I love this quote...

"...watching conservatives mock liberals for being PC, is like watching the morbidly obese mock Weight Watchers for its system of points."

As someone who confronts her own 'whiteness' and the things that come with it on a regular basis, I gotta tell you that I loved this piece. Its strangely comforting to see that the view is equally cloudy on the 'other side' of the fence.

Basic Smocked Shirt Pattern

Constance from Sweden put together a lovely little 'step-by-step' with visuals for creating a high necked smocked shirt. Then GottfriedKilianus was nice enought to translate the written portions from Swedish into English and post them on Flickr.

While this is basically the same instructions that Rainillt (nice website update BTW!) offered in her first pleatwork embroidery handout, this simplified version with pictures will probably come in handy when trying to explain to folks how to get these projects started.*

Part 1:

Part 2:


*Certainly far easier than trying to explain Electra's version with the finger pressed pleats (although this method *is* very easy to demonstrate in person and actually avoids the step of having to run gather threads all together!).