Adventures in (clothing) alteration

At church a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about how I'd made my own dress for a gala (at the Library of Congress! I'm still floating a little bit over that one). She said she wouldn't mind learning how to sew, but sewing machines always break on her. I knew exactly what she was talking about; I told her about my own sewing machine trauma and how to this day, I kind of have a preference for hand-sewing over machine sewing.

I also mentioned that I now own a darn reliable sewing machine, if she ever wants to borrow it. She didn't want to borrow it for herself, but she did wonder if I might be willing to hem her wedding dress for her. And the answer was yes, of course!

When I got to her house and saw the dress on her for the first time, it became evident that the most pressing problem she faced was that the shoulders were way too big on her. I pinned the shoulders together, then marked the lines where the new seam lines would need to go by sewing these lines in a contrasting color of thread. (I've discovered the hard way that if you're planning to pick something out, it pays to have that thing be in a color that's easy to see.) Then I took apart the existing shoulder seams, matched up the seam lines I had marked, and basted (temporarily sewed) them together along those new lines.

It was a little more complicated than that because the dress is lined, but that is kinda-sorta-basically what I did during that first evening when I visited her house, thinking (ha!) that I could get this project done in one sewing session. I ended up taking the dress home with me after all, to work on in the evenings.

She also needed the dress hemmed, so I pinned it up at when I was with her, and then last night I finished hand-basting it up. I do plan on machine-sewing the hem in the end, but I wanted to make sure that I really had gotten the length correct before I cut any fabric. I do feel like hand-basting wins over pins pretty much every time; it's both sturdier and more flexible than pins. Not to mention the 100% reduced risk of getting stabbed on accident, either for the sewist or for the person being fitted.

The skirt has a gauzy outer layer and a much more opaque lining. I hand-basted both.

This dress also has a train, which she would like to have out of the way when she is dancing during the reception after the wedding. I did an internet search for how to deal with this, and came up with the idea of a "train pin," which is a way to pin the train up on the outside of the back of the dress, but we couldn't make it look good at all when we tested it out, so that was a no-go. However, she did like the idea of sewing a loop to the middle of the back of the train, so that she could carry her train without using her fingers. I installed this last night.

I used some grosgrain ribbon I had saved from some gift bag, which I couldn't bear to get rid of and which has been sitting in my stash of saved ribbons and strings for I don't even know how many years. I sewed it to the underskirt, and then picked apart the seam on the gauzy overlay fabric so that the loop could poke through. Tomorrow we'll try it on her again, just to make sure all the modifications work well, and then I'll hem the hem with my machine, as originally promised, and then I'll probably be done.

I am still working on the fence-painting project (the weather has been mostly perfect for it) but only felt enough umph to blog about one thing this week. But if you show up next week, I'll tell you about the very exciting world of power washing and about having the perfect roller brush and about why I bought catnip this last week, even though I don't have any plans to use it for a cat. Then there's also the excitement of finding rotting pieces of wood in places where there probably really shouldn't be rotting pieces of wood, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Come back next week and I'll tell all.

Oh. Also. If you want to see three more pages of the graphic novel and read a little bit about it, head on over to cordeliafernwood.com.

Delivering myself from famine

Friends! I am alive. At this exact moment I'm planning to start blogging here again as well as continue the new work blog I started a few weeks ago (at cordeliafernwood.com), but I know myself and I'm not... sure... how long this enthusiasm will last. Also I'm not sure if anyone who reads this blog isn't already my friend on Facebook, but if there is anyone who was waiting with bated breath for me to show up here again, hooray! I'm here again. 

So, at Cordelia Fernwood, I've made some stuff and I've sold some stuff, but I haven't sold very much stuff, which is to be expected at the beginning of a venture like this, but the upshot is that I shall be needing grocery money in the relatively near future, and luckily for me a fence-painting job is available for me to do and be paid for at this very moment. This is because my mother owns the building I live in, and she pays me to be her fixit human for my own house. Eventually I will run out of things to fix and at that point will either have to start selling more stuff or else find a real job, but for now the weather isn't heinous and it's a good time to be working outside.

The last time this fence was painted, the workmanship was, hm, how do I say, dubious. Without any apparent prep work whatsoever, such as sanding or even cleaning the surface to be painted, a high-gloss paint was sprayed on to the existing fence. For my part, after using progressively coarser sandpaper and considering driving an extra fifteen miles to pick up extra extra coarse sandpaper, I finally concluded that primer is my friend. (I also picked up a wire-bristle brush at Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, and it is FABULOSO at scuffing up hard-to-reach high-gloss fence parts that have no business being high-gloss.) Like this:

Also there is the top-end-of-the-fence-boards situation. Which is to say, none of the exposed end grain on the tops of the boards got painted during this high-gloss spray-painting job, but were left to weather naturally, which results in stuff like this:

In some cases, the ends don't have moss on them, but in some cases they do. I'm planning to paint the non-mossy ones, just to preserve them a tiny bit longer, but quite frankly the whole thing is going to have to be completely rebuilt within the next five to ten years, so I'm constantly wondering to myself which effort is worth it and which is not.

