Today was “Copy Your Favorite Garment” class:

Make a pattern without taking your garment apart. Pattern–making experience is not necessary, but you must have sewn clothes, know garment construction plus sewing/pattern terminology. This class is for those who cannot find a pattern or can’t fit patterns but own a garment that fits (and not mind pinning it and getting some wash–away ink on it). I’ve taught this class for 15+ years at local stores and since 2004 at the Experimental College.

It’s thru’ the Experimental College at the UW (it’s a student group), which is a great resource if you’re in the Seattle area.

GothLoli PA Dutch mystery skirt

I wanted to take the class because i have this fabulous skirt which never fails to receive compliments — but for which i have no pattern.  The awesome things about this skirt are:  #1, it has sixteen gores.  #2, the fabric is weird and quirky.  I tend to think of it as a GothLoli Pennsylvania Dutch skirt.  Can you imagine how fabulous this thing would be over layers upon layers of tulle??

The weird thing about this skirt is that Mom and i aren’t sure where it came from.  We found it in my grandmother’s sewing things when we were cleaning out her sewing room.  The gores were sewn together and the zipper was hand-basted in.  But all it took was one flip to the inside of the skirt and Mom and i knew instantly that my grandmother had not put it together — the seams were shockingly uneven and rough.  But the skirt mysteriously fit my waist, so i brought it home.  Put in the zipper, fitted it with my usual band-less waist, and sewed up the hem.

The more i wear it the more i love it.  (Tho’ i don’t wear it often because the ironing of it is a pain.)  The more i wear it, the more i want more skirts in the same pattern (okay, ironing be damned).  But there are no patterns for mystery skirts!  And so today i learned the basics of making a pattern from the garment itself.

And now, i shall make more and more skirts just like it.  First up, a skirt in this:

alphabet: red-lime (by applesandorange, @ Spoonflower.com)

Oh.  My.  Freaking.  Word. I loved this fabric the instant i saw it.  Yes, it’s a Spoonflower fabric — and, yes, that means that 1 yard of cotton will cost about $18.  I would normally not pay that much for fabric if i were buying it at a local store.  (The most i’ve ever paid for fabric was $15 a yard, but it was Japanese fabric in an adorable owl pattern and the drape and feel of the cloth was absolutely divine.  And that is the careful-est sewing i have ever done on any garment.  You bet i didn’t want to mess it up.)  But i think, for a design that i absolutely adore and at a cost that will go to support an independent designer, i might be willing to make an exception to my upper-limit for fabric cost and buy this one.

The older i get, the more the genetics i inherited from my grandfather kick in.  Namely:  I just am no good before 10am.  Work is especially bad because i need to be there at 8am, tho’ fortunately i’ve gotten everyone trained to leave me the fuck alone until at least 9am (and my morning work is kind of a drudge so it’s not like i need to be awake to accomplish it, thank goodness).  But even weekends are hard.  Today i have to be in Wallingford — which is just the next neighborhood over! — at 10am, but i’m sitting here wishing i could just go back to bed.

You know how the common wisdom is that the older a person gets the less sleep they need and the more they become morning people?  Not my grandfather.  After he retired, he’d sleep in until 11am every single day except sunday (church, of course).  He’d happily stay up until midnight, 1am, 2am catching up on the programs (usually sports) he’d recorded.  During the 6 months i lived with my grandparents before i moved to Seattle, i’d come home from working on the night obituary desk at the newspaper and settle in on the couch to watch TV with him.  We’d each have a big bowl of ice cream and enjoy “The New Yankee Workshop” together until past midnight.  Come morning we’d usually wind up waking up at the same time, and then it was a race to see who’d get to the shower first.

My grandmother, of course, would have already been up for about 4 or 5 hours.  Good gravy, i have absolutely no idea how she could do that.

The J.D.Salinger-fan coworker greeted me with excellent tidings of a gift-to-come: He’d found a spare red-cover paperback edition of Catcher in the Rye at a secondhand store, and it could me mine if i wanted it.

Do i?! Do i ever!!  I have been wanting to re-read them for years, but for nearly a decade now i have been unable to locate my own red-cover paperback edition of  Catcher in the Rye, and i’ve refused to re-read any Salinger until i locate either my own copy or one just like it as a replacement.

My Salingers — and i have a complete set of all the books he’s done — are ’60s reprints: red-cover  Catcher in the Rye, white-cover Franny and Zooey, yellow-cover Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, and the white-cover-with-9-squares edition of “Nine Stories.”  When my aunt’s former bedroom at my grandparents’s house became my occasional bedroom, i discovered some of my aunt’s old books (perhaps English texts from college, perhaps not).  The Salingers were the prizes in the bunch.  I read thru’ all of them in short order, and when i needed a book report book in, i believe, 7th grade (when i was 12), i asked if i could write on Catcher in the Rye.  The teacher was initially hesitant (slightly horrified, too) and wouldn’t allow it: “I don’t think that’s the right book for you to be reading right now.”  “But i’ve already read it!”  After a moment of utter startlement, she decided what was the harm then in allowing me to report on it.

I’ve always suspected that some of the disappointment i felt at college was that i was somehow expecting a more Salinger-esque college experience.  My Salinger-fan coworker chuckled and wondered if any of us, Salinger fans or no, would actually be prepared for and able to handle a Salinger-esque college experience.

I can’t wait to get my hands on another red-cover Catcher in the Rye.  I wonder how i’ll respond to Salinger 24 years after having 1st read him.

crafting @ the worktable
Originally uploaded by wrdnrd.

While we were trapped inside during Snowpocalypse ‘08, i finally had enough time to unearth my worktable. It had been inaccessible ever since my shipping cube of stuff arrived from Pennsylvania in mid-november.

