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Tuesday Project Roundup: Big Square Vest

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup

I got my vest done and it’s a layer I needed AND it’s reversible. So I’m trying to focus on those two facts and less on the fact that I look like I’m wearing a big quilted cube when I have it on.

In hindsight, I think adding length would have shifted this from “square” to “rectangle” a little more, but the cropped retro length is growing on me. I also could have gone down a size but I wanted room to layer/room for my back to get even more swole in a few years.

Construction-wise, the Green Pepper instructions were great, as usual. I added the step of quilting my outer to my insulation but other than that followed everything to the letter.  Materials were leftover Thinsulate from my winter parka project and DWR supplex and Polartec Thermal Pro shearling from The Rain Shed, plus my trusty KAM Snaps (that are reversible too!).

One More Month

By in Uncategorized

There’s just one more month to go until the Winter Solstice and then the days start getting longer again. We can do it. (Right?)

(Picture from Red Butte Garden yesterday–there’s a Sunday morning yoga class there we tried out!)

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Remember when I talked about Dracula Daily, the project of sending Dracula chapters by email? It was kind of fun to read a novel over six months. Now that it’s over, you can sign up to get Moby Dick in your inbox with Whale Weekly. As they put it:

Wish you could take 2 years to finish Moby Dick without feeling bad about it? You’ve come to the right place.Whale Weekly will begin in November, 2022 and installments will continue for approximately two years in accordance with the passage of time in the novel.

 

2. I’ve been interviewing at a few places, because why not, and this is just so incredibly tempting:

 

3. Mayhem on the train set!

 

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Giving Help, Accepting Help

By in essays

If you’ve been around here for a bit, you know that I subscribe to the Culture Study newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen. I think I started for her commentary on toxic jobs (heh) but the stuff she writes about communities of care is what I can’t get enough of lately.

I could pull quote just about the entire newsletter from last week, about why it’s hard to accept help:

You haven’t been around examples of healthy community or dependence — particularly within your family — and don’t have models of what it means to safely ask for help. This is particularly true for people whose independence is, in some way, a trauma response, but I also think it’s true of people who grew up in homes where the adults were solitary or isolated, or where everyone in the family talked shit about other members of the family who asked for help.

But the meat of the article is a document template for outlining what help you would need and want most (food, errands, a walk, etc.). Then you can send your answers to your friends and family and they can fill theirs out and suddenly you’re not in the loop of “What can I do?” “Oh nothing, it’s ok.”

In summation, THIS:

It’s wrong to think of community as tit-for-tat, I-give-so-I-get, but offering care invites engagement….and accepting care models vulnerability. We cannot assume that others don’t have space to care for us, just as we cannot convince ourselves that we do not have space for others. You are not a burden; you are beloved.

 

Narnia! (And A New Trail)

By in nature

Doc and I both had a clear Tuesday so we went to a different canyon that’s usually just too busy to be nice on the weekends. It was like a storybook illustration of “winter” and we discovered a new-ish feeder trail that was extra magical.

For locals, this is the Donut Falls hike in Big Cottonwood. Usually you have to walk up the access road to the trailhead, but at some point a new path through the forest to the east got put in. There’s also construction going on for a boardwalk through the meadow there and it looks like everything will connect:

It was cold–the car said 25 degrees in the parking lot, and we gained elevation/lost the sun–but my Polartec base layers and my parka did great. (This did solidify my planning for some heavy quilted pants that will use up the last of the Thinsulate and Polartec Alpha, though.)

And! The one spot of the trail that’s a scramble down in the summer had a ROPE for the winter and I got to pretend I was rappelling on the Alps. Thrilling!

Tuesday Project Progress: Nine-Pound Vest

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup

I’m working on a vest layer for hiking or around town and it’s gonna be WARM:

I quilted Thinsulate to nylon supplex and am layering it with Polartec Thermal Pro “shearling” (all from The Rain Shed). The pattern is a Green Pepper one, the “Women’s Santiam Reversible Vest”

I basted the two layers together and I look a little like the Michelin Man… I guess that’s how you know it’s a warm layer.

Winter Is Great (For Now)

By in nature

Ask me how I feel about the snow in late January and my answer will change, but right now it’s magical to be out in the snowy mountains.

(Millcreek Canyon, the Terraces road and up the Bowman Fork trail a bit.)

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

The last couple weeks have just been deeply weird…anyone else? I was introduced not as a “writer” but as a “naming girl” (???) and also learned the Department of Labor gets involved if money is missing from your 401k (!!!). What a time to be alive.

1. This is honestly how it still feels being a female creative doing business in Utah:

 

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2. Might as well embrace the witch vibes:

 

3. Other Signs, Besides Having A Map In The Front, That The Fantasy Novel You’ve Just Picked Up Will Be Good

Another Freelance Hike

By in nature

We went on another weekday afternoon hike on Tuesday, even though it was wet out and it was tempting to stay in. But we have good gear and getting out got us into some very Zen misty forests–plus we saw a bunch of jays!  (This is Neffs Canyon for a change; Millcreek was closed for weekday road construction.)

Never Too Late

By in swole

The She’s a Beast newsletter pointed me to this story about a Redmond woman who, at the age of 94, is setting powerlifitng records:

At 90, she could deadlift 93 pounds clean off the mat. That’s in the record books. And this weekend in Reno, Nevada, she’s going for another world record — lifting 104 pounds at age 94.

…This extraordinary ability came late in life. Kuehn said she never worked with weights, played sports or even did much exercise until she was in her 60s.

“Oh heavens no,” she said. “Never. But I did like to sew.”

 

Delightful!

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