A New Dress for Barefoot Affairs!

A New Dress for Barefoot Affairs!

It’s always nice to get new clothes and a little blog likes to look nice, too.

Barefoot Affairs had a rough start getting the look I wanted. You never saw some of the first templates, but they were sad. Dark and stormy sad. The colors looked as though they’d been taken from an auto mechanic’s man cave. Black, golds, dark greens.

If you’ve never created a blog, there’s a lot more work to it than you might think. I’m no expert with HTML or CSS, but I had my ideas and getting them into a workable form was beyond me.

There are plenty of sites that let you download their templates and use them for free. These work well, but you have to pretty much use their design and colors with no changes.

I wanted it my way, so I registered my domain name and started hunting for help.

When I found Andy at the Hive, a program created by our local community college’s computer science department, I found exactly the kind of help I needed. Andy has helped me get this blog up and running and looking like I wanted. Unfortunately, he feels the need to graduate and get married and get on with his life. So I’m losing him. The Hive will remain and I can still get help, but Andy won’t be around.

We will continue on, which brings me to today. Andy has helped me upload a new header for Barefoot. She gets a new dress. Which got me to thinking about my own dresses. I don’t remember the last time I had on a dress. That’s all I wore to church as a kid, but everything’s so casual today. I wear a uniform– with pants– for the airline. And most of the time, I write in the mornings before I’ve dressed, so I’m writing in my sleeping clothes with morning mouth. What can I say? At heart, I’m a slob.

When I was a child, Betty sewed many of our clothes– for my sister and me, as well as for herself. She was quite accomplished and although these may have been homemade, you would not have known it.

I was small and looked young for my age. A blessing I missed as a child, but later enjoyed as an adult. I could still shop in the children’s department when I was a teenager– which was a hugely insulting event. By sewing my clothes, she saved my poor embarrassed soul the humiliation of being in the children’s department . . .  where it was so patently OBVIOUS TO EVERYONE THAT I DID NOT BELONG IN THE CHILDREN”S DEPARTMENT . . . I WAS NOT A CHILD! I was THIRTEEN!!!

I was 50 years old before I weighed enough to give blood. Sadly, menopause changed that right quick. I do not have the same metabolism post as I did pre.  A dozen hot and fresh Krispy Kremes with a glass of milk in one night are now only a fond memory.

We had friends at church with a daughter a couple of years older than me. When Wanda outgrew her dresses, her mom would give me many of her hand-me-downs. I especially loved this black and white gingham. It was my first LBD. I thought black was such a grown up color and it had a white crinoline petticoat with 2-inch cotton eyelet lace that peeked out below the gingham skirt’s hem. I don’t remember the bodice, but I thought that hem-line was cutting edge fashion.

And I was only three years old. I know because I remember wearing it at the white house on West Mercer Avenue where we lived. Tom also cut off the tips of two fingers on a planer in his workshop at that house. Betty piled us in the front seat of the car, he lay roiling in pain on the back seat, and she took off to the emergency room at the hospital. He puked in the parking lot.

Tom was always building stuff: a slide-in camper for his pickup truck that we camped in all the way to California and back and then, up to Montreal, Canada for the World’s Fair; a playhouse for us with windows, doors, a little bedroom, a kitchen and living room– the first open floor plan of the 60s, and the home we lived in. So I’m sure I get some of my imagination from them.

I wanted this blog to be a happy blog. Not a shallow waste of our time, but helpful in how we live. It had to look like that, too.

We’ve all been through crap in our lives. Stuff we may not have understood, that hurt us very badly. A wise counselor once told me ‘few of us escape this world unscathed by pain.’ He’s right. We all have bad things happen.

Life may have dealt us a bad hand of cards. Cards that were hard to play. But, at the end of the day . . . it’s how we play our hand that counts. I want to be told one day, ‘Well done.’

I hope you like Barefoot’s new dress. A dress of seashells, starfish, sponge and netting. Andy and I are working on it and he’s uploaded the first edition. I’m sure we’ll tweak it a bit before we’re done, but it’s coming around. 

Michael Blevins took the picture of a seashell frame I’m working on. There are more pictures coming soon for the slider. You can see more of his work by clicking on the dachshund at the right or here.

Love,

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