Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Austin Kleon on violence and Bach:

… I’m not just trying to raise “gentlemen,” I’m trying to raise gentle men, men who have a full range of emotions and expression available to them. But it’s just so hard. Even if they’re home with me all day right now, I can’t protect them. They were born into a country steeped in violence. A country where killing machines are sold in convenience stores. A country that has a longtime habit of dropping bombs on innocent children just like them. A country that sees kids their age shot to death in classrooms and won’t do a thing about it.

The only thing I feel like I can do is make my home a haven, a place where we celebrate things of beauty and rationality and love and peace. Bach’s music is one of those things.

2. From Buzzfeed (I know), 3 Anxiety Tips You’ve Heard, And 7 You Probably Haven’t. Number 7 is genius (“I keep photographic evidence of my [locked] door and my oven’s knobs when I leave for vacation“) but the suggestion to watch horror movies to channel anxiety is just right out for me.

Thursday Poem

By in poems

I last posted this the day after the 2016 election; honestly, I could have posted it about every day since then. Keep your chins up–and thank you for this one, Maya.

 

Still I Rise
Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Fabric + Organizing, My Two Favorite Things

By in sewing

With the addition of the new sewing table for the new machine, I had some shelf space open up. I had seen this True Bias post about folding fabric around backing boards for storage, so I decided to finish the sewing room mini re-org with that project.

Before (you can see the shelf that opened near at the bottom because of the ANARCHY happening on it):

After!

I’d already been storing folded fabric like books (thanks, Marie Kondo!) but because fabric is floppy, it made it hard to pull things out and then put them away neatly. Now that the fabric is wrapped around cardstock it’s so much easier to look at what I have and then “re-file” it neatly. I was even able to pull all my knits out of the bin and get them on the shelves!

The True Bias post talks about using 8.5×11 magazine backing boards but I went up to 9×12 sheet music backing boards, since 95% of my stash is 55 inches wide and that size filled up the cubbies better.

This took me a couple of hours (with Toby’s help, of course) but I’m so happy with it. It was also good to refresh my memories of what I have in the stash: After doing it, I closed a couple browser tabs that had carts of fabric waiting in them, just tempting me–because I already had better things on my shelves.

 

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. It’s “max effort” time at the gym (they go in six-month cycles) and I got a new max for deadlifts last night–175 pounds!! Yes, I am telling everyone about it: friends, coworkers, people on the street.

2. It’s Lughnasadh, the Celtic beginning-of-the-harvest festival and the midpoint between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. Just this week I noticed the evenings are coming a little sooner and the mornings are getting a little darker. (Throw the comb away…)

3. This is perfect:

(via a friend, by New Yorker cartoonist Will McPhail.)

If You Give A Mouse A Cookie

By in sewing

If you sew a dress in a week, you’ll notice that your sewing machine really needs a tuneup. So you’ll take it in to the Bernina dealer for some attention, but while you’re there you’ll look at the new machines. While you’re waiting for your tuneup to be done, you’ll start researching new Berninas. Then you’ll realize how many more years of use you’ll get from a new Bernina than a new laptop, which was the other big purchase you were considering. Then feature creep may set in and you’ll think you should get a really nice Bernina to get as many years as possible out of it. Then you’ll be sad because you’ll wish you had your mom’s advice in all of this.

Then, once you’ve worked through the sadness and maybe decided, you’ll think you need a different sewing table for the new machine, so you’ll go to IKEA. While you’re there, you’ll get some drawer units too so everything can be more organized. Then you’ll put together the drawers, send your partner back to IKEA for a different table top, organize all the drawers, and then–

and THEN–

 

You’ll bring home your new machine.

HELLO, NURSE.

 

This is the 740 and she’s the nicest thing I own. I told Doc last night, “If there’s a fire, we grab Toby first. But if there’s time to grab a second thing, this is it.” I’ve got classes to take at the local dealer to really learn her but spending time on the store model was magic: Auto thread cut! Auto buttonholes! Auto presser foot raise and lower! And the most beautiful, even stitch quality on any fabric.

My mom was a Bernina loyalist and my first machine 11 years ago was a Bernina –so it was a no-brainer to stay with the brand. The threading is the same, the feet still fit, and everything is so well designed. Even how the machine was packaged in the box was precise and well-engineered.

And she has a new sewing table and newly-organized room! We’ll all live happily ever after.

The End.

“Martha Stewarting”

By in Martha Martha Martha

A few years ago I wrote about how much I love Martha Stewart and said this: “When I mention I’m a fan, most people respond with, ‘She went to jail,’ like it might be news to me or make me recycle those magazine back issues.”

I chalked that up to people not being true fans like I was, or not knowing about everything else she did because the jail time got so much coverage. But this article finally sums up why that response bothers me so much: The Martha Stewarting of Powerful Women: How society disproportionately demonizes women after they’ve bent the same rules that men have always broken.

The entire article, by Ann Foster, is fire–going from Martha to Joan of Arc (!) and beyond–but this pretty much sums up the problem:

For a man to fail as a king, president, or CEO through wrongdoings is so commonplace as to be insignificant; in fact, the patriarchal system supports these men as they fall, leaving doors open for them to regain their former level of power. For a woman to ascend to these roles is novel enough, rare enough, that when they display the same fallibility or criminal activity, they dominate the news cycle for months. This when we reach peak Martha Stewarting: the particular schadenfreude expressed at the public shaming of powerful women behaving badly; the way that women who misbehave are treated as representatives for the entire gender and shamed far more than men would be for the same actions.

Buy It Or Make It? Statement Dress

By in buy it or make it, sewing

You could buy this J. Crew dress for $248 (! – it’s not even silk!)

Or you could score this cotton gauze from JoAnn on sale for $8/ yard…

…combine it with this McCalls 7925 pattern (you could shorten the skirt tiers by half and remove the skirt placket for an even closer match)….

…and boom–you’ve saved at least $200. (Yes, I bought this fabric.)

Ups And Downs (And AXES)

By in Rage

I had another unexpected ride on the griefcoaster this weekend–I started shopping for a new sewing machine Friday night and all I wanted was to ask my mom’s advice.

Luckily, my friend had a party Saturday night to celebrate quitting a job that wasn’t working for her. It included axe (well, tomahawk) throwing and I finally got to try that and let me tell you, it’s as cathartic as I expected it to be:

That is my handiwork in that photo–the only time I managed to stick one in the target, but I’m hooked. The whole time I was practicing, I kept thinking about that essay I linked in October, “An Axe For The Frozen Sea“:

I’m interested in the linguistic distinction between tool and weapon. One intended for making; the other, violence. The axe is the longest-used tool in human history, dating to the Paleolithic era. It’s also most certainly a weapon: Lizzie Borden, Trotsky, and the Villisca Axe Murders, to name a few, and Jack Nicholson in the last half of The Shining. 

“You too have your tools,” wrote Kafka in a passage about fear, and I thought of that line whenever I was scared: I will get through this. I can talk to friends, write about it. Years later, I came across a different translation of the same text: “You too have your weapons.” That seemingly simple switch changed the entirety of my inner dialogue: I will defend myself, I will fuck you up, come and get me, fear.

Come and get me, grief. We’ve got axes to throw.

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