grace duVal

it’s a quiet morning here in Ohio. I woke up to Amy laughing and talking on the phone with her friend Ant, some guy from Austraila whom she met in Cambodia. So of course I ran into the living room and pounced on her. and thus began our day.

It’s been beautiful and pleasant staying with Margot and Bill. They have a beautiful house hidden back in the woods on over 30 acres. We spent the afternoon hanging around the house making guacamole. After dinner we went on a fabulous hour long walk, winding through the forest and then walking through a long meadow. The light was long across the ground and the air was warm. It was beautiful.

After the walk I read out loud to Amy (“tell me a story!” she said) and we ate watermelon on the porch with Margot while the sun set.

It’s been pretty idyllic here, but now Amy and I are ready to move west. Next stop, the Dunes campground and Chicago for a few days.

Time to get out the tent!

Hello Hello Hello!

I am writing from the middle of Ohio! Why? Because I have officially escaped the confies of Richmond and have begun my summer excursions. The last week has been so incredibly intense, I can’t even handle it.

I left from Natural Bridge of Thursday and tried to get back to RVA early in the day to get all sorts of stuff done before I left town on Friday, but of course nothing went according to plan. I had to change the oil in my/Amy’s car before I drove all the way to Chicago in it. Good thing I did, because while I was getting it changed the guys noticed that my back tires were so far worn down that if I drove over gravel incorrectly they would EXPLODE. Awesome. So I had to go get new tires and pay a ton of money, which was NOT in my game plan.

Then, while I’m waiting for my tires I call FedEx to track the shipment of Melanie’s and my dragon dress, only to find out it’s been returned to my front porch. I am not pleased. So I talk to an international representative who tells me that the wood in the skirt won’t make it through customs so I have to get an official document stating that the wood has been properly treated so it doesn’t bring bugs, etc. into the country. I hang up and start crying.

So over the rest of the day my dad puts me in touch with the department of agriculture, who puts me in touch with the USDA, etc. etc. etc. So finally at the end of the day I get back to my place to find my giant box sitting on the end of my porch with a note on top of it that simply says “stuffed animals prohibited in New Zealand.”

SERIOUSLY?

More drama ensues, I call FedEx and finally it gets figured out that they actually mean stuffed ANIMALS, like taxidermy, NOT toy stuffed animals. Oh god. So my package got sent back for nothing.

So yesterday was a wild day full of taking the package BACK to FedEx and shipping it AGAIN, and then I had to do a photo shoot with Aniscia, whose wedding dress I made. It was an amazing shoot and I can’t wait to edit the pictures. She’s so much fun to work with, the pictures are really beautiful.

After I finished all of that running around I got in my car and sped up the state to pick Amy up at Dulles because she just got back from Thailand. I can’t even tell you how exciting it is to have her back! We have endless stories to share and she has all sorts of awesome things to tell me about Thailand. We talked the entire car ride,and I’m sure the dialogue will keep going the whole trip. I swear, that girl is on a constant adventure. I love it.

Anyways, I picked her up at the airport and then drove five hours to her aunt Margot’s house, where we are now. I can’t even explain how amazing it was for both of us to crawl up in our bunk beds and pass out for the night. Oh man, we both needed it. So today her cousin Matt took us into the town of Kent so we could see their fashion museum and everything. Now we’re just back at the house hanging out for the afternoon. Amy’s downstairs taking a nap and I’m up here.

It feels amazing to finally be on vacation. I’ve been running constantly for months, and I feel so much relief now that it’s all done.

On a different note, I was just informed that one of my dresses his a really big blog. I’m all over the internet and had no idea… Go check it out!

Tomorrow Amy and I continue west towards the Dunes campground on lake Michigan. We’ll stay there for two nights while I check out SAIC, and then onwards to Michigan to look at Cranbrook. Ahhhh, to live the life of an adventurer.

I stole that title from Paul. That will all makes more sense in a bit.

