Happy Birthday, Mark Twain~~

I'm not a huge fan of the literature, having taken a graduate seminar in Twain & Melville and having rather more testosterone-intensive, water-logged reading in one semester than I'd ever anticipated, but I think I would have liked to sit down on the porch and visit with Twain. Here is what I think is perhaps the most useful thing he said. I offer it to you to go along with yesterday's post about being older:

"Twenty years from now 
you will be more disappointed 
by the things that you didn't do 

than by the ones you did do. 

So throw off the bowlines. 

Sail away from the safe harbor. 

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

 Explore. Dream. Discover."

Today's Project. I Hope.

Eeesh. I bought this a while back. $15 at an antique store. I saw it, saw that it needed Some Serious Rehab, and walked away.

And, of course--you know this!--couldn't get it out of my head. Old. Soft. Leather. Tooled! Perfect!

What is perfect, you ask? Well, The Perfect Bag is leather (I'm sorry, I want to shun leather, I really do. It's my weakness, and I admit it). It's old and broken in but sturdy. It's maybe a little stained but clean. Soft. It has pockets that make sense:  I need an interior zipper pocket for my wallet (I carry a men's bi-fold and have for as long as I can remember--if I get a chance to do something exciting, like go ride a horse (it's happened) or something physical, I can put the wallet in the back pocket of my Levi's, and it will stay, snug and secure. Otherwise, it needs a zippered pocket), an exterior pocket for the iPhone in its large-ish fringed leather case (the one I made here), and at least one other pocket for business cards and Stuff. (This one has three sections, each separate from the others.) Not too big--I've got big bags, and I try to carry them only when I really need them. Carrying huge bags crammed full of stuff is not the path to Good Back & Neck Health, let me tell you. But not too small--if the bag is too small to hold the stuff you need, then it's just An Accessory, like a big bow stuck on the back of your head. Eh.

So I went back for it, thinking it was $45 and not knowing whether it was worth it, never mind that I'd fallen in love. Turns out it was $15. What can I say? But then, once I had it home, I couldn't figure out how to mend the inside. The lining that separates the outside pocket from the inside pocket has pulled loose. To repair it The Right Way, I'd have to rip out the seam in the leather, iron the lining, insert it between the two pieces of leather,  and re-stitch the seam.

I don't think that's going to happen, but I don't know what's going to happen instead. What I've got to do is figure out a way to mend it. I can't turn the bag inside out--the cardboard bottom panel would be ruined. It's too small to get my hands in there to stitch. I hate glueing fabric--it's so tacky. Like safety-pinning your underwear. So I've got everything out on the table--leather scraps, the bag, needles, various kinds of adhesive. I'm going to figure out SOMETHING today; I just hope it's something I can live with.

Wish me luck, please~~

Being a Baby Boomer Doesn't Mean You're Dead Yet

What do you think of when you think of someone who's "middle-aged"? Technically, I'm past middle age--I really don't think I'm going to live to be 110. Nor do I want to--everyone I know, plus all my teeth and functioning joints, would be gone.

Two interesting things in the last 24 hours made me think about this this morning when I should really be doing other things. One was this, a page posted on the blog of someone who tweeted me about museum experiences, which is what made this so serendipitous. Let's see if I can condense the story [bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha]:

Our walking route goes through the grounds of the Museum of the Southwest, the old Turner Mansion (where, back in the 1960s, there was a scandalous murder. The wife was killed, and a black man was convicted of the murder. Some people believe the husband did it and the black man was just the convenient target. Duh: Midland, Texas. 1960s. Anyway, I love a mystery--just about any kind of mystery except the ones that plague me, like: what in the world happened to the charcoal henley I prepared for making a yoolie, cutting it and picking the floss and putting it in a bag and pinning it to the collar? I had it all ready to go, and it vanished. I have no idea where it is or what could have happened to it, and that's the kind of mystery I most certainly do NOT like.

Most other kinds, though? Love them).

OK, I'm already not doing so well with the whole "condensing" thing, am I?

Anyway, so we walk through the grounds. The museum is closed on Monday, but people work there, and the director of the children's museum has given us a standing invitation to stop in on any Monday to check out the current exhibit--she knows I'm not a kid person and am not going to come in on a day when there are actual kids visiting. So yesterday we went in to check out the current exhibit, on masks. It was interesting, and--even better--they made use of QR codes: you can scan various codes for more information, short videos, slide shows. I loved it, and we got to talking about QR codes and then podcasts.