Apparently, in that month’s time i’d almost forgotten just how closely aligned mentally the worktable is with my ability to be productive. No worktable accessible? I feel scattered and incapable of doing anything. Able to sit at the worktable once again? Suddenly i burn thru’ several mini-projects that had been loitering about, at least one of which had been loitering for years.

My worktable used to be the desk for the head editor at Seal Press. The internship i did with Seal happened, unfortunately, just as they were being acquired by the Avalon Publishing Group and moved to New York. I had a great editorial internship experience with Seal, but it was so remarkably bittersweet because toward the end of my too-brief time there i was helping more with packing up the Seattle office than i was helping with editorial duties. So much shredding, so many books to be pulped. So many pulp-destined books dragged home on my back so i could save them by distributing them to my friends.

I also dragged home furniture. Andy and i had just begun to set up our first apartment together and we were almost completely lacking furniture of any kind. From Seal’s Seattle office i acquired a ficus plant (which, alas, has since gone to that great compost heap in the sky), a desk chair (recently replaced with my own office chair from my Pennsylvania stuff), several small office organizing items (like letter trays). And the head editor’s desk. Which was my desk for about a year until i was able to bring out from Pennsylvania the computer desk my Gpa had custom made to my specifications when i was in college. Yet even tho’ i have my own computer desk now, i still find myself doing much of my work at the worktable. The worktable is shallow front-to-back, so that everything is always within reach, but it’s long and perfect for spreading out a project. It also has a piece of wood running the length of it between the legs, which is nice for propping up my feet.

And sometimes, when i’m sitting at it, doing layout for a zine or homework for a class, i think back to the other time i sat at it, in a pink-walled office with a view of Puget Sound, working thru’ some editorial task while LAM was out of the office for the day. Most of the things the Seal office provided for Andy and me have gone away, but i doubt i’ll ever part company with this worktable.

My mother tells me that when she was little her parents would get their tree just a few days before Christmas. On Christmas Eve the girls would go to bed to the sight of a naked Christmas Tree standing in the living room. After the kids were asleep, Gma would then decorate the tree so that the kids would come out to the living room on Christmas Morning to presents and a fully decorated tree.

My parents split up when i was pretty young, but i remember my mother explicitly stating that she was starting one new tradition so that we could still have something to share in our new family-minus-one. And it was nice, over the years, to be able to count on Christmas Eve always being the same, no matter what families we had to visit on Christmas or whose families they were (grandparents, new step-mothers, step-grandparents). What she did was allow us to open one — and only one! — gift on Christmas Eve. When we were younger it was after the Christmas Eve service at church. As we got older and as my brother and i got more involved in the church services ourselves, the gift would be opened in the short space of time we had at home in between services. Even now, in years when Andy and i bother to buy multiple gifts for each other (and manage to still have gifts to open come Christmastime, because i’m notorious for making him open his gifts early), i still like opening one Christmas Eve gift.

In the years when i believed in Santa i loved — loved — listening to NORAD track Santa on the radio. These days the cynical side of me wonders what a multi-nation defense organization is doing reinforcing the Santa myth, and i also suspect that perhaps my parents were using the threat of Santa getting closer just as a mechanism for getting me to get my little butt into bed — but, whatever. I still loved it. Now i see that one can follow NORAD’s Santa-tracking on the web. Or, better yet for those of us who are still radiophiles at heart, you can follow the NORAD Santa-tracking Twitter.

My dear friend Jess has a lovely tradition with her husband where they camp out in their living room and fall asleep under their Christmas tree’s lights. It’s such a pretty idea i’m tempted to steal it some day.

Andy and i did stay up until midnight one year, but the cats didn’t talk.

These days i am trying to foster one new Christmas Eve tradition of my own. I don’t care if we have a special dinner or if we make it to a Christmas Eve service or anything. I don’t mind if Andy and i don’t have Christmas Eve gifts to open (because i have enough things in my life and am increasingly less interested in gifts). All i want for Christmas Eve every year is “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1987 TV special with Denholm Elliott or if it’s Dylan Thomas himself reading it. Either will do. Better, tho’, are those years i can talk Andy into reading it to me as i snuggle under the comforter in bed at night (or, occasionally, when i take my turn reading it to him). My copy of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is this one with the lovely woodcuts by Ellen Raskin.

“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

My office has a long-standing, ongoing hangman game. It’s a really fun way for an office full of language geeks to play around with words. And i do love working in an office full of other people who are as excited as i am when i find a really great language gem. So often once a hangman word has been solved we’ll stand there admiring it saying, literally, “Oooooh, that’s a good one!”

Our game was started almost a decade ago and the rules are simple: don’t duplicate a word, don’t misspell your word, and don’t care at all if you actually “hang” your “man.” We don’t play competitively — we don’t even keep any kind of score. Altho’ there have been a few times where it’s turned into a game of contact hangman when 2 people lunge for the board to put up the last letter at the same time. I’ve hip-checked coworkers a time or 2 because i’d suddenly realized what the word was and wanted to solve it before they did.

My favorite office hangman story is about the word “syzygy.” I used it the 1st year i was working here, but the person who was keeping track of the words at the time forgot to put it on the master list. So, about a year-and-a-half later, i used it again. The 1st time i used it we went thru’ almost all 26 letters of the alphabet before it was solved. The 2nd time i used it, the 1st coworker who wandered past the board decided to be a smartass and led off with “y.” D’oh! I dutifully filled it in so that the board looked like this: “_y_y_y” And i also added an note: “Curse you, Coworker V!!!” Another coworker wandered past, laughed hysterically, and added 3 guesses and a note: “szg”, “Thank you, Coworker V!”