Anyways, today was pretty awesome. Still in Lexington living the simple life. I went to town today with mom and just… you know, did the Lexington thing. Went to goodwill and got some great colorful stuff, stopped at habitat and picked up something hilarious for Ava…

and then I got lunch with Paul!! That was so fantastic. I haven’t seen him in a while and it was really important that I get to catch up with him. He’s one of my best guy friends ever and it’s really important to me that I stay in touch with him. We always have these long crazy conversations and such. Anyways, he was in China for the paast two weeks and I happened to catch him right when he got home and right before he left again. We got lunch and talked for a few hours. The most awesomest part of the whole thing (not that I don’t love seeing Paul just because he’s great) is that he brought me back this AMAZING communist watch with Chairman Mao on it. He waves his hand in time with the seconds ticking. It’s seriously the best thing I own.

After lunch with Paul I got to meet up with Isia, which was SUPER amazing because I haven’t seen her since December, what with her being at Princeton and everything. So we got coffee and talked and talked and talked. Which is how we roll. Honestly, it wasn’t nearly long enough of a talk with her. I need weeks. We keep a semi-regular message stream running over Facebook, so more or less we know the gist of what’s going on in the other’s lives, but still. Face-to-face is SO much better. But like I said, I could have talked for so much longer. We got coffee at the coffee shop and then walked around W&L and VMI and then parted ways. We’re both off to New York, though I’ll be in the Adirondaks and she’ll be over in NYC living the high life at Newsweek. So jealous.

Tonight mom and I stopped at Sally’s on the way home (for the fourth night in a row) because today is her ACTUAL birthday. We brought her flowers and were just in time to mooch off of them and get amazing home made dessert. We stayed for a while and Jimmy showered us with flowers, and then we went home.

Now, unfortunately, I’m back in overdrive mode. I’m going back to RVA tomorrow for a little over 24 hours to do the wedding photo shoot, then I’m heading north to Dulles to pick up Amy from Thailand. THEN we’re driving straight towards Chicago, stopping for the night at her Aunt’s house. Then we keep going west and hit up Chicago so I can check out SAIC grad programs. We’re going to camp at the dunes campground for a few days, and then go east so I can visit Cranbrook. The whole trip is so I can take a look at grad schools, which is both exciting and REALLY SCARY. But more than anything it’s just an excuse to steal Amy for a week and go on a road trip. Who can blame me?

So right now I’m procrastinating packing the car with camping gear and everything that I should be doing. When will my life slow down?

On a REALLY AWESOME note, I’m ordering my Nikon D60 tomorrow so it should be here by the time I get back!!! I know it’s not top of the line but a. I can’t afford anything more and b. I don’t really care. OMGZ I CAN’T WAIT YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

I just have to say, I love being home. I love my home. I love Natural Bridge Station, in the middle of nowhere, in my clapboard hourse full to brimming with animals, trains running by on the railroad tracks and rushing creeks overflowing from last night’s torrential downpour. I know it’s not supposed to be this way, that young people like me aren’t supposed to love home and aren’t supposed to want to stay here forever, but I could. I really could.

I just drove up the hill to Flint’s, the local gas station, to get myself a Diet Coke (because we never keep such things in our house, and the city has spoiled me in some ways). Just driving that two miles made me so happy. Fog has entirely covered the mountains so I’m suspended in this misty valley, everything around me entirely green and lush.

It’s odd how being here always makes me think “home.” I know so many people who have moved their entire lives, never really having one solid place. Meanwhile, here I sit in my room, the same room that I’ve had since birth, staring out of the same window lined in Beanie Babies from that bizarre phase of my childhood.  Everything about this place, both my home and the county that I live in, bring memories flooding back. It’s an experience that  I don’t think I could ever fully express, it’s just something you either know or don’t.

All I can say is I love my home. I love where I’m from. It makes me feel free and happy, like I can truly be myself in a way that Richmond never allows me to really feel. Will I end up here? I don’t really know. If there wasn’t some odd taboo against living where you grew up, I would almost definitely say yes. But I guess I need to get out and experience the world before I make a definite decision.

