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Weekend Details
Friday Links
1. I found the sub-Reddit devoted to orange cats and it’s extremely wholesome and also has a great name: One Orange Braincell.
2. Lance Armstrong: still a trash human.
3. Unskilled labor: still a myth.
Unskilled labor is truly nothing but a capitalist myth to keep workers down pic.twitter.com/98vceKLnrS
— Stop Cop City (@JoshuaPHilll) June 17, 2023
4. A good reminder for the long weekend (I’ll be back Wednesday!):
(from Gisela on Instagram)
Thursday Poem
This one from Ron Padgett has some overtones of Gary Snyder being Zen. Nice.
Poem
You’re here-
and if you relax
for a moment
your back
and other parts
will arrive
and you can be
together,
with yourself,
a little happiness.
(From Big Cabin, Coffee House Press, 2019)
Double Project Roundup: Hot Regressive Maximalism
Like I said yesterday, I’ve already made a circa 1998 cutaway top and I really love it:
This is the Greenstyle Sky Tank in a stash cotton rib in the waist length. Highly recommend for a quick sew that will let you relive all your high school fashion dreams, but with more muscles and less anxiety.
I also finished these bright! chartreuse! linen! wide! pants! at the same time and realized they worked really well together:
I think there’s just something that happens after you turn 40 where you become more and more attracted to linen–right after your mid-30s when you realize that you won’t stand for uncomfortable clothes any more. This explains Eileen Fisher and I am 100% in her demographic but I hate how neutral it all is.
Good thing I can sew! Elizabeth Suzann has very similar vibes to Eileen Fisher, but offers sewing patterns so you can make your loose elastic pants in any color you want. The pattern is expensive for what you get (I had to add pockets on my own) but the drafting is really great: They’re extremely comfortable and not “dumpy” in the rear. I used an almost-neon green linen from Fabrics Store, which has relentless emails but also pretty nice linen.
Wide-legged chartreuse linen pants definitely encapsulate the “maximal summer” vibe I want this year: bright, spacious, easy, comfortable. Add a 90s top and Birkenstocks and you’re all set.
Sewing for “Hot Regressive Girl Summer”
I found that title phrase on Instagram and immediately decided it was the ideal descriptor for my summer of recreating the vibes of the mid to late 90s: The first Beck album on repeat, less internet and more wandering around, pretending I don’t have a job.
Thanks to 90s and 2000s fashion coming back again, I can even wear the original hot girl trends like cutaway tanks:
(That is a screenshot from the music video for Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” from 1999 and it will get stuck in your head.)
I never wore anything like this the first time around because I couldn’t figure out a bra and my arms were too skinny. Well, now my arms are the size of tree trunks and I can sew something with a shelf bra:
This is the Greenstyle Sky Tank and I’ve already sewn up the tank version. I don’t really wear dresses but I just might have to do the below knee length and put my hair in little buns. If only I still had my weird narrow sunglasses from college!
Hot Regressive Girl Summer, here we come.
Pink & Green Things
Friday Links
1. This Slate piece about what people did in their 20s in 2002–before smartphones and fast home internet–was just a nostalgia bomb for me.
Sally: You’d have bar arguments about what was true or not, and you couldn’t resolve it immediately, because no one could check the internet! It would go on forever. For days.
Matt: I had two giant metal towers of CDs and I had a five-CD changer. And you’d just hit shuffle and listen to music.
Mac: I just sent tons of emails to friends. I wrote these incredibly long emails. Email was still a toy instead of an unbearable burden.
Bring it back!!
2. Speaking of the analog life, maybe you need to peruse the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator?
3. It’s snail time and two is the perfect number of brain cells:
@aidenaratait’s snail time
“Up in this high air”
What’s this? Me pulling out this Out of Africa quote again after our solstice evening at the lake? Of course.
The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air…
Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
Summer Solstice 2023
(The Sun, 1909 by Edvard Munch)
It’s the longest day of the year for the Northern Hemisphere and a good day to go watch the sun set, have a bonfire, pick some flowers, or even listen to the “Hymn to the Sun” from Philip Glass’s Akhnaten.
You can even join me in setting a theme for the summer. I might need to workshop mine a little, but right now it’s “The Summer of Ease and Abundance and Enjoyment and Maximalism and the Kind of Rest and Spaciousness I Haven’t Experienced in a Summer Since About 1995.”
However you choose to celebrate, enjoy the light today. Happy solstice, friends!