This month’s

I am calling Burned to Beautiful.

My 40th birthday was September 15, 2001. As you might guess we had other things on our minds than celebrating my birthday. How about simply being alive? Counting your blessings not the candles on your cake? Anyway, you get the picture.

We scaled the party down and ended up having it in late October. It was a lot of fun and some folks even flew in for the festivities. Towards the end of the evening, after a few drinks and toasts and roasts we got to dancing. My jacket ended up tossed on a table which held a votive candle which caught it on fire and burned several holes in the sleeve and charred a few other spots.

I don’t know why, but I held on to it. (Well, some of you who know me well will never question why I kept it. I tend to keep just about everything. Hey, you never know!)

I dragged it out the other day. Humph. What to do? I happened to have a piece of red lace from a mask I made when I was Lady GaGa one Halloween. Pretty darned good match.

I used a seam ripper to open the seam at the shoulder. And then chopped off the burned part and did the same to the other perfectly good sleeve.

Then I cut a piece of the lace the same width as the bit I just chopped off. I sewed it onto the sleeve.

The charred spots I simply covered with a bit of lace.

So, what could have been deemed unsalvageable, I saved with a bit of lace! This is an easy fix. If you have a favorite garment that has a stain, a pull, a hole, a rip, consider embellishing it by adding a bit of lace to cover the flaw, or some feathers, or (as I did on a black organza dress in an earlier post) sew some silk flowers over the holes. You just have to have a bit of imagination. And the best thing is, if it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost much!

So here is my “fixed” jacket. It cost me nothing as I had the bit of lace and already owned the jacket.

I have a good news!

The Dressmaker’s Duke is a finalist in the National Readers Choice Awards for both Best First Book and Best Historical. I am really thrilled! Writing can be such a solitary endeavor it is so lovely to get a bit of validation. The winners won’t be revealed till the end of July at the RWA (Romance Writers of America) National Convention, so fingers crossed!

Thanks for stopping by.

And if you haven’t checked out my book, please give it a try! Available at: amazon, B&N, iTunes

Also, I would love a review if you have not done so yet. Just go to Goodreads or Amazon click “write a review” and post! You don’t even have to use your real name!

Happy Thrift Hunting!!