But I think I would be quite satisfied with taking an old barn and renovating it into my house with my studio in the rafters. By that point I’ll be so famous that people will come to the middle of nowhere just for my designs.

hah.

so I haven’t written for awhile because I’ve been absolutely slammed. Leave it to me to get SUPER busy the minute school lets out. Let’s see, what have I done… The minute I got back from Kanuga I went back to RVA and set about workinggggg awayyy. I have two main projects that I’ve been focusing on. First off, a wedding dress! This has been a super fun excursion for me, as it’s the first wedding dress I’ve ever made. It’s for an awesome girl that I know who’s getting married in July. She asked me back in November if I’d do it for her and of course I said YES!

I’ve been steadily making rough-draft versions of the dress ever since, fitting it to her and making sure it still fits correctly. It wasn’t until last Friday that I finally had the real fabric to make the dress (which looks vaguely like this only with a boat-neck sheer overlay.) Well I cranked it out in two days, she tried it on and it fit like a DREAM! I was so excited when I saw it on her. She’s got such a bright, big personality and this dress totally matches it. I love working with people who have the same aesthetic as I do.

We were supposed to do a photoshoot yesterday but it threated to rain and we were both like HECK NO we’re not taking a silk wedding dress out in the rain! So we’re shooting this Friday, and thus I’ll post pictures later.

Otherwise I’ve been finishing these darn camping dresses that have utterly consumed my life. Of course I would be the type to think that something takes an eighth of it’s actual time to make. I just finished the glowing lantern hats and now all I have to do is put cloth tags in every single piece and I can ship the whole set off! I’m hoping that my friend Isia will model the hats for me so I can have nice pictures. She was one of my photo muses during high school and it would be fun for the good ‘ol days. Also she has bright red hair, which will be wonderful with the bright orange hats!

On top of everything I shipping Mel’s and my dragon dress, which was a terrible trial. I had to stay in FedEx for an hour and a half while this awesome girl Caroline helped me cut ONE INCH off the end of the box because it was ONE INCH two long. Seriously. That was one of those times where I just wanted to bang my head against a wall. But Caroline was awesome and we got through it sans head banging.

So now I’m finally home again, nearly done with everything and nearly bored out of my mind. If I’m not doing everything at once, of course I feel like I’m rotting away. What is it with me? My dad’s friends Norb, Roger and Jeannie are in town and we’re having a three day celebration/cook-out dealio because it’s Norb’s and my bfff Amy’s mother (Sally)’s birthday too. So there’s tons of awesome food and hanging out and mountains and fresh air and everything I need to unwind. Dad and I are about to head over there for dinner, so I’ll head out.

Tarrington, my rat, says hi.

WELL let me just start by saying I just had a SPARROW FLY IN MY WINDOW. and I’m not even at Kanuga anymore! Holy crap, that was scary. I’m at a hotel in Asheville with mom and she just left the room. As she left she opened the window and said jokingly that she would have opened the window earlier but she didn’t want a bird to fly in while I was asleep. LITTLE DID SHE KNOW. Isn’t that an exciting way to start off the day…

Anyways, mom and I left Kanuga yesterday. We wanted to stay in our fabulous cabin for as long as possible, but unfortunately another group was coming in the same day. So while mom finished up her last session yesterday morning I sat on the porch and sewed away. I finished my sleeping bag skirt for my series of camping dresses that I’m making for WOW. This series is based off of the tent dress that I made back in December.

Basically it’s three dresses that turn into camping elements. There’s a main dress that has a removable skirt that turns into a ten-foot tall tent. The other two have removable skirts, one that unzips into three pillows and the other that unfurls into three conjoined sleeping bags. Well that’s the one that I just finished. It’s pretty awesome. I lined the back of it with this old plaid flannel sheet so it REALLY looks like an old sleeping bag. It’s great. I’m really excited to send all of these dresses off, but I’m scared about how expensive it’s all going to be. Ugh.

I spent all of my sewing time out on the second, BEAUTIFUL screened porch that we have in the house. It was perfect, looking out onto the lake and sewing away. I wish I’d had more time to sew, but oh well. I also worked on my friend’s wedding dress that I’m making for her. I was working on the crinoline underneath the skirt so it’s really puffy. Let me tell you, I was SO frustrated with all of the tulle and gathering thread and everything that was wrapped around me. It was like a giant cloth maze. I got so irritated, I hate gathering for hours. Eventually I’ll straighten it all out.

