Friday Links

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1. The 48-hour trip that I spent a month sewing things for is coming up this weekend! It’s SUCH a middle-aged lady niche interest trip, too: We’re going to the scent museum and the pinball museum and, of course, Stonemountain Fabrics.

2. Would you like to see lettering from classic jazz albums? How about albums designed by Milton Glaser?

3. America may not make it but hell yeah, imposter syndrome is out! (Also I’m glad to know it’s not just me worrying about getting fired all the time.)

 

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It’s Not A Rabbit Hole If You Learn Things

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A friend sent me this, knowing it was exactly up my alley (words and gains)–the origins of the word dumbbell as it related to bell ringers:

 

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And that got me looking up videos of bell ringers to see the physical action, and before I knew it I was on the Wikipedia page for change ringing, dusting off my music theory.

It’s a fun rabbit hole if you want to go down it, too–so many tidbits, like “full circle ringing” and “quarter peals” and even a Dorothy Sayers novel!

Wednesday Poem

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This is a short, recent one–but boy does it feel appropriate. Keep doing beautiful things, friends. That’s how we save us.

 

In 150 Characters or Less
by Nikita Gill

Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in that.

Healthy AND Fancy

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I had to get a set of five sheets of intaglio paper for my friend’s valet tray, so while I had the boards and glue out for that project, I made a big fancy box for the living room:

The inside is a classic Florentine fleur-de-lys and I had just the right red book cloth for the hinge. (Yay for buying an excessive amount of craft supplies, I guess.)

And what goes IN this big fancy box, you ask? A blood pressure monitor, of course.

My blood pressure got really high last year with the anemia (which makes sense, given the paucity of red blood cells to move oxygen around) so I started checking it daily. To remember to do that, it helped to have the monitor down in the main living area, but I hated looking at it, so: fancy box time. Now Doc is checking his, too, so Intaglio Box is getting a lot of use.

So Bad

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The fires in California are unimaginably bad–just like the floods in North Carolina or the hurricanes in Florida or whatever the next climate disaster will be in the next state. Hamilton Nolan’s newsletter yesterday spelled out the likely future and it’s bleak:

Either you allow a few people to get very rich and let them hire their own private protection and build their mansions on hills or on stilts or behind big walls, and buy themselves estates in New Zealand to escape to, and rockets to blast off in if necessaryā€”or, or, you take the other path. You say, “all humans are together on this planet and we are all equal and we will face this collectively and we will take care of the most vulnerable first and we will demand the most sacrifice from those who have the most to give.ā€ It is a stunning thing that the first choice has somehow become the default, the legal and most likely path for the worldā€™s richest nation, and the second choice has become an object of mockery, something to be dismissed as utopian.

[…] There is the all-encompassing question of evolving our entire world to try to head off the progress of climate change, but we do not need to solve the entire crisis in every conversation. At this moment, it is enough to say, ā€œwe need to make some reasonable rules about how we are going to get everyone through the disasters, because we are all in this together.ā€ This low bar, I promise, is too much to expect from the federal government that is set to come to power. We will watch them hand out oil drilling permits and pass bills to protect gas stoves and swagger around in big trucks and pose in campaign ads with guns and banners that say ā€œCome and Take Itā€ and go on hunting trips with lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute. These are the villains. There they are. They will help your house burn down and send cops to crack your head if you get angry about it and then ask you to vote for them. They have a lifeboat. You canā€™t get on. Theyā€™re sure they will get away with it.

 

Imaginary Travel: SentoĢ„

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I saw an old World of Interiors article about Japanese bathhouse design and immediately clicked through. I wish it had even more pictures, but I did learn a new fact:

Though bathhouse styles vary from region to region, sentoĢ„ can nevertheless be divided into two broad categories: Tokyo and Osaka style. The former are almost without exception extravagant places, always arranged with a washing area in front and baths behind. The relative uniformity of sentoĢ„ design around the capital is a consequence of the catastrophic Great KantoĢ„ earthquake of 1923. In the aftermath, it was shrine carpenters who turned their talents to restoring the sentoĢ„: their architectural approach, complete with meditative murals of Mount Fuji and similar motifs, became the established regional style.

 

Sewing: Keeping Me Humble

Karen

This isn’t a full project roundup, just a reminder to myself of the dangers of sewing hubris because this backpack project has been such a struggle.

Did I think it would be that difficult? Nope, I’ve breezed through hiking packs and wool coats so I expected this to be the same, but wow the user error got me on this. I can’t even blame the instructions, because they were very thorough! They gave me many tips on sewing curves, which I ignored, because I’ve sewn curves before! They WARNED me to pay attention to the alignment marks, but did I? Not really!

You might be thinking, “What’s the problem, Karen? This looks fine!” but the picture isn’t showing that the back panel with the straps isn’t aligned with the body, yet the zipper lid IS, so that makes it all sit crooked. And the curves of the back pocket and the lid have puckers, despite me trying two or three times on each (but still not following the instructions!?!).

I have one more step to go to finish (bind the inside seam) and then I’m taking this on the road in a couple weeks, where hopefully the flaws will fade and I can see if it’s as useful as I planned. So I’ll get more pictures then, but I don’t post about the struggle much–honestly, it’s been a while since I HAD such a project struggle–so I just wanted to keep it real.

Green Things + Vitamin D

Karen

Well all the parties are over now, we got snow, it’s a long gray January…don’t forget to take your Vitamin D and find something green. We went to Red Butte on my birthday and the conservatory was as green as I expected–but there was also a brave magnolia outside trying to bud. Hold on, little guy! But thanks for being there.