Aloha!

Last week (well, more the week before that, but who's counting?) my family and I got on a plane, off a plane, into a hotel, out of a hotel, on another plane, and landed in Oahu! Quite the far cry from our usual camping trips.

That valley on the left was almost constantly in shadow or getting rained on.

The view from the balcony of the condo we stayed in—the ocean is a little out of frame to the right. Those mountains are much taller than the clouds are making them look, but they almost always wore fluffy caps, so it was hard to tell for the first few days. We spent several hours watching and narrating a baseball (or softball? something with a bat, anyway) game on the diamond in the foreground, too. We'd get kicked off the air if we were sportscasters, but not before we went viral.

This looks remarkably like home, other than the mountains...

The landscape was stunning and incredibly varied. We learned later that there are four distinct microbiomes on Oahu, and I assume that's not counting the ocean. The Honolulu/Waikīkī side of the island gets about 17 inches of rain a year, just a touch more than the average desert. The other side of the mountains gets between 260 and 300 inches...it's a lot greener over there.

I have approximately 82 nearly-identical photos of waves. Aren't you glad I didn't put them all in here?

Did I mention the ocean? They keep all this water just...on the ground. And it doesn't go anywhere. In fact, it eats the land and sneaks up on the unwary. Also, it's full of salt and pointy rocks (and pointy fish) and I love it. There's something extremely deep in my bones that feels like the world is meant to be bounded on one side with mountains and on the other with the sea, and being on a volcanic island satisfies both conditions beautifully.

It's a low-quality cell phone video, but you can definitely still get the idea. Also, I cut my knee just kneeling on the rock to get this. Pointy rocks.

Yes, I love the ocean. How could you tell?

What you cannot tell is that this video cuts off just in time for me to leap back from a suddenly huge wave that splashed probably four feet further inland than I'd been standing.

With bonus Houseplants On Steroids in the background!

There were feral chickens all over the place, and of course I was fascinated and tried desperately to take a decent photo. The roosters were striking, with their gold-brown hackles and teal tails (have you seen Moana? If you have, you've seen these chickens). I was equally fascinated with the plant life. Much of it's invasive species, but there's still something remarkable about seeing mimosa trees that your brain really wants to categorize as oaks because they're just that huge and gnarled. And scheffleras the size of...well...rainforest trees, and a variety of neon-bright flowering trees we never managed to identify, and of course plumerias, and hibiscus, and dragonfruit, which has got to be on the list of Strangest Plants I've Ever Seen. It's a succulent with long, serrated, three-lobed leaf-stems that can grow kind of like an extremely low-poly rose, or can decide it's tired of being earthbound and make for the nearest telephone pole/tree/stone archway.

Dots in ombré concentric spirals.

I have no idea what these shells belong to, but they were everywhere, and they have lovely tiny dotted patterns all over them. There were also beautiful deep teal crabs with gold spot-line patterns all over them, but they were skittish and (shockingly) blended into the rocks extremely well, so I have nothing to show for clambering around on jetties like a piscivorous mountain goat with a camera. (Well. I have a photo of a dead crab, who is bright red and somewhat tattered, but it's not exactly beautiful.)

I only have one pose for photos.

And there was sewing! Of course there was sewing. I finished the straps before we left, and actually meant to make them fixed, over-the-shoulder straps, but the back of this dress is low enough that it would have been a Challenge to eke enough length out of them, so halter-style won. (And I was tired of sewing by the time I finished the front attachments, but we're not talking about that.) All of the hemming also happened on the plane to Hawai'i, which was less challenging than it might have been after I got the facing pinned in the terminal before we left.

I love the way it fits, and the pockets are nearly perfect—next time I need to either split a skirt panel to move them forward a bit, or use panels with slightly different widths to achieve the same effect, because they're a touch too far back for easy use. Still, not too bad for hasty off-the-cuff patterning. Likewise, the hem is satisfactory but not brilliant; there's a little bit of bubbling in some spots where the facing isn't exactly the same shape as the outer shell. I think the solution next time I do a shaped hem will be to cut the skirt panels and facing at the same time, with the pieces pinned within millimeters of their lives.

Also, I have learned why a lot of island skirts are:
a) tight-fitting
b) long
c) layered
d) all of the above

Knee-length very full skirts are a hazard when there's a multidirectional breeze. That is all.

Confirming the efficacy of the scale I chose for the pattern.

And I finished the second strip of skirt trim for the green silk bliaut! Alas, I believe I have repeated at least one leaf and vine swirl at this point, but I'm still carefully avoiding a predictable pattern of filled leaves, half-filled leaves, and acorns. I actually started the third strip, but there's no photo of my progress because jet lag is really, really bad for doing detail work. I realized, three feet into laying out the first set of chain stitch borders, that my stitching had wandered nearly half an inch from its original trajectory, and had to snip out about two feet stitch by stitch. It's still in time out.

This is like...a third of the first floor.

Also...there was a fabric store a few blocks from our condo. This was Dangerous. And Amazing. But mostly Dangerous. Predictably, there were lots of Hawaiian prints at the front, but also a section of Japanese imports that were gorgeous, and an entire wall covered in bolts of beaded and embroidered laces. Mum, Grandma, and I spent some time trying to figure out how we could justify buying those (we didn't come up with anything suitably convincing, sadly).

We also found several bolts of fine linen stashed under a table, and several bolts of something that the selvedge claims is wool, but further inspection of the six yards I bought under the little super-microscope a friend gave me (no, I didn't have it with me, what kind of perpetually-organized heathen do you think I am??) suggests it may be polyester. I still have to burn a bit to be sure.

The pineapples were too adorable not to photograph.

If I remember right, this pattern is based on ginger plants.

Upstairs there was even more fabric, and these stunning Hawaiian quilts. Mum decided someday she wants a navy and white one. I smell a future Christmahannubirthdaymas present. Distant future. And probably meant to count for like three years' gifts. That's a lot of quilting.

Also fun fur in wild colors, lots of quilting fabrics, pleather, weird kind of wetsuity material (okay, maybe it actually was wetsuit material, what do I know?), and even more tables of embroidered stuff. I found some gorgeous embroidered linen, and Grandma bought me enough for a skirt someday soon.

There was lots of food and adventures, but I think this is quite enough to be getting on with for now. And I have more adventures from this past weekend to talk about...later.

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