More about that in a minute.

When I got home, I tweeted about this--about the museum doing a good job using QR codes in a creative and useful way. And that's when I got the tweet. It had a link, and I don't follow tweeted links unless they make sense in the context--from someone I know about something I would expect them to tweet. You know the drill. But for some reason I checked out her profile and went to her website, and I found this, about how she set up a business helping middle-aged people with their problems with technology. This is a good thing--and a brilliant idea--but it bothers me that it's necessary. And the "Baby Boomers" in the title make me shriek a little.

Back to the conversation at the museum. Another woman was there, and she was talking about how she's getting ready to start doing podcasts for the museum. Both women are in their late 20s/early 30s. The one we know says she's not into technology at all; the other admitted that it's a little scary--she wants to do podcasts but doesn't really know how to put it all together. I explained the process--what she'll need, what some of the options are--and gave her my email so she can ask questions.

This isn't the first time this has happened, that someone way younger than I am has asked about podcasting or making iMovies or setting up a website or an Etsy shop. What I'm coming to believe, more and more, is that it's not about age and technology, but about interests. My nieces and nephews (20s, early 30s) are all on Facebook. Most of them have smart phones that they carry in their hands constantly. My editors and people with whom I work are mostly about the same age. They know Facebook and Twitter, Etsy and Pinterest and Linkedin. They know all that stuff.

But most of the people I know know nothing about how to set up an automatic backup of their hard drive or create and distribute a podcast or create a QR code or make and share a movie with music. They don't know about Dropbox for file sharing or about creating pages on their blog. I believe it's not that Young People are amazingly technology-savvy; it's that they're very socially oriented. They use social media constantly, and they know how to use technology for that. But many of them don't use their actual computers/laptops/iPads for much else beyond that and sharing photos and videos and maybe doing some light word processing. This isn't a bad thing; it's knowing what you want to know and focusing on that.

Sure, there are more 19-year-old computer geeks writing code and creating apps and hacking into bank accounts than there are 60 year olds doing the same thing, but there *are* 60 year olds doing it. It's not about age; it's about interest: knowing what interests you and focusing on that and learning what you need to know to be able to do it.

(And here I have to insert that I *do* know at least one kid who's a total computer geek, who takes apart and rebuilds his computers and can do amazing stuff that I can't even understand. But it's OK that I don't understand--the math-and-science part isn't the part I want to know more about; I know whom to call if suddenly a huge wad of wires and bolts and 2 x 4s and PVP pipe falls out onto the desk.)

I've ranted before about how irritating it is to me to hear women (it's almost always women; men may feel the same way, but they keep it to themselves. Except my husband, who has no problem telling you how little he likes technology and how happy he is to leave it to me, which is just one more reason we get along so well) my age say they can't do this and they can't do that and (the straw that breaks me every time) they have to wait to send me something/do something/show something until their son (it's always their son and never their daughter) has time to do it for them. This makes me crazy. While I have no problem with someone who, like my husband, has no interest in computers or what's online and is happy to admit it, I have a real problem with someone who wants and needs to use the technology but has decided, for some reason, that they're too old to do so and that Someone Young has to do it for them. I kind of fell for this, too, when I wanted to start doing podcasts. I foolishly assumed that every Young Person with a computer knew this stuff, and I knew a bunch of Young People with computers, so I'd have a bunch of information and a bunch of options, right?

Not a single one of them knew anything about it at all. Most of them didn't even know what podcasts were.

But that's understandable, once I started thinking about it: you know about what interests you, and they weren't interested. Makes sense. What doesn't make sense is assuming that if something *does* interest you, you can't learn about it because you're too old.

How is that possible? Oh, sure, if you've got some kind of brain malfunction, then it would make sense. But otherwise? No, age isn't an excuse. You learn what you want to learn. If you decide this--whatever it is--is something that would be fun or useful or lucrative or entertaining or whatever--you learn it.

Back to the museum: one of the (remember: young) women said it was all just overwhelming--Etsy and Pinterest and Twitter and all the rest--and I told her that's because people think they have to know it all and do it all and master it all, and that's just not true. You can't use all of it--there's not enough time. There're not enough hours in the day to keep up with everything. You have to figure out what you want to do and focus on that.