I did finally conclude that I should replace the most rotten boards on the gate, though. I use the gate every time I leave the house, and one of the boards on the front had rotted out so badly that only the screws that had held it in place were left at the top.

Behold the front of the gate, which already has three boards I've replaced (it's hard to tell, but they're a slightly different color from everything else because I primed them before I installed them ;)

Since I am a fan of whimsy and not a fan of regretting my decisions, I've decided that the crooked board on the far left on the front side is whimsical, and that I don't regret at all the fact that I totally forgot to sight down the long side of the board to make sure it was straight before I bought it. Really truly, though, I actually do think it kind of looks cute, and I'm also not kidding about the liking whimsy thing. 

You can see that the board on the far left on the inside of the gate is pretty ripped up on the bottom. I wasn't originally planning to replace it, but replacing the boards on the front of the gate went so well that I'm sort of thinking maybe I will after all. 

Aaand I'm out of time to write. Probably for the best. Check out cordeliafernwood.com if you're curious about what the first pages of the unfinished graphic novel look like, or what the mostly-finished paper Nativity or paper Easter Set look like, or if you want to read more ramblings about creative work and, like, stuff.

Gluchlich

The German word for happiness- well, probably one of the words, but since my German isn't very good it's the only one I know-- is "Gluchlich." And this used to bother me, just a little, because it is so clearly related to the English word "lucky." It irritated me to think that an entire language could seriously assume that happiness was up to luck, that you couldn't influence your own fate about this most basic of psychological needs. I know very well indeed that we aren't always in perfect control of our emotional lives, but this seemed to be a bridge too far.

Then I read a book by Tony Danza, of Who's the Boss fame, about doing a TV reality show in which he taught a high school English class for a year in a tough high school in Philadelphia. (The book's title is I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had.) What I mostly got out of that book was that good teaching doesn't necessarily make for good reality TV, because good teaching inherently involves less drama than reality TV needs. But towards the beginning, as he was talking about how he got to the point of doing the reality TV show, he talked about how he had many friends who were just as talented and just as hardworking has he had been, but that getting the role in Who's the Boss was a lucky break for him. It was his way of acknowledging that he was no better than-- well, maybe not anyone else, but many of the people he knew and respected. I liked that--and suddenly I became a lot more OK with Gluchlich as a concept. 

I am aware that happiness can be cultivated-- that's the hardworking part. But somehow I feel calmer and happier myself when I know there's some unfairness built into the system. If I don't have as much as someone else, it isn't automatically because I wasn't as good as them at something. It even, oddly, makes it easier to be happier for them. If you know it isn't a perfectly balanced system to start with, there's no use weeping or wailing when it shows itself to be what you already knew it was. :D

The Garden Lantern

Last spring some time I was in Kohl's with a $5 off $5 coupon, and I wandered around until I found the thing I was supposed to buy, which was a solar garden lantern. I'm getting better at this with buying things-- finding what is just right and then going with that. I kind of wish I were so confident in picking out people to be friends with, but people are not things and money is much simpler (and in some ways more dangerous) than exchanges of friendship, so perhaps I should be content.

Anyway, I brought it home and then set it by my door to wait until I figured out exactly where in the garden I wanted to put it. I wanted it to be useful, but I also didn't want to attract mosquitoes close to the front door.

But I also-- and this is the extremely silly part, but it's funny and I'd rather make someone laugh than make them think I'm never ridiculous-- I also hesitated to put it out because I was afraid that the weather would get to it. The garden lantern. That was designed to be out in the weather. So, as I mentioned, I propped it in its corner between my front closet and my front door, and periodically it would fall over, and I would think to myself that I should put it out, and I would worry again about the weather, and I wouldn't do it.

Then last Thursday or so, I realized that while it was designed to deal with the weather, it wasn't designed to be tipped over and fall on the ground repeatedly, and that I should just put in in a spot already. You see, unlike lighting designed for the indoors, this garden lantern didn't have anything flat to rest on; it had a pole with two spikes at the end, meant to be driven into the ground. So I took it out and within about three seconds realized that the perfect spot was just inside the garden gate, and I felt very silly for not having put it there before. And I was so pleased with how it looked as I went out for my walk on Sunday evening that I took a picture of it as I left the house, and that is the picture that I show you now:

I suppose there's some useful moral to be learned from all this, though I'm not quite sure what. I'm just thankful that my silliness didn't result in the poor lantern being broken without ever having been used. The sight of it brings me happiness every time I see it.

Child Abuse Prevention Training

 A new school year is about to begin in our district. This means, among other things, that I have been diligently completing online training modules, including one which is sometimes known among staff members as "child abuse prevention training."

But it isn't, not really. It's actually a training on what our legal responsibility is if we suspect a child has been abused: which is to say, we must report it promptly to the proper authorities. I've cried after work every single time I've had to submit one of these reports, BTW, but having emotions about a legal responsibility doesn't absolve you of said responsibility. Also, it's not a huge percentage of days. I've only ever had to submit at most one a year, and my job for the past several years has involved so little direct interaction with the kids that I haven't had a day like that for quite some time. 

