Advance 4914 at the Lan Su Chinese Garden!

Just pictures, today.  This is what I was doing last Sunday!  My friends and I went to the Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland, Oregon.  It's enclosed in walls in one city block, but feels quite spacious once you're in it, because of clever design and careful choices throughout.  We picked a good day to go, as the weather was lovely, and a young woman was playing the guzheng, or Chinese zither.  She was really good!  After each song, she explained what it meant.  For instance, she played The Fisherman's Song at Dusk, which is about fishermen coming home in their boats.  As the sun sets, they cheerfully race each other to get home before dark, and the song gets faster, but keeps its rhythm, the pull of the oars faster and faster, the rills of water splashing and swirling. 

The song reminded me of me and a friend once rushing to get our canoe to shore ahead of a storm on the lake where we lived.  Energetic fun, but with a real deadline. 

And since I was wearing my new dress that day, I got some lovely pictures to share! 

If you want to read about the dress pattern or construction, here are the links:
Advance 4914, view 2, PATTERN
Advance 4914, view 2, CONSTRUCTION

Photos by Eryn Rieple. 

I wore the sandals for comfort on a hot day, but my friend scolded me because they are not stylish shoes!

I love the composition of this photo! Dark and light, cool and hot, yin and yang... very Chinese.

Okay, I'll take the shoes off! Oh, dear, my petticoat is showing.

Actually the petticoat does show a bit when I sit or raise my legs (see the two pictures below).  Interestingly, it's not a matter of length of skirt, but of circumference of hem!  If a skirt has a wide circumference, and you strike a Captain Morgan pose (for instance), the skirt will come up over your knee and still have plenty of folds to fall down as well.  But if a skirt has a narrow circumference, when you lift the knee for that pose, it'll lift more of the skirt, even creating drag-lines as it lifts fabric from elsewhere in the skirt.  So if a petticoat is super full with a huge circumference (like this one I'm wearing), and the skirt over if has a narrower circumference, the skirt will occasionally lift or ride up when the petticoat below it does not.  Thus when I sit, crouch, or raise a leg, the white froth of petticoat spills out the bottom.  I must be aware of it to be ladylike in this outfit! 

Koi fish!