We left on a Friday, and drove for hours from Kigali, Rwanda, to an ecolodge overlooking tea plantations about an hour from the canopy walk we’d be doing at Nyungwe National Forest. A GPS search says it takes about 5 hours. There was much to see, and the long drive wasn’t a hardship.
What should we pack? What will we do? I asked many times in the weeks leading up to our trip. Along with an unexpected slam from Delta, we were going to a new place I knew nothing about.
I didn’t want to fill my head with other people’s ideas, so I wasn’t doing a lot of internet research, and limited my reading to a couple of authors from the region. Our friends and hosts told us they were taking care of the itinerary, so we just needed to show up.
So we did. We showed up.
The Sew House 7 Wildwood Wrap Dress has a LOT of pattern pieces. It took weeks of procrastination just to get my size traced onto pattern paper, and weeks again before I got around to marking and cutting the fabric. When I finally traced everything and got out my fabric, it took an entire day to cut out all the pieces interspersed with my other responsibilities.
Nearly everything is asymmetrical, meaning opposite sides have separate pieces. I marked everything with chalk to keep the pieces straight while I worked.
Back when I was on FB, it was pretty easy to make the decision only to connect with people I knew in real life. On IG, it’s a little easier to slowly add folks who have interesting style, pursuits, or perspectives. So there are quite a few people on my feed who I don’t know personally.
That’s a little weird for me. I like that I can connect and be inspired creatively by these folks, but sometimes they share their opinions and then I quietly set my phone down and have an existential crisis.
Several days after we got to Rwanda, we woke up at 4 a.m. and loaded ourselves into a safari truck with our hosts.
