I have fallen into the world of sewing in such a fast and furiously wonderful way. Hard to describe but I tend to be a bit obsessive about my projects and in the past week or so I have been spending my freetime trying to learn as much as I can about machine sewing. Even knowing that the learning curve (curves are hard to sew by the way) is steep and I am at the bottom, I am really relishing the process.

So what this straight stitching will teach me is a mystery, but the goal this week is a wearable skirt at some point. Buttonholes be dammned and zipper seams will simply have to cooperate as I try again and again.

There is a relaxed and rythmic way in which the bobbin and the needle dance through the fabric (I keep trying new ones mostly the cheapest most cotton-y things I can find). There's a hum the the machine makes that I find soothing and the joy of the pressed seam is one of accomplishing practical tasks.

More process than product at this point but I don't mind...

Rachael

I bought one. It's way too much fun to try to make straight seams. I made a couple of special bags and am getting very inspired and excited by my crazy idea to make myself a few very skirts. I go to work all day and think, and talk, and solve problems and then I come home (at least this week) and I sew. So...I think I might step out of bags (well maybe I'll try this one) but not quite to skirts and try...

Check it:

Headband, like this one here

There's a fabulous virtual world of sewing I'm finding, from Sew Mama Sew to Burda Style to the Threadbangers. And then there is the rythym of the sewing machine and the satisfaction of a (mostly) straight seam...

take care
Rachael

Last week the writer, Jonathan Safron Froer came to town and talked to a crowd in an old downtown church about the ways in which someone can stumble when asked easy questions. He threw a lot of jokes about Sarah Palin into the air and we all chuckled and worried and listened. And he talked about how the books he wrote surprised him in the writing, they morphed and changed so much, they started one place as one kind of a boat and each bit of that boat was replaced in the journey and when they arrived on the other shore, each story was a new. I hadn't read his books. I didn't know anything but his name. And when I walked out I thought that he had stood and told some truth.

He quoted W H Auden who said (he said)

"I look at what I write so I can see what I think. "

And Kurt Vonnegut who said (he said)

"A reader is to a book as a musician is to a score."

And Joseph Brodsky who said (he said)

"The rhyme is smarter than the poet."

And the anonymous