Recently, I submitted an entry into a sewing contest. For it, I motivated myself to finally learn how to make an ao dai (ow-yai, meaning long garment), the national garment of Viet Nam, my country of origin. I used a pattern for a base, Folkwear 139. However, I customized it to fit a 5’10” friend who was my sewing model. I also fixed how the shoulders were done because sewing it as instructed left a very jagged shoulder “dart”, which was essentially what I was doing more than sewing it together as a seam. Then I extended the neck line from the body up so it didn’t leave such a big collar. Finally, on my real garment, I redrafted the front and back pieces to remove the vertical darts so as not to disturb the beautiful big print, and took out a dart on the sleeve.
Tag Archive: how
Today was a great day for Canada as Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister, introduced a gender-balanced Cabinet, and showed Canadians so many ways as to how his government will be different from anything we have seen before. However, one thing that had not changed, but could in a small way with big visibility, was the “fashion”, or lack thereof, of most of the male politicians. They practically all wore ties with the traditional and boring Windsor knot.
So here’s my suggestion. What if they were to wear the beautiful and distinctly visible Trinity Knot in the picture at right?
A few days back, I shared a short story I wrote about a very sad childhood experience I had in Viet Nam. I wrote it prior to returning to my home country for the first time in 35 years, ending with contemplation about how I’d handle helping ease some of the poverty I would experience there. Specifically, it was the street children because it was street children survival brutality that I had been exposed to as a child that one day of The Pho Incident story.
