If you can’t tell by looking, I was a milkmaid. The brown skirt was ankle length (it’s the only part that still fits at all — now it falls about mid-calf). The white peasant blouse closes in the front with velcro and the red bodice fastens over it with more velcro. No wardrobe malfunctions here. There are matching pieces of the flowered lacing ribbon for my braids. I like to think I carried a milk pail instead of  candy bag that year…

This costume also makes me a liar. I wrote before that 14 was the first year I made my entire costume. Well that’s just not true. Despite maternal help with costumes 12 and 13 (those posts are on their way), I sewed this one on my own too.

Interesting that my obsession with romanticized female farm laborers of the 18th and 19th centuries began at such an early age. Had I just learned that the stereotypical beauty of milkmaids was largely due to their exposure to cowpox (with resulting immunity to the disfiguring scourge of post-Renaissance Europe, smallpox)? Or was I (am I) simply echoing a genetic imperative from my Germanic and Celtic forebears?

Which is why you haven’t heard from me in nearly a fortnight!

Alas, I haven’t been sewing (unless you count a curtain for the closet). But I have:

• Finished setting up our bedroom
• Helped to mount the spring/summer costume exhibit at the local historical society
• Participated in an international gathering of Theosophists
• Begun studying Aline’s part in The Bohemian Girl
• Re-learnt Clementi’s Sontatina No. 1 (excellent finger exercise)

And that’s only the stuff I’m at liberty to mention!

So, forgive me? I’ll be back soon with more interesting updates — for the moment though, I gotta go move a piano.

First, I made four dozen vanilla cupcakes from my favorite “California Cake” recipe (circa 1865). Then came four dozen chocolate cupcakes, using a fantastic vegan recipe learnt from a fellow member of the Fourth Street Food Coop in NYC. That was followed by a dozen gluten-free chocolate lavender cupcakes from a mix. And last, but not least, two dozen carrot cupcakes and a two-layer carrot cake.

With the exception of the carrot cake and cupcakes, which require cream cheese icing as a matter of course, I topped the cupcakes with butter cream in various flavors:

• Vanilla cakes with pink rosewater cinnamon butter cream
• Vanilla cakes with milk chocolate butter cream
• Chocolate cakes with purple vanilla butter cream dipped in shredded cocoanut
• Chocolate cakes with coffee butter cream
• Gluten-free chocolate lavender cakes with purple vanilla butter cream

Here’s the majority of my handiwork. A few cakes didn’t make it out of my kitchen…and it wasn’t long before a few more were swiped by passersby once I delivered them to the lodge. We hid the layer cake until it was time for the candles to be lit.

The cupcakes were a hit — and I even saw a few people eating them the next day for breakfast! The remains of the carrot layer cake are in our refrigerator, haunting us with every overwhelming mouthful.

This may not strike you as the ideal dress for Lehar’s Merry Widow to wear to the ball, but there’s a very good reason it won out. I finally saw the costumes that everyone else would be wearing (this is a remount of a show from last summer — my singing sweetheart and I are last minute substitutions) and it turns out that of the four other women in the show, three are in gingham skirts. So this was really the best choice for the overall effect in our ensemble numbers.

The one down side is that the ankle-length skirt of this empire-style frock is rather narrow. Too narrow in fact for me to open my legs to play the cello! It was decided that the best remedy is to wear purple tights and simply hike it up over my knees when I play. Not exactly what you’d call a lady-like solution, but oh well.

If you’d care to know, I came by the dress through inheritance. It was sewn by my Aunt Linny when she was in high school. She inherited the sewing gene too, even minoring in fashion design.

These two seem to be a pair. They’re both semi-sheer cotton, beautifully sewn, with contrast binding and embroidered “flower pot” shaped pockets. I’m guessing 1950s on these based on the material’s condition and the overall design, though there’s a possibility they may be from the 1970s.

And the pink one has an extra feature –  my mother’s name was carefully printed on the waistband with a black pen, as though she wore it in a class, or maybe for a girl-scout project. Underneath her name are two illegible figures that look more like the numbers “71″ than anything else. Maybe the aprons were a gift from my mother to my grandmother in 1971? Or do the numbers refer to her class or scout troop?

The suspense is killing me! Mom, if you’re reading this…call me.