Here is a list of “101 Additional Advices” from Kevin Kelly, the 74 year old co-founder of Wired magazine. It’s a good mix of practical and psychological:
Three situations where you’ll never regret ordering too much: when you are pouring concrete, when you are choosing a battery, and when you are getting ice for a party.
Don’t work for a company you would not invest money in, because when you are working you are investing the most valuable thing you have: your time.
Avoid making any kind of important decision when you are either hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (HALT). Just halt when you are HALT.
To tell a good story, you must reveal a surprise; otherwise it is just a report.
Get good at being corrected without being offended.
(Do we think the plural on “advice” is a typo or an homage to Arnold in Pumping Iron? Let’s hope it’s a typo and Kevin isn’t giving us … “the wrong advices.”)
Predictably, it’s late spring and I’m thinking that classic button-ups would be a good summer uniform. Unlike the last Summer of Shirts, I’m a lot faster now so I might be able to get a few made before I realize yet again that they’re TOO hot for real summer.
But for now, the timing works: Closet Core launched a new pattern just in time for Summer of Shirts 2.0 and I have a lot of shirting in my stash to sew through. This is their Jenna Shirt and it’s 90% great:
The pros: The details are great, very classic menswear. The tower placket instructions were clear and the collar stand instructions were brilliant–they use a whole new order that gives a beautiful finish.
The cons: I had to reduce the curve radius on the hem to get a smooth finish and now that the shirt is done, I’m not loving the small collar and how it all sits. The shirt wants to pull to the back, which RTW shirts do on me too, so it might be that the drafting is fine and I just need to do a forward shoulder adjustment. However, all the pattern photos show the collar either popped or buttoned all the way up, so I’m a little suspicious …
The fabric was from my stash, originally from Farmhouse Fabrics. (I think I moved it to this house from my apartment, it’s that old). I had a three yard cut because I bought it in my dress era and just never used it, thinking “someday” I’d need a shirt dress to wear on the Amalfi coast or something. In the spirit of dressing for the life I have NOW, I used the extra fabric to make a pair of shorts for a matching set, like I see on Pinterest.
I used the LearnMYOG DIAS pattern for the shorts, because I knew they fit and had excellent pockets. (I never blogged them but I made a pair in Supplex last summer, seen here.) In a nice shirting vs a technical fabric, they read more “boxer,” which is just what I wanted, and the back welt pocket adds a nice touch.
Hopefully the shorts help me keep Summer of Shirts going a little longer into the actual summer. I can always wear the shirt as a jacket, too.
We’re at the point in the season where I realize it probably isn’t going to snow again, and a “cold” day means it’s in the 50s. Hooray! Here are some shots from Red Butte yesterday; it was so warm that I think the bulbs will be done after this week.
Before 1859, green pigments came from arsenic mixed with copper, which, uh, killed you:
The “green tarlatan so much of late in vogue for ball dresses” contained as much as half the gown’s weight in arsenic – as one article explained. [Alison] Matthews David concurs with this assessment, adding that “a ball gown fashioned from up to 20 meters of this fabric would have 900 grains of arsenic. It was possible that no less than 60 grains could fall from the dancing gown in the course of a single evening. For an average adult, four to five grains were already considered lethal.”
(Arsenic wasn’t used in just fabric, either. William Morris, Mr. Arts and Crafts, owned a copper mine and used copper arsenite pigments in his wallpapers. He also dismissed claims of that green being poisonous up through the 1880s.)
I’m doing more projects at work focused on youth mental health, and wow is being a teenager with clinical anxiety still vivid in my mind. This was never me but the stats are so bleak for teens today. If you’re reading this and you’re a teen–or anyone struggling–stay here another day. Green’s your color.
Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
I redid the neck on my sweater vest and look! It fits over my head!
I’m so pleased it worked out. It’s exactly like I pictured it, from the fuzzy texture to the grass green color to the fit. Those deep armholes are what drew me to the pattern and make it easy to layer over big shirts:
The pattern–the Holiday Slipover by Petite Knit–was a joy to knit from; I can see why her work is so popular. I watched the videos on her site and did my best job yet picking up stitches for the neck and arms, plus my first Italian bind-off on all the edges. (Twice, on the neck edge.)
The yarn is a thicker cotton/alpaca/merino held with a silk/mohair strand. That mohair fuzz is a Petite Knit signature; I’d always avoided mohair because it seemed itchy/tickly but on a vest, it didn’t matter. I’m glad I added it because the finished fabric is so light but super warm and also delightfully fuzzy.
This is the first non-sock/big needle knitting I’ve done since the year my mom died. Part of the avoidance was four years of tendonitis and part of it was remembering waiting at my parents in the days before she died, working on another chunky sweater on those same needles.
I’m glad the next project on those needles turned out so well. Green for a new start.
My mom would have been 76 today. Spring is so hard without her: her birthday, Easter, knowing how much she’d gloat over every sunny day and new flower. At the same time, now I gloat over every sunny day and flower. I tried to make Easter special this year. And today I will celebrate spring flowers and maybe even take a trip to the mall (she loved a sale almost as much as flowers).
Thirty years gone and my mother is always with me. Thirty years gone and I still ache for her every day. Thirty years gone and my sorrow has sweetened into gratitude. How lucky I am to have been her daughter. To still be. To feel her shimmering in my bones with every step.
…The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother.