this moment

A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, dreamy moment I want to remember.

this moment

A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, dreamy moment I want to remember.

I made a bag!

This is from a couple of weeks ago. I just didn't quite finish it.

I'd love to say I've been busy with spring activities to explain the quiet around here. But I haven't. Largely thanks to the total lack of anything resembling spring-like weather. Instead, I've watched five and a half seasons of Gossip Girl. I keep telling myself that once I'm finished the series, life can go back to normal.

I've been getting restless to attempt sewing on my own sewing machine. I bought the old Singer machine two years ago for $40 from a local thrift store. A good friend who knows how to sew tried to help me figure it out back then but it was beyond her. I took it back to the thrift store and they said it worked fine and it was just threaded wrong. And ever since, it has stood on our hearth (preventing my youngest from climbing on the stone ledge and hopefully preventing injury), intimidating the hell out of me. I had lots of ideas for Christmas gifts in both the holiday seasons between then and now. But I just couldn't overcome the intimidation factor.

I invited my friend (the one who helped me make Youngest's new pants -- which he now loves, proclaiming them "not bumpy anymore!") with promises of my buckwheat sourdough pancakes yesterday morning. So she figured out my machine and declared it just fine. And today I made the Adventure Bag from Soulemama's The Rhythm of Family.



I'm especially proud of myself because I didn't have a pre-made strap, so I figured out how to make a strap. And it worked.

I made pants!

I finished the pants for Youngest this weekend and I really loved the process. Which is a good thing, because he refuses to wear them.

I snuck them on and snapped a few pictures on the go, and when he realized he was wearing them, he immediately took them off.

Oh well. Hopefully this is just the beginning of more sewing projects.

this moment

A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, dreamy moment I want to remember.

learning to sew

I learned so much yesterday. I went to my friend's house, where she had cleared a table for us to work on in a lovely, sunny room. So we spent a chunk of the afternoon preparing the fabrics for the pair of pants I want to make. I had no idea you could iron paper or that it would be useful when sewing  (we lightly ironed the pattern sheet and also the tissue paper we traced the pattern onto). I ironed the fabrics I'm going to use, matched the grain of the fabric (who knew?), pinned the pattern parts to them, and cut the pieces out. So I'm all ready to go next weekend with starting to put the pieces together.



I love that my friend is taking me through the whole process. It's so much easier to learn when you have someone beside you to reassure that yes, it's okay if your hand wobbles a bit tracing the pattern or if the scissors do when you're cutting the fabric. It's so much more efficient than the humming and hawing and fretting I do when I'm learning to do something from a book, all by myself. Plus it's just lovely to visit with a friend in a sunny room, especially when you're still deep in winter.

systems

Someone I know recently said something pretty profound to me, when I was complaining about how I just don't seem to know how to set up systems to manage the clutter and life in our home. I thought what I needed was someone to come into my home and show me how to set up systems so all I have to do is maintain them. But she said she thinks that there is valuable experience in struggling to set up a system. Through the struggle, you learn things about the system that enable you to maintain it and improve it.

I think she's right. So I'll keep struggling, I guess.