Moving is stressful, especially if you have to worry about both getting a job and getting a place to live.

Mike and I sat down and he reasoned that since we’re in a new city and don’t know all that much about it, why not see it all? So we spent all of one Sunday looking at varied rental units. Our favorite was the blond on Mercer Island that scared us with stories of bad traffic (justified), and the promise that if we didn’t act NOW, the apartment of our dreams overlooking nothing, in a bland cream and beige box, would be gone. Skipped that one.

In a different section of town, we found out the formula for getting into a polished condo in Belltown if you’re not currently employed with a normal 9-5 job:
a) have an offer letter
b) paystubs
c) have enough cash or liquid assets to equal (monthly rent) x 3 x 12
which in our case would have equaled.. $60,000.00.
so NO!

After a crowded open house in Ballard we jumped at a house in the Eastlake neighborhood. Here are few quick pics of our place that I swiped off of craigslist.

It’s great to have our own place again!

A quick gift I made out of some soft pink cotton jersey, and black lace. I’m still using Near Sea Naturals as the source for my cloth, and so far I’m very happy using them as a vendor. This project was quick and fun, probably because attaching the lace gave such a pretty result!

We’re looking for jobs in Seattle. We’ve been up there twice and I know it’s an awesome city.

I’m so excited and while there have been so many wonderful things that have happened in FL (getting married, the orchids, the beach) I know I’ve been looking forward to this move for years.

A photo back from our road trip, here’s the Hoh rainforest in a somewhat rare bout of sunshine. The greenest place I’ve ever seen!

I finally started my organic fashion project! I created a cotton dress with a retro 1957 pattern I found at a local cloth store. I shortened it a bit, the mid-calf length looked a bit too dowdy on a shorter frame like mine. :) This blue-swirled number is “Smurfs on a Cloud”.

The cotton feels quite soft, and I think was a much better choice than hemp. I still think most hemp cloth is too harsh…

Here’s my lovely sister as a willing model:

Skorpions Project, “Skwrath”

I got a look into a unique mashup of fashion and technology at this year’s Seamless 2008, held at the Museum of Science in Boston. Designers showcased ideas that wove together traditional textiles with solar panels, wifi, bluetooth, and LED’s.

Some ideas appeared to be in their infancy, but were great concepts. Barbara Layne’s tornado dress had “three small photocells (that) detect ambient light” which merely made the dress flash. A more in-depth approach may have been to read in data from a website to judge if certain criteria met those for extreme weather. Hard to demo, of course, but perhaps a bit more useful. Of course this notion fabric displaying information is partially borrowed from the Project Peau d’Ane, in which Valerie Lamontagne and her co-designers actually did use scientific information to change the behavior of the dresses. The moon dress, for example, had “thermochromic painted flowers embroidered with resistive silver threads”. Take that, lunar fashionistas!

Perhaps the grandest of the pieces was the Project Party Dress, architectural in its scope and definitely a way to bring a different feel to any event. It’s basically a tent worn by 5 women that look like a troupe of killer waitresses, and when it expands you get to see those same ladies stand at the corners like beautiful living gargoyles. I am curious what this party dress would look like done in white or red gauze, to give more of a lightness to the tent and make it more inviting to step inside.

Finally, in possibly the most controversial mix of technology and religion, the Charming Burka by Markus Kison stands alone. It’s a simple idea - give a woman with a burka the power to decide how to show her true identity. Via infomation embedded in the cloth, a woman could choose to send her real photo to anyone around her with a bluetooth-enabled device. Although the designer claims that “no rules of the Koran are broken” on his website, I picture it being just the type of thing a rebellious teenage girl would use to do what she could to show her individuality.