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Tuesday Project Roundup: Getting Fancy

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup No Comments

Isolation, day 17: I put on a shirt with BUTTONS and wore SHOES and EARRINGS! I also moved the kitchen table and had Doc take pictures of my not-so-secret pajama pants while Toby helped:

These are another pair of Brassie Joggers in a knit from Nerida Hansen–the same place I got my Lisa Congdon fabric and clearly the source of the most amazing prints. This one is by artist Miranda Sofroniou. (I bought it last year, so it’s sold out, but there’s other prints by the artist in stock.)

At this point in my elastic-waist pants journey, I’ve figured out my preferred Brassie mods: I cut a separate pocket bag with trim (as shown in this tutorial) so I don’t have to use the sewing machine at all, just the serger. I’ve also been cutting the waistband as wide as the pants opening so the elastic will form some gathers, for more of a true jogger look/forgiving fit across the belly.

I finished these before the isolation days started but I’m glad I decided to only make stretchy pants for a while. Someday I will wear them out of the house and feel like I’m getting away with not wearing “real” pants.

Tour des Parcs

By in weekend report No Comments

We’ve been taking outings to local parks lately, which offer the excitement of LEAVING THE HOUSE but make spreading out a lot easier than on a hiking trail.

Fairmont Park

Sugarhouse Park

Murray Park

I’ve never really spent much time in parks–we don’t have kids or a dog to play in them, and I always (snobbishly) thought, “Parks aren’t really nature; just go on a hike instead.”

But you know what? City parks are kind of a miracle: There’s open space, there’s something for everyone (Fairmont Park has a skate park! Murray Park has an outdoor fitness circuit, complete with bros!), and they’re just…there…waiting to be enjoyed. For free!

Spending time in places that embody civilization has been really soothing, an antidote to fears of the end of it. Find some local parks and start your own tour this week.

Thursday Poem

By in poems No Comments

My friend shared this yesterday in our group chat; Neruda wrote it in the 1950s but it’s perfect for right now. That second-to-last stanza…

 

Keeping Quiet
Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death. Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Twelve Years Of Toby

By in anniversaries, Toby No Comments

This week is also the anniversary of adopting Toby, prince among cats, who is living his absolute best life with everyone home right now. Every time I think about what this kitty has meant to me and helped me through, I can only think of my mom saying, “You and he are just really bonded.” Indeed.

(Photo by Doc, the only male Toby will permit to touch his head. What honor!)

Tuesday Project Roundup: Plaguewear

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup No Comments

After you’ve worked from home in elastic-waist pants and a knit top (with a real sports bra underneath!), what nicer feeling than to change into even COMFIER elastic-waist pants and a DIFFERENT knit top?

 

I didn’t buy all these fabrics with the intention of making a new wardrobe of pajamas to wear at home during a pandemic, but it happened to work out that way:

  • The yellow Sloane Sweatshirt was made from scraps from the sweatshirt I made Doc last year; I threw a daruma patch on it (sitting around from this idea) to make it look a little Comme des Garcons.
  • While I had yellow in the serger, I whipped up another pair of Brassie Joggers in a palm print double brushed poly I got in my December Fabric.com order. These were going to be pants to wear on the plane to and from Hawaii–I figure I can lounge in them until that trip happens.
  • The stripes are another pair of Brassie Joggers, this time in a stripe baby french terry from Surge Fabrics. They had a 29% off Leap Day sale and I had worn my old striped J. Crew pajama pants into literal rags, so it was time for an upgrade.

 

Last week I didn’t really get “dressed” for working at home and I felt like a slug by the end of the week, so this week I’m putting on woven pants (ok, they still have an elastic waist) from 9-5. Which makes changing into fresh spring loungewear at the end of the day even better.

Six Years

By in anniversaries 2 Comments

Saturday was the sixth anniversary of Doc and I meeting at a friend’s birthday dinner. We talked about that night and the span of time since then and I jokingly said, “Thanks for staying on the emotional roller coaster with me.” Then I realized it had been a roller coaster, and how much had happened: the country went to shit after 2016, I started therapy and anxiety meds, we lost Mom, now there’s a pandemic and earthquakes and god knows what else.

Through it all, though, Doc has been there for me–being reliable, telling jokes, adjusting to things long before I do. He is my rock, which is a thing I would never have said before therapy. But thankfully I’ve learned that humans have evolved to need close personal connections. Having that need met doesn’t make you weak; it makes you lucky.

I say it every year, every birthday with him, but there hasn’t been another phrase that captures that feeling of winning the cosmic lottery better than Sagan’s: “In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch” with him. Thank you for being there, honey. I love you.

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information 2 Comments

1. We’ve made it through the first week of isolation. Every day is an emotional roller coaster for me, but it’s hard to have every routine totally upset. I, um, punched my punching bag off its hanger yesterday morning so, you know, we’re working through all the feelings as best we can.

2. It was the Spring Equinox yesterday–the earliest it’s been in over a century. My friend sent out a lovely newsletter for it about courage and change and gardening, literal and figurative:

As you are present with how you are feeling, allowing yourself to experience the slower pace, more stillness, you are prepping the soil. As you tune into what feels like the next best step for you, for your family you begin planting seeds to heal the shock of rapid change and gently rebuild trust in the power of creation.

3. Do you  need something to read? Libraries are closed but you can still get ebooks and audiobooks sent to your phone or Kindle. Here’s a list of recommendations–they all looked good.

4. Do you need some opera in your life? (Who doesn’t?) The Met is live streaming an opera every night for the foreseeable future. Sunday night is Onegin with Hvorostovsky!

Thursday Reading

By in essays

How’s everyone doing? I slept with the emergency go-bag and a flashlight next to the bed last night, but so far <knocks wood> no more earthquakes. Back to worrying about plague instead of natural disasters!

I’m assuming that, like me, everyone needs distractions and reassurance. Something that distracted and reassured me on Monday was Robin Sloan’s March newsletter. It’s rambling, it’s full of links, it has C.S. Lewis quotes about hard times, and tells us how to keep going when nothing seems to matter:

 

We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:

It matters.

[…]

Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.

In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.

It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.

Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.

A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.

Wednesday Soothing Poem

By in Mary Oliver, poems

Jesus CHRIST, as if the news every day about a global pandemic weren’t bad enough, Salt Lake was hit with a 5.7 earthquake this morning. I’ve never felt one that strong and, as my friend said, “I didn’t know my house could move like that, and I don’t like it.”

So! Let’s read some Mary Oliver in addition to using ALL of our anxiety-coping tools. Because I think this is all of us right now, worrying:

 

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

(From Swan: Poems and Prose Poems)

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