Focus, focus, focus. That's the key.

Same with technology. You don't need to know everything about your computer. This iMac does tons and tons of stuff that I don't know about. I have never used Automator or made a slide show or a DVD. I know nothing about creating spread sheets or PowerPoint presentations (on the Mac, that would be KeyNote). But here's the deal: I don't need to know that stuff. Someday I might need to know it, and then I can find out about it. Until then, though, there's no reason for spending time learning it and having that information cluttering up my brain until I forget it. And forget it I would because 1) I have no reason to use it and reinforce the neural pathways of the stuff I learned and 2) I forget everything. (Except, it seems, every moment of my mother's last day in the hospital, which plays for me like a movie at totally random times.)

Anyway. There are two problems here, and they dovetail. One is that people my age seem to think they're too old to learn new stuff, and the other is that many people of all ages believe there's so much stuff to learn, they'll never be able to learn it all.

They dovetail at curiosity. If you're curious about something--if you want to learn how something works, want to master it, want to find out what you can do--that's over half the battle. A huge portion of the rest is figuring out what you don't need. You don't need to learn everything all at once. You learn the basics, and you learn the stuff that interests you, and the rest can wait. I will probably never need to make a DVD, never mind that there's an application for doing that--iDVD--right here, and that all the manuals devote chapters to this. I haven't opened the program, and I haven't read the chapters. But if the day comes (which I doubt it will--few people share movies on DVDs any more), I can open it up, read the chapters, figure it out.

I have never had a lesson in anything having to do with computers. I didn't know anyone who used a computer until I was in graduate school, and there was only one person who had one, a total geek girl. I had a graduate degree and was in my 30s before I ever touched a computer--heck, I didn't learn how to type keyboard until I was in college. I got my first dedicated word processor forever ago. It was used, and it was huge, and it weighed a ton. The disks were big platter-sized (well, almost) things, and the "manual" was some poorly-Xeroxed sheets hastily stapled together, and I bumbled along and figured out what I needed to know to do a bunch of writing on that thing--it served me well. I never tried to learn to do much on it--I knew it was just a temporary thing. The next computer I had was also used, and again with the photocopied "user's manual," and again with the bumbling. When I finally got my first brand-new PC, the first thing I did was go buy manuals--the "for Dummies" ones and the 1000+-page ones and everything in between. And I read them all and spent a ton of time trying things out. By the time I switched to a Mac, I'd learned what I needed to know, which was this: you don't need to know everything. You need to know only what you need to know; you can learn the other stuff when you need to know it.

Life isn't like school. You're not required to learn stuff in a certain order. You don't have to master everything in a course before you can move on. In life, you can learn just the basics and then add to those when you need to. And the key is: as long as you're curious and willing to stretch yourself, it's never too late to learn new stuff.

[Whoa. I was sitting here typing and started getting a headache. I never have headaches, so this was pretty odd. And it got odder and odder until I reached up to my head and discovered the reading glasses I'd pushed up there are not my regular, familiar ones but a much smaller, tighter pair I'd grabbed from one of the 10,549 locations where these are stashed throughout the house. I took them off my head, and the headache immediately went away. I think there's a lesson in there.]

I have so many problems with women my age and the things they believe about what they can do, what they can't do, what they should do. About technology and clothes, about physical activity and interests. People I know are selling their houses and moving to another town to "be near our grandkids," which makes me wonder how they can have so little that interests them that they can give it all up to move hundreds of miles away to be someone's baby sitter. Sure, they want to spend time with their family, but giving up everything--the house, the neighborhood, the friends, the activities--is the life you've created of that little interest to you that you're willing to give it all up just because You're Getting Old?

Oy.

I hate hearing "I can't do that," "I can't wear that," "I can't learn that." If you think that--at any age--then of COURSE it's true. Tell yourself you can't do something, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Do me a favor. If you're Middle-Aged, male or female, and you're mired in the "I can't do that" slough of despond, sit yourself down for a good talk. If you're in decent health, there's no reason you can't do the things you want to do. Change your diet, get more exercise, walk away from the television, get some books. Make lists. Keep a journal. Make a chart. Make plans. Above all, be curious. The longer I live, the more I realize that the people I want to know and talk to are the people who are curious about things. Wide-ranging things, random things, serial things, obsessive things. Just curious.

