As mentioned previously, my friends Dylan and Verena planned their wedding for July 19th in Waimanalo, Hawaii. Dylan grew up in Hawaii, mostly in Waimanalo.

This was the first real destination wedding that I’d attended, in that everyone coming to the wedding really made a vacation of it. All the guests were in rental houses within a few blocks of each other and the wedding site. All the houses were also less than half a block from the beautiful white sand beach. It was a wonderful week.

In honor of the fact they were getting married in Hawaii, I had worked feverishly during the weeks prior to make my dress and a shirt for Craig to wear out of Hawaiian print fabric I had bought years ago and recently discovered. You can see that they both turned out just fine:

The entire ceremony was beautiful, and Verena’s dress was one of the most gorgeous wedding dresses I have ever seen, and caused her to look like a mermaid leaving the ocean to join Dylan on the beach.

Yonna and I had also made skirts for the trip through our “Cute Skirt” class at Cool Cottons. The skirts we made in class were sized all wrong so we bought more material and spent another weekend working on new skirts. During our second attempt we decided to make a third skirt for Monica both because we figured she’d enjoy a skirt at the beach, and because we found that there were three variations of the same pattern available. We had to guess on the size for Monica’s, but luckily this time around all the skirts fit.

We all wore our skirts the day we drove to the north shore and stopped at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck in Kahuku for lunch. Unfortunately, I only have two pictures of the three of us in our skirts and in both the skirts look fine, but the three of us all look a little funny.

It was a wonderful week. I met a lot of great people, ate shave ice, spent time on the beach, kayaked through the tradewinds and got to spend a full week with a six to seven week old darling, Clementine.

It has been more than a month since I got home from this trip, but now at long last I posted a bit about it.

Yesterday I took the day off work to make some headway on the halter dress I am hoping to complete while my mom is in town. I’d made the front pieces, and had basted together the “bodice.” I was intimidated to go further as the next steps involved the vague phrase “finish seams” as well as setting pleats. I have no experience with either of these actions and wanted the help of a more seasoned seamstress. Plus, I needed someone to help me fit the dress.

We spent all afternoon working and have only three steps left, listed in order:

1. attach the bodice to the skirt
2. attach the zipper
3. finish the upper back of the bodice

I am still a novice seamstress. There are parts of this dress that clearly show my skill level. Still, with a little effort and luck I’ll have a completed dress this weekend.

Even better than the progress on the dress was having an opportunity to hang out with my mom. The fact that we live nearly 3000 miles apart means these afternoons are far and few between, I savor all the time I can get.

Wheel Building (aka Craig’s Birthday, Part 2)

After an afternoon of sewing it was off to Kevin’s for a wheel building party I put together as Craig’s birthday present. He is a difficult person to gift, and I’d spent weeks before his birthday trying to figure out what I should do. I realized that anything I thought about buying would be more for me than him.

It wasn’t until the week before his birthday, while I was talking to Kyle at the bowling alley after the Big Lebowski bike ride, that I thought of a wheel building party. Kevin (as Craig says, nine on the calendar) agreed to host so I had him pick the date. He’s built a lot of wheels and has a well stocked bike shop in his basement.

Since Craig had all the necessary parts I was told that if I provided beer and pizza then the 4 wheels that needed building might all be completed by the end of the night. Kevin noted that he had pizza stones, so rather than ordering pizza we could just make it. This way he could show off his renaissance skills in a single night.

Last night Kevin and I managed to get two pizzas in the oven before anyone else arrived. Once others arrived I quickly began to realize that if Kevin continued making pizza we would lose a critical component necessary for successful wheel building.

I had planned to meet my mom and Rusty down the street at the Kennedy School for dinner and leave the mechanics to their building.  I had to postpone the meeting time to ensure that all five pizzas made it into the oven, and then ask Kyle, who had no wheel in hand, to ensure the pizza came out without burning.

We made some great pizzas, such as the one below with wild mushrooms (shitake, maitake and morels) and fresh garlic:

That said, if you are thinking of organizing your own work party I highly recommend either ensuring that the dedicated cooks are not required for the work, or better yet, uncouple the activities and order out.

Before I left I gave a “friendly reminder” that I wanted the night to be fun, but also hoped that at the end of the night the wheels would be built. This is a bit of the scene while I was at dinner, notice the rarely used, but still important nipple driver on the orange blanket:

The wheel building moved inside after dark and everyone that had not seen it before was exposed to Kevin’s awesome bike collection and shop. If you aren’t a bike enthusiast, you might just see a lot of bikes, tools and parts (like me). If you are, his hand crafted bikes, assorted specialty tools and well stocked parts might make you drool.

Here Kevin is truing a wheel:

Notice the yellow box of JagWire derailleur cable on the wall in front of him. The point here is that rather than paying the steep mark-up for buying the cable retail, Kevin bought in bulk and now has an amount of cable that would last the average cyclist 30 years, though in his case he will be lucky if it lasts ten.

I got back to the house after 10, and found that four people remained and were all nearing completion of the wheels in hand.

Before we left, Kevin proposed that we all drink a toast to Sheldon Brown who passed away in February.

To quote BikeSnobNYC:

I doubt that there’s any cyclist who hasn’t consulted his site, or who doesn’t still. And as the architect of the cycling canon he’s done more for cycling than any pro cyclist, or critical mass, or white bike, or orange bike ever has. No matter what you ride, how you ride, how long you ride, or how long you’ve been riding, you’re a fan of Sheldon Brown.

As for the wheel building party, thanks to the fact that Craig has great and committed friends I took four completed, ready to ride wheels home. Today, the mountain bike wheels still need rim tape, but its a beautiful day and Craig could be riding his Bianchi to pick some up right now.

Thanks again everyone!

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