to the groups of black students.  By college, all the guilt and meanness and cruelty and uncoolness, added to the fact that I’d never be able to dance or jump, had me paralyzed with fear.  “I can’t talk to you.”  “I don’t know how to talk to you.”  “I’m not good enough.”  “I’m not cool enough.”  “Everything bad that’s ever happened to you is my fault.”

So I did what anyone does when they’re totally afraid.  I ran away.
To Africa.

Here, it was different.  I was different.  New stereotypes were flung at me, but I didn’t buy into them.  Maybe it was because they were delivered to me by individuals instead of society as a whole.  Maybe it was because I knew them to not be true with respect to myself.  How come I always accepted that the stereotypes back home were true?  Indoctrination at a young age?  Societal reinforcement?  Not grown up enough to know myself?  I started to realize that things I’d believed about myself weren’t true.  I was me. Me. Alone. Me. Not the billions of other people in the world who had come before me and happened to have something in common with me.  Me.

I had been taught that “racist” was the worst thing you could ever be called.  My fear came from fear of that word.  In Africa, the worst thing I was ever called was Mukuwa/Muzungu/Onyibo and that isn’t that bad.

Now I understood.  Just because someone calls you something, doesn’t mean you are such.  I was, am and always will be Mukuwa.  But in some ways, I was also correct when I’d yell back to those “Mukuwa!” screaming kids, “Tandili mukuwa, ndili Ba Tonga.”  I am not a foreigner; I am one of you.

There may be times when I am racist, but it’s because of me, my thoughts, my experiences, not because of all those people I never knew in all those places I’ve never been.  I’m me. 

Sometimes I’m good; sometimes I’m bad.  Sometimes I’m right; sometimes I’m wrong.  Sometimes I’m cruel and unfair; sometimes I’m compassionate and generous.  But I am not afraid of what I am anymore.  Africa gave me that.  That, and some of those hairstyles I’d been wishing for since I was a little girl.

Chuckie Cat

Munchkinhead had a lot of noisy stuffed animals when she was little.  There was Barks, the large Pound Puppy who, you guessed it, barked whenever you squeezed him or made a loud noise around him.  There was Humpty Dumpty, who made a crashing noise if you launched him across the room.  There was the baby doll – I don’t even know if she had a name – who, when you hugged her giggled and said, “heh heh heh heh Momma, Momma heh heh heh heh.”  And then, then there was the Chuckie Cat.

Chuckie Cat played music and moved his little arms as if playing with an invisible ball of yarn.  Like the others, he could be set off by squeezing or by loud noises, but unlike the others, he could also be set off by motion.  There was a little sensor on his tummy.  At least, those were the three things that were supposed to set Chuckie Cat off, touch, sound and movement.  But Chuckie Cat didn’t play by those rules.  Chuckie Cat did what he wanted.

We’d all be downstairs, eating dinner or sitting in various rooms, and someone would hear music.  “What’s that?”  Chuckie Cat.  No one nearby.  No one nearby to touch him, no one nearby to make noise, no one nearby to move near him.  Chuckie Cat, playing away.

Munchkinhead would go up to room for bed.  Before she even got to the top of the stairs, she’d hear Chuckie Cat.  She’d go in her room and there he’d be, playing, moving his little arms, his plastic eyes staring right through her.  He’d stop.  She’d turn the light on and off a few times, trying to get him to play again.  Nothing.  She’d leave.  She’d be in the bathroom brushing her teeth and she’d hear the music again.  Chuckie Cat, playing, moving his little arms.

In the middle of the night, when everyone was sleeping, there’d go Chuckie Cat again, playing, moving his little arms.  “Maybe we have ghosts and his sensor can see them.”  We’d hide Chuckie Cat under baskets and boxes and blankets, attempting to block his motion sensor.  No matter, there’d go Chuckie Cat, playing, moving his little arms, wiggling the blankets. 

I’m amazed Munchkinhead was able to sleep with him in her room.  Alfred or I would have thrown him down the laundry chute, playing and moving his little arms.