I think that's another blog post, though.

OK. I'm done. Thanks for sticking it out all the way through~~XO

Perfect Just Like It Is

Sometimes there's just nothing else you need to do, you know? You look at something and go, "That's it."

 Remember this Free People sweater? Soft and oversized and cozy, but blah:

I dyed it grape, and here it is:

Nothing else to do to it, I think.

Blame This Morning's Hilarity on Holly in Tennessee

I don't surf. I don't hang out on silly websites. Really! I work! I mind my own business!

Except when Holly sends me somewhere, because somehow she always knows exactly what's going to set me off. As she did this morning, when she sent me here, to Engrish.com. (There's an adult section of the site where you can see how The F-Word is a favorite of people around the world, with nary a care about its function in a sentence. Subject? No problem! Verb? Sure! Adjective? Why not!)

These two made me laugh until I had tears running down my cheeks, which I probably shouldn't tell you but should just keep to myself, lest I ruin your impression of me as someone very adult and sophisticated. You did think that, right? Of course you did.

 It was the part about using the pool as a mouse that set me off.

The Hurted Ass Man. What more can I say? (Nothing, because I'm about to fall out of my chair over here.)

Another Weekend Project

Whew. It's still hideously windy and even uglier--I don't even dare show you a photo of the brown sky right now; it's that depressing--but I'm getting a ton of stuff done. Remember this Lucky Brand cotton knit jacket? So soft and comfy:

I dyed it a last week (?the week before?), so it looks like this:

OK, it's more of a grape. I let iPhoto "enhance" the color, and this is what it came up with. Not too far off, as the cabinet door in the background is a true red. Let's try again:

That's much better. "Enhance," my butt.
Last night we hunted down buttons--not what I had in mind (I wanted 10 plain, deep purple buttons, but those were nowhere to be found), but they'll do:

These colors are marginally more accurate, although the table isn't that yellowish.

So when I'm ready to sit down, I can finish this one up.

What are y'all doing today? Hope your weather is WAY better than ours and that you can get out and enjoy some of it.

Saturday Morning

Hello, my little chickadees! I just wanted to tell you that if you never hear from me again, please look for us--me, The EGE, the cats, our house, all the dirt and grass and leaves from the yard, the storage building, both vehicles--somewhere in Mexico. Or even farther south. The South Pacific, maybe. Or Antarctica. The good thing about this hideous wind is that it's clearing out all the fallen leaves. The bad thing? Well, pretty much everything else about it. Here's a photo. Please don't show it to small children, the infirm, or the easily depressed:

That tint down at the bottom is all the dust blowing this way from Lamesa, up in the cotton fields. Probabaly a lot of cow manure in there as well. Bleach. You remember my story about my friend and his endless sinus infection that, when they cultured it, turned out to be caused by particles of cow manure from the blowing dust.

Let's all say "ewwwwwww!"

But for the moment--unless our house is picked up and carried off to OZ--we're all warm and toasty in The Voodoo Lounge. Here's the daybed, with Fat Moe chilling.

For some reason we don't understand, he loves to shred newspaper, so after The EGE finished reading today's paper, we gave it to Moe. He doesn't eat it or chew it; he just shreds it and flings it around. This isn't a representative shot because I'd already picked up most of the little bits.

Here's where I am on the velvet dress/tunic:

and here's what I'm working on for a change up this morning. This coat, remember:

and what I'm doing to add some more color:

(You do know you can always click to enlarge these, right?)

For decades, the split stitch, with all six strands, was the only stitch I used. It's a nice, anal stitch--you can get all picky about the length and about splitting it right in the middle with three strands on each side. This is, of course, one reason I started doing other stitches: to save what's left of my sanity. But sometimes it's nice to be precise, and that's what I'm doing today. If I wanted to be more introspective, I could probably figure out what it is that's drawing me to be more anal-retentive. Eh. Not that interesting.

Well, wish us luck. I hope the fence doesn't blow over--the one on the side of the house is moving a lot, even the poles go two feet into the ground and are encased in cement. It's *that* windy today.

