Wednesday Poem

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You know I love a sonnet, and this one has some great parts–“we’re all peninsulas, I guess, joined to the mainland, part of the shore”–plus it feels appropriate for the week before Thanksgiving.

 

Sonnet from the Ephesians
by Barbara Crooker

Ephesians 1:16

I do not cease to give thanks, especially in November
even as we lose an hour of light, drawing
the curtains at 4:30 to keep out the cold. To remember
you are dust seems appropriate now. Crows are cawing

black elegies in the bare trees. Just past the Day of the Dead,
and I’m thankful for every friend who has blessed
my life, gold coins in a wooden chest. Who said
no man is an island? We’re all peninsulas, I guess,

joined to the mainland, part of the shore. We’re the sticks
in the bundle that can’t be broken. Even if
it doesn’t seem that way, the bickering of politics,
the blather on the nightly news. Maybe we speak in hieroglyphs,
unclear, always missing the mark? So let me be plain.
I’m grateful for the days of sun. I’m grateful for the rain.

Pattern Testing, Keeping It Real

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I had my first pattern tester experience for one of my favorite companies, Daughter Judy. (Pattern testing is just doing a trial sew of something before the pattern is released and putting in notes about the pattern and instructions.) This is an elastic-back pant that’s coming in a couple weeks and I would never have picked this silhouette on my own, but I kind of love it?
(I’m going to make Doc take real pictures so I can post more detail.)

 

This is actually my second pair; the instructions for the exposed front zip kicked my ass the first time (the bottom opening should have been square):

But the pattern designer put a helpful video in the tester Slack group (and I think will add more detail to the instructions) so my second try turned out great:

Remember, you can be at any skill level and mess things up! But you can also try again!

Powdered Sugar

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There was a little fresh snow from Saturday on the trail and it made everything look like it got dusted with powdered sugar. (Or maybe I’m just feeling like doing some holiday baking.) Either way, it was pretty.

Friday Links

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1. Journalist Lyz Lenz wrote about the election last week and I promise it’s funny and not one of the endless “what went wrong” takes, but she also makes a great point. We have work to do regardless.

But as devastating as these next four years will be, the reality is that I live and work in a red state, and the work is not much different despite the results of the election.

Even under a Democratic president, Iowa saw a loss of reproductive rights, an erosion of the social safety net, book bans, loss of rights for LGBTQ people, and the loss of funding for public schools. I still saw the childcare tax credit discontinued and wages stagnate while the cost of living rose.

[…] There are no quick fixes to building a better life. Even if Harris won, Trump voters would still be around, still running our school boards and state legislatures.

This is the work.

 

2. My old coworker Justin Shiels also posted this last week and it’s been in my head (click through the whole slideshow):

 

3. Joy, of course, is not the same as buying things. But my brain is saying what if buying yarn for a rainbow sweater WAS a way to create some joy? Hmm.

 

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Indigo Escapism

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I don’t know how I came across the “Chinese traditional life” genre of videos but I watch every time. Nothing like just a hint of hard physical labor in a beautiful setting and a lot of time lapse to make you want to live like that!

This one covers harvesting and fermenting indigo to make a huge vat and then using wax resist to indigo dye fabric for a lovely cape.

 

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Let’s Learn About Sharpshooters

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I’ve had this article about sharpshooter Elizabeth “Plinky” Toepperwein saved for a while. No reason why I thought of it again! Just an interesting read on a thing a woman could do!

In the days before television or air-conditioning, hundreds of men in suits—and a few women, decked out in Victorian-era dresses and corsets—braved heat and cold to watch Plinky shoot shotgun shells off [her husband] Ad’s fingers and Ad hit a bull’s-eye while standing on his head. Crowds loved to see Plinky “peel” a potato, held by Ad, by chipping it away with bullets. […]

The Toepperweins’ advertisements often extended a special invitation to women, and they came in droves. Syndicated columns touted the healthful nature of outdoor trapshooting and proclaimed that, as Plinky wrote in 1917, “there is absolutely no reason why a woman should not shoot as well as a man.” Some women formed female trapshooting clubs, and tournaments added amateur women’s divisions. Annie Oakley, now in her fifties, joined the upswell by giving shooting clinics for women. When Oakley and Plinky met at one of them, in 1915, the older sharpshooter reportedly told the younger, “You’re the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.”

Tuesday Project Roundup: Camo Pants

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I bought some cotton ripstop camo back in the summer when I was going through my nouveau prep/Magnum PI moment. As much as I was tempted to make tiny shorts, I went with pants–I’d had this image from J. Crew saved since maybe 2010. (It feels very 2010, right? Pattern mixing, heels with everything…thanks for the bunions, J. Crew.)

I used the Daughter Judy Brier Pants again, except in a straight size 12 (no grading at the waist) and with about half an inch taken off the rise.

I do love how the Daughter Judy block fits me–other than the rise, these are exactly as drafted. I even did some pattern mixing for my outfit (but am firmly at the “soft flat shoe” age).

Monday Poem

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We did yard work (planting iris) (not literally) and have been watching stupid movies to keep us from being tempted to look at the devil’s butthole. We can all still make a fist.

 

Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Friday Links

Karen

1. I’m trying not to read everyone’s outrage, which keeps throwing gas on my own fire of outrage, but this quote from Kate Manne talking about misogyny is going to live in my head forever:

They don’t necessarily want women to go septic and die in parking lots, denied life-saving reproductive care in case it constitutes an abortion—a reality that Trump deliberately and proudly ushered into being. But if that’s the price of a cheaper tank of gas, or being able to afford a bigger house, or run a more profitable business, then they’ll willingly pay it

 

2. But enough of that! I’m going to refer to “planting iris” a lot in the future, I think. From Leonard Woolf’s Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939, via Austin Kleon:

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

 

3. This is really the same sentiment as the quote above:

Things That Are Good

Karen

I wrote yesterday’s post having just learned the news and as the day went on and it really sank in, my feelings of dread and doom intensified. I don’t think we’re going to unionize our way out of this one.

But I made myself get off the internet and go on a little hike and you know what? Mountains don’t have any idea what a government is. Neither do orange kitties you can hug in the night if you can’t sleep. “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”