My Second Insta-Dress

Someone’s been bugging me to get my newest dress up on the blog, so here it is.  Another foray into insta-dress fabric.  Unlike my first insta-dress, I decided to get a bit creative with this one.  It would have only taken me a couple days to make if my sewing machine hadn’t broken.  Instead, it took me a few weeks.

Munchkinhead has a dress that’s similar to insta-dress style.  We picked it up at one of those festivals down at the Summerfest grounds.  (She’s wearing it in the photo on my first insta-dress post.)  It has the smocked part around the midsection and then has a summery, overlapping triangles, top above that.  I like the way it looks on her and thought the smocked midsection would be nice for the insta-dress.  It has the bonus effect of making the dress longer, too.

Gathering the Materials

The insta-dress fabric I chose was white with white and hot-pink roses on the bottom and smaller roses climbing up the skirt with a few scattered roses on the smocked part.  I swear the roses are hot pink even though they look red in the pictures.

I searched through my patterns until I found a bodice that I thought would work nicely.  I chose a Simplicity pattern that I had made once before but made too big.  (I love the dress but never wear it because it’s huge on me.)   The top I chose has a full back with a zipper closing and a V-neck line.  The goal was to have an undergarment-friendly dress.

Now that I had a bodice pattern I could use, I needed fabric.  So I dug through fabric drawer in my file cabinet and found some perfect scraps.  White and beige gauze from Mr. Trizzle’s summer pjs.  The beige was perfect for the lining.  The white fabric was in one long, fairly wide strip, so I had to do some piecing before it was large enough to fit the bodice pieces.  Those seams are small and fairly well hidden near the underarm seams.  There wasn’t enough beige to line the whole bodice, so I decided to only line the front. That’s the important part after all.

Bodice

The bodice was a bit tricky to put onto the smocked fabric, mostly because it’s gathered at the bottom and it took a few tries to get the gathering properly distributed.  I also added some detail to the shoulders with little ruffles on the shoulders.  These ruffles are from the smocked part of the fabric, strips from a part I trimmed off.  The smocked part is sewn into the lining/bodice seam at the shoulder so the little ruffles stick out.

I didn’t quite like the way the front of the V had turned out – same problem I’d had with the original dress when I’d made it.  I also felt the top of the dress was too disconnected from the bottom.  So I decided to add some  decoration.  I found a bit of ribbon that had been a handle on a Victoria’s Secret bag that was the exact same shade of hot pink as the roses!  (Again, doesn’t look like it in the photos, but it is.)  I hand-stitched the ribbon onto the center front, wrapping it completely around the bodice from smocking to smocking.

I also modified the back of the bodice a bit.  In the original dress pattern, there’s a zipper from the skirt up through the bodice.  I didn’t want to mess with a zipper and didn’t know how it would work with the smocking below.  Instead of putting in a zipper, I hemmed the edges of the back opening with the neck edges.  My original intention was to put a button and button loop or a snap at the top of the back.  But once I tried it on, I decided I really liked the back opening folded diagonally open instead.  (See photo below.)

Skirt

My first insta-dress can be a bit difficult to walk in if I need to take large steps.  I wanted this dress to be more flexible.  I had more fabric than I needed to go around my mid-section.  I measured what I needed to go around my mid-section, folded the fabric in half and stitched a seam down the smocked part of the fabric, leaving a very, very large seam allowance that was equal for each side of fabric.  Then I trimmed only the smocked part down to a regular seam allowance and left the straight fabric with the full extra hanging off the seam.  I hemmed the top and side edges of these large hanging rectangles.

Next, I folded both straight-fabric extra hanging pieces over to one side of the dress.  One piece was folded back on itself and the other was basically pulled around in the direction it had been going.  I then tacked the corner of each piece onto the dress itself at the bottom of the smocked part, leaving some slack width-wise so the smocking can stretch.  When I walk, a slit opens in the back to allow as much movement as I need without ever revealing anything that ought to stay covered.  If I’m standing still, the dress looks like a regular straight dress.

I’m super excited about the dress.  I think it came out pretty nice and it met it’s goal of being undergarment friendly.  Now, I just need somewhere warm to wear it!

Pattern used for Bodice: Simplicity 0605