Keep warm & make something fabulous! XO

What I'm Reading

I don't get nearly as much reading done as I used to. For one thing, I'm pretty much ready to go to sleep when I get in bed--here lately that's about 1 a.m. If I can get there at midnight, I can get in an hour, theoretically. In practice, Moe often comes and lies down on me and purrs, and then it's pretty much all over. I don't read during the day--I wish I could get to the place where I could do that without feeling guilty, but the only way it ever happens as if I'm reading something work-related--either a magazine or a book about which I'm going to do a video. Maybe I should make that one of the resolutions for next year: spend more time reading. It just seems so self-indulgent, reading does.

So it takes me forEVER to finish a book. And I'm a fast reader! ("I'm an excellent driver.") I'm guessing that most nights I spend about 15 minutes reading, maybe less. That's ridiculous, isn't it, given how much I love to read?

So here are the current stacks by the side of the bed. I'm boycotting the local library and am ordering used books from amazon.com, which is where I got all of these except the one on the bottom, Quest, which was handed out at the author, Daniel Yergin's, lecture here this fall.

Why, you ask, am I boycotting the library? It got noisier and noisier and smellier and smellier--they're trying to lure more kids in (why, I have no idea--they say that computers and video games are the things on which they need to focus, rather than books, so it's not like they're interested in teaching kids a love of reading) and they have no plan in place for dealing with the daily influx of homeless (and, in Midland, with its 4% unemployment rate, "homeless" means drug-addicted and/or alcoholic and/or mentally ill), it was no longer a pleasant place. Then the new director, some young guy From Elsewhere, is problematic. An artist friend tells me he's gutted the fine art section, removing everything with images of nudes. I find this difficult to believe but, given Midland's climate and the fact that the librarian they fired was a liberal Jewish Unitarian Universalist who made real strides in creating a balance in the theology section, well. It may well be true. I haven't gone in to find out. I've loved that library since 1969, but they're ruining it. In the year before I quit going, the romance and religious fiction sections kept growing, and the only new biographies were celebrity and right-wing-wacko bios. Hence my boycott.

 The books on the left in this stack above are ones I read long ago and want to re-read, I think. If not, I'll pass them on. On the right are the ones in line--the top two are about Wallace Simpson and the Duke of Windsor--I was fascinated about them decades ago and read all I could find and now want to read about them again. Something in the New York Times about a bio to be released next year, I think, is what spurred this. I think Jennifer New was the one who mentioned Devotion, and she liked it so much that I ordered it. Next are a couple books on how the mind works--a perennial favorite topic. Then two books by Spencer Wells, an anthropologist and geneticist who also spoke at Midland College this fall. Diary of Helena Morley--I think I have this because I loved (and have read twice) One Art, the letters of Elizabeth Bishop; I've had it for years and haven't read it. Soldiers in Revolt--some DVD we watched mentioned this. Then there's Jennifer New's new young adult book about Dan Eldon, Safari as a Way of Life, which I ordered before I talked to her, and then Trappings: Stories of Women, Power, and Clothing--this is a cool story: we were in some airport. Maybe San Francisco? Portland? (OK--Portland; I looked it up. Go here to see what I saw). I don't remember--and they had a display of photos of women wearing their "power" outfits. And--woot!--there was a QR code. I scanned it, and there was a video. It was all based on a book, and I hunted down a book kiosk at the airport and checked out the book. I didn't buy it--it was like $30, and I had no desire to carry one. more. thing. on the plane. But I came home and ordered it and can't wait to read it. Well, I guess I *can* wait. Obviously.

At the bottom is Quest, about oil. They gave away cases of this book when Yergin spoke here-one of the local independent oil companies ordered them and handed them out to everyone who came. Hundreds. You can imagine how envious I was--they did that with my book at Authors at Google, but there were *not* hundreds of people. Not quite.

 I adore these Best Of books and order them every year, except I wait and order them a year later, so I can get them used and cheap. I don't get them all--I love best the science and nature and, next, the travel writing. I get the essays, too, but reading those is like work, as my critical brain gets involved and I have to slap myself to keep from taking notes.

 Someone mentioned Macaulay's How Things Work, and so I had to get it. Haven't even looked at it yet. I got the Steve Jobs issue of Time because I know nothing about the guy and wanted to know more. I've ordered the biography, as well. Some of the reviews were scathing, but I've read Walter Isaacson's bio of Einstein and liked it, so I'm going to give it a try.