After lunch I helped mom pack up all of her things from the conference and we left Kanuga and headed out into the real world, which is quite a shock after being somewhere with no tv or any sort of media. We drove down to Asheville and here we are! Now I’m sitting in a hotel in Asheville with mom watching a Miley Cyrus music video and loving every minute of it. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. We’re just hanging out now but in a bit we’re going to go downtown and shop. I just got paid so I’m excited to hit up the vintage shops and get some new clothes for summer when I go teach at CAMP!

Oh man, so much excitingness!!!!

so i’m sitting here on a couch in a log cabin on a lake. I’m here because mom, who’s a therapist (techincally an LPC) was invited to come do a three day workshop on codependence here. Where are we? We’re at Kanuga, an Episcopal retreat center in Hendersonville, NC. This place is absolutely amazing, let me tell you. It’s set back in the mountains on a big lake about forty five minutes south of Ahsville. It’s so quiet here, you can just sit around and wander the grounds with only the sounds of crickets and geese in the distance. Though as I sit here and say how quiet it is there’s currently a group of young campers being taught how to canoe right outside of my window, which is far from quiet.

It’s really great to escape Richmond and come up here. I’ve been absolutely slammed with work, preparing to ship out garments to World of Wearable Art, a fashion show in New Zealand that my best friend and I are traveling to in the fall. I’ve been so swamped with work, so it’s great to get out and relax.I really should be working on finishing my camping dress series (a tryptic of dresses that turn into a tent, pillows and sleeping bags) but instead I’ve been nestled under the sleeping bag dress that I made (it works really well!) working on random graphic design and reading Cold Mountain.

I love coming to conferences with mom. It’s great because I get to sit back and enjoy the hotel room/free cable/internet/cabin/woods/lake for free while she does all sorts of things. I’ve been going to them for years, so I’m really used to sitting around with a bunch of therapists day in and day out. It’s supremmely normal to me. People seem to find it adorable and charming that I come with mom, considering nobody else brings their families to these things. I guess mom and I are just that close.

This conference has been particularly awesome because somehow mom and I managed to get a five-bedroom cabin all to ourselves for the week. It’s lakefront and positively amazing. I also have enjoyed this trip because I’ve managed to roust myself out of bed before eight every morning to go hear some lectures with her. Yesterday we heard Mary Pipher speak, who wrote Reviving Ophelia. It was an interesting talk, though I disagreed with some of what she had to say. But it’s always interesting to hear someone of fame give a lecture.

This morning we heard a phenomenal speaker. Her name was Lucy Hall and she is the founder of the Mary Hall Freedom House in Atlanta, GA. Let me tell you, I don’t know if I’ve ever been so moved by a speaker. I was on the verge of tears for most of her talk, and by the end she earned a standing ovation. She’s a recovering alcohol and drug abuser who came from a family of adicts, most of whom died from aditcion-related incidents. She finally got into recovery and decided to start a residential recovery program for women and women with children. I can’t even tell you how impressive this woman is, both in the power of her speaking and what she has accomplished through her tenacity.

I’m doing a terrible job of describing what the center is about and what she’s done, so I urge you to check it out. All I can say is I am so moved and inspired by what she does. It’s really interesting to come and hear about drug and alcohol abuse, as I come out of a recovering household, so I know alot about the whole process and system. I love being involved and immersed in worlds like this because, while I’m an artist, not a psych major, this sort of thing holds great interest in my life. I learn so much by coming to these things, in addition to the free cabin. I hope I can continue to come to these sorts of things for a long time.

Well, the canoers have taken off from the dock and are causing a ruckus. I guess it’s time for me to go do some work, sew, or maybe just read.

Golly, I live such a hard life…

hello all!

So I’ve tried to keep up online blogs in the past, but it’s never seemed to work out. I always get distracted or overloaded with things and never manage to keep them updated. Somewhere out there in the depths of the world wide web there are random posts about my life from the past…. what, seven years?

I’ve decided to try again since I’m just now launching my website and I figure I should keep people updated. Everyone seems to want to know what the heck I’m doing, and since I run at about a million miles a minute, I figured this was an easy way to do it. AND maybe it will help me remember everything that I seem to do.

SO… here’s my wild and crazy life.