I've been thinking about what it would be like if it were actual child abuse prevention training. If I were designing it-- and to be clear, I'm well aware that no one has asked me-- but if I were designing Child Abuse Prevention Training, I would have the first part be on how to recognize your emotions, the next part on how to appropriately deal with your emotions, and the last part on how much more important it is to be in control of yourself than of any child. 

For good measure, I'd probably throw in a few things about how to get children to do things without being abusive to them, because I know I am personally most at risk of child abuse when I feel like I have to get a kid to do a thing that for whatever reason isn't happening. Now that I think about it, I'd probably also have a bit about what is going through children's heads when they act a certain way. I've noticed an ever-greater tendency in our culture to attribute adult-style motivations and ideas to these young aliens who most often have no idea what is going on, want desperately to win our approval, and haven't learned yet how to regulate their own emotions (which, it's that much more difficult for them to do so when we are giving them poor examples ourselves). Maybe I'd end on a happy note with several videos of people telling "That could have gone south, but I managed to figure out how to stay in control of my emotions, ask for help as needed, and prevent child abuse" stories.

Thank you to Project Gutenburg for making this out-of-copyright image available!
I think this lady looks pretty calm and collected even though one of her charges looks less than enthusiastic about nap time (or wherever they're going) don't you?

Meet the ferns

The Lady Ferns were the first to get their names because it seemed silly for ladies to not have names. I'm not sure why my phone in all its wisdom has decided to give Lady Elisabeth such different lighting than Lady Katherine; I took these photos mere seconds apart, and the ferns themselves are pretty close together.

Lady Katherine

Lady Elisabeth

After that the Hay-Scented Fern told me he could be called Charlie, after my grandpa (who never actually went by Charlie, but whatev). Because I know you are wondering: no, Charlie doesn't smell like anything, hay or otherwise, to me. 

Charlie, poor Charlie.

I feel pretty bad about how poorly Charlie is doing. First, I left him in his pot for about half of last summer, literally overshadowed by the ladies beside him (though I didn't notice that part at the time), and only watering him when I noticed everyone was looking a bit droopy. Then I got so tired of trying to find spots in my yard to plant ferns which hadn't already been cris-crossed by too-large tree roots that I gave up and planted Charlie in an inadequate hole. You can see the result. *sigh*. I can only hope that he will continue to survive, and eventually thrive. Also I'm backing up that hope with extra water and fertilizer and encouraging words.

Dasher and Dancer are next to each other, and Donner is over on the far side of the yard, next to the fence rather than the sidewalk. Dancer was my only Christmas fern last year, but I ended up planting Dasher and Donner this year. As with other Christmas-named plants, these are named for that fact that they still have foliage during the cold time of year, when Christmas is in the northern hemisphere.

Dasher

Dancer

Donner

I decided on the names for the Ostrich Ferns last. The others had practically named themselves. I finally decided to go with Edward and Edwina when Mrs. Weathercolour suggested it; I'd thought of it, since I used to have a picture book titled "Edward the Emu," but her suggestion cinched it. (Ostriches aren't emus, but we both figured: close enough.) I feel a little bad for Edwin and Edwina, since the cicadas liked them an awfully lot. In the weeks since they got all that love the eggs have been hatching out, and Edwin and Edwina's fronds have been dying off rather much. And yet, they started out quite hale and hearty and happy, better equipped to deal with that kind of stress than probably anything else in the garden, so I'm not too worried for them.

Edwin

Edwina

Magical Tennis Shoes and Perfectionism

I think I've written about the magical tennis shoes here, but I'm not finding the post at the moment. When I do I'll link to it.

The TL;DR is that I ended up buying a pair of tennis shoes that was extremely in style, which made me darn nervous because I truly did not want to look like one of the seventh graders I was working with at the time. It turned out that instead of the kids thinking I was trying too hard to be cool (with the exception of exactly one sixth grader) they thought I WAS cool-- and the more trend-aware the kid was, the stronger the impression was. This was pretty weird for me, but nice; the positive feedback from kids was nice, but the truly amazing effect was that the same kids who on principle tended to resist any and all orders, suggestions, commands, etc. would get twirling spirals in their eyes and say "Yes," when I asked them to do things, as long as I was wearing The Magical Shoes. I found these effects to be both hilarious and worrisome.

It was worrisome because I know darn good and well that letting any of your sense of self-worth rest on the approval of seventh-graders is a terrible idea, even if you're a seventh grader, but especially if you're a grownup. Luckily, I was able to avoid that fate at that time. 

However, recently I was in a group discussion about a video featuring a woman who had been an elite synchronized swimmer, whose perfectionism had prevented her from enjoying the successes she had before she became too ill to compete. All of a sudden I made the connection: it does feel good to get compliments from normally hostile seventh graders; it also feels good to get awards and prizes from the sports world (or the academic world, or the musical world, or the world in general); but letting go of your precious sense of self-worth in exchange for those things is a terrible idea.

I haven't been quite as successful at keeping my sense of self-worth safe from these other traps, but at least now I have a metaphor to remind me why I should keep trying. :)