Wearing Handmade: Paso Robles Wine Tasting Trip (Sew Country Chick- DIY fashion and style)

Last week was my wedding anniversary. Twenty one years! I decided to wear a dress I made a couple of years ago. I thought it would look good with the wine up there, being purple…

We decided to go up to Paso Robles for a night to celebrate. If you love wine and wine tasting, and are in California, than you must visit Paso Robles on the central coast of California. Paso is quickly catching up to the Napa Valley on the wine lovers destination list, and many of their wines have won top awards this past year at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine awards. Some wineries to keep an eye out for are Adelaida, Niner, which won wine of the year, Lone Madrone, and Cass, a winery we discovered last year which has a great restaurant out in the vineyard.

Paso is gorgeous, and the terrain is similar to Spain or the south of France. It shares the same type of Mediterranean climate. Many of the same grapes that were traditionally grown in Spain and France, are now thriving on the near to the coast, but warmer inland areas of Paso Robles.

I was all ready and fixed up in my purple dress made with fabric from Anna Sui. It has this purple flower trim on the neck and well, now that I look at it, this dress is maybe a bit ….too much! I’m not sure if it’s my style anymore. Maybe I will take off the flowers. What do you think?

The thing as I only serged the thing, as it was a quick make and I didn’t use a pattern . On the way up in the car, I noticed the seams on the sides were coming out! I had nothing else fancy to wear and of course I never travel with a sewing kit.Maybe I will now… So I wore my jeans for the next two days. which was fine because truth be told, I was a bit overdressed for Paso Robles. Although it’s becoming very chic, very quickly, it’s essentially a cowboy town, and you can still see people riding their horses through the streets there. But now there are French tourists walking around, too. And I looked like I was ready for dinner at The Hilton in Maui!

Moral of the story: Sew with a normal machine stitch to reinforce knits if you are going to serge something. Serging only doesn’t last.

Old Paso Robles….

Our hotel, the Paso Robles Inn , opened in the 1870′s and has sulfur hot tubs on private decks fed froma sulfur spring on the property. And Jesse James the outlaw holed up there for awhile back in the 1880′s.

And new Paso Robles…