 In the stack above, also on the same little table, are my favorite poets--Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, and then, below those, books I've had for a long time and haven't read. Then Blue Highways, which I read decades ago and thought I'd try again.

 Then there are these that I've finished. I watched the TED talk by Jack Horner and was entranced (go watch it if you haven't already). I read his online bio and loved it and ordered these. Alas, he (they--he has help, which always makes me suspicious--I want to know exactly who's writing the books I read) focuses too much on the digs and exactly where they were and exactly who was there doing what and doesn't tell enough about what they found and what it might mean. I got really bogged down in these--like a list of the names of geographical locations and people involved, and if you're reading after midnight, boring stuff like that isn't going to do much to hold your interest.

This is the one I most recently finished, and I was really disappointed in it. It's a New York Times #1 Bestseller, for crying out loud, so you'd expect riveting. Amusing. Educational. Thought-provoking. While it was OK, it lacked focus and seemed really self-indulgent, and here's why: there are some books, seemingly more and more all the time, perhaps in part thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert and Eat, Pray, Love (the author, in the current O Magazine, tells about how she got rich overnight and actually bought houses for people) in which people decide they want to do something--research cooking, or go to Paris, or take up hang-gliding, and then decide that if they wrote a book about the experience, they could write off the experience/trip/expense PLUS make a ton of money on the resulting book. Wow. The problem with this is that they don't really care about writing the book--it's never about writing the book. It's about the experience, and the writing part is just sort of a chore that has to be finished. If you don't care passionately about writing the book, please don't. Please write blog posts instead, or emails to friends, or--better yet!--tweets. Don't waste your time and ours writing about something just because you can write off expenses and make some money (and, you secretly hope, get a movie deal).

So these last three are going to Starbucks this evening. They'll have their little notes on them and be ready for someone else to decide whether or not it's worth their time to read them.

What are you reading that you really, really love?

It's Time

My friend (and one of the Women Who Say That Really Bad Word) Karen posted this on Facebook, and I love it--you know what's coming, but it still makes you get all tear-y, anyway. Besides the importance of the message, there's the art form, too: short, well-done videos are just so amazing--it gives you the sense that anything is possible.

What Are You Doing on Black Friday?

I always try not to spend any money at all on Black Friday. I try to stay home, but the truth is that both of us really like people-watching. We've never been to the mall on Black Friday, but we might go. Probably not, but maybe. I would love to have a comfy chair in the middle of Northpark Mall in Dallas (my favorite mall--big and light and airy), where I could sit and stitch and watch people all day long. I don't really like to watch them closely, like The EGE does--he likes to see what they're doing, but after a few times when I've been puzzling over someone's actions and then discovered they were doing something disgusting, I've gotten over that, mostly. What I love is to see what they're wearing, how they put themselves together that day. I skip over all the people who apparently put on whatever is lying on the floor next to the bed. They don't interest me at all.  In fact, they make me sad, all those sloppy, slovenly, depressed-looking people slouching and shuffling their way through life. All the rest do interest me, though, no matter if their style is foreign to me (Dallas matrons in pearls, for example) or not. I can get excited by torn jeans and a t-shirt if you can see there was some thought about the combination or the fit or the shoes or whatever. While I'm suspicious of White Men in Suits, a really nice shirt and tie can make me forgive them their formality. My favorites are the hippies, of course--the boho, the gypsies--but I can be happy about any really interesting outfit that shows the personality of the wearer. That's what I love: how do people's clothes reflect their personality, what they think of themselves and their place in the world? I LOVE that.

Alas, there is no real people-and-their-clothes-watching in Midland. Most of the people we see are of the slept-in-their-clothes variety: t-shirts or sweatshirts, jeans, flip-flops or tennis shoes, gimme hat. Sigh. For a town with a ton of money, there's not much imagination. Lots of people go to Dallas and Houston to shop. I'm guessing they wear what they buy there only at secret parties, disguising themselves as rednecks the rest of the time.

Anyway. That's not what I meant to write about. I know some of y'all really like the process shots, the photos of things while they're being done. I love those, too. I just don't like stopping what I'm doing to take the shots. But since it's not All About Me (well, not *always*), I'm doing my best for this project.

OK. So we had the two hideous velvet dresses, right?

I took off the horrid sequin-y things (and glued them to felt and took them to BJ as joke brooches: she can't put jewelry on any of the clothes in her shop because, she says, people will steal it. So I told her I'd make her some holiday-ish brooches perfect for being stolen. Of course, they're so tacky she'll never put them on any of the clothes, but it was fun to give them to her anyway), and then I washed the dresses ("dry clean only" is just a challenge to me). Then I have to do something about those hideous silk ruffles. See this line of stitching holding them flat?

 It's the line closer to the ruffle, not the one on the toward the velvet--the lowest line in the photo below:

 I ripped that out and then could pull the ruffle away from the hem on the velvet.

I cut the ruffle off, leaving enough of it to turn under and then stitched it by hand.

This is what it looks like from the right side. Gaw: look at all that lint~~

Now, I could have ripped out all the stitching, taken off the ruffle, and resewn the edge of the velvet on the machine. But I don't have a lot of confidence in my machine sewing skills--I've never much sewn on velvet--and I didn't want to risk screwing up the edges--they might start raveling or something. So I'm doing it this way. It will take most of the day, I'm guessing--there's the neckline, which goes down to the waist, both armholes (no sleeves), and the hem. But it's meditative, as long as I have really good light.

What are you doing today? I hope you have the day off and are doing something fun. I worked all morning yesterday--until after 1:30--to get work stuff done so I can take the rest of the weekend off. Yay, me!

OK--back to work--got a lot of hand-stitching ahead of me today. Now if only I had that chair at Northpark Mall; we could all have chairs there, sipping lattes, stitching/drawing/writing/whittling, watching the shoppers~~wouldn't that be fun?

XO

Podcast with Melanie Testa: Cancer + Creativity

I did a podcast with Melanie back in July of 2010. You can go listen to it here. Since then, she's been diagnosed with breast cancer (last January,) has gone through months of grueling treatment and gotten well, and has written a book (Dreaming from the Journal Page: Transforming the Sketchbook to Art, due out in 2012 and available for pre-order here). Now she's starting a way-cool new project on her blog, here, which, as you might guess, is TOTALLY exciting for me. 

I saw Melanie at the Quilt Show in Houston the first part of November, and she looked fantastic--happy and energetic. Of course, it was hard to really spend any time with her because everybody--and I mean everybody--wanted to hug her and touch her and just be near her. 

When I asked Melanie if she would share her story with us, she said she was ready to tell about her experience with this amazing year, so yesterday we talked, and here's our conversation. 

The Rest of the Garments

Well, no, not ALL the rest. But the ones I've got photographed for you.

This is 3J Workshop, a division of Johnny Was. Kind of like this one.

You know I loved the frayed edges and embellishments, but even more I loved that I HAVE some more of those stitched flowers I can add to it. Plus, I think, some lace flowers from my wedding dress, unbelievably.

 I love this: two layers of fabric stitched together and left with raw edges. I want to do this on a jacket!

 This is a luscious Double D Ranch rayon/silk blend velvet blazer with--omigoodness--shoulder pads. I'm not going to do anything with it but wear it with jeans. It is not one of their heavily embroidered ones, alas. But then it didn't cost anywhere near what those would have, even used.

 I love this cotton jacket--it's Lucky Brand and very, very soft. I'm thinking purple (grape), with new buttons.

 It had epaulet things on the sleeves, but I took those out and think I'll rip off the belt loops.

 This is a Free People sweater, and it's soft and fabulous. I think it will be purple/grape, as well. I'm out of most colors of dye and am using up the ones I have--grape, hot pink, avocado, lemon yellow. If I had all the usual dyes, I'd dye the jacket chartreuse, but I don't NEED it that color; I have several green coats/jackets. Only one purple, though--and it's very tailored and wool, so I don't wear it much. Hence, I see a load of grape in my immediate future.

Whew. What I haven't shown you is the pile of knit dresses and Goodwill t-shirts waiting while I mull over the next big project. Since I have no idea how to do what I'm thinking of doing, I'm piddling around with these lesser ones--and more yoolies--while I try to figure out what I want the finished piece to look like. I don't even know the length yet, for pete's sakes. Obviously got some more thinking to do. . . .

Thanks for looking. Wish you were here so we could sit and stitch together. Oh, how I wish that for us~~XO