Text(ile)

1. Tea, especially the first cup of the morning. 2. Books. Right now I'm loving Emma Bull and Anne Lamott. 3. The Garden. We've done a lot of work this year and things are starting to thrive. Right now we have tiny red baby strawberries, one small green tomato, a handful of jalapenos, and a crap ton of chamomile. The green peppers are also starting. The compost pile is also doing well which is interesting to no one but me. 4. Time Off. In a conspiracy of the fates, I have an unexpected extra long weekend. It is exactly what I need right now! 5. All of the above combined in sitting outside in the evening. It sounds cheesy, but when the sun is going down and the birds are singing, our back garden is a magical place.

I made a jacket!  Here is a picture of it!  Here is another one! This one shows the fun lining. This is the pattern I used. I can't say enough good things about it and about the super helpful sew-along instructions.

I've always been interested in clothing.  I've also never had the funds to devote to being a fashionista, so to look at me you wouldn't really know that I'm interested in clothing.  Almost as long as I've been interested in clothing, I've felt guilty about being interested in clothing, so even when I buy clothes that I love, I feel like I shouldn't.  I shouldn't be shopping, spending money, or consuming. But, friends, those are all feelings that I've realized come from buying clothes at the mall. Now that I've discovered the joy of making my own clothing, however, I'm hooked. And I think Sarai Mitnick of Colette Patterns hits the nail on the head in the opening pages of The Colette Sewing Handbook when she says that for her sewing her own clothes is "an antidote to this rushing whirlwind of fashion and consumerism. It reclaims fashion as an opportunity for creativity, joy and self-expression." Making my own is so much better tha...

I'm taking a course in macroeconomics this semester, and, surprisingly to me, I find it interesting. So I finally picked up the book What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealt h , by Wendell Berry. In the Foreword to the book, Herman E. Daly discusses the fact that we actually use the wrong word when discussing economics. The word economics comes from the Greek word oikonomia, which Daly defines as "the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run," that is, what we mean when we say "home economics" which is actually a redundant term. This word has been appropriated refer to (I'm quoting the OED's secondary definition of economics here) "the branch of knowledge that deals with the production, distribution, consumption and transfer of wealth." Ok, I get it, we appropriate words all the time, that's great, there obviously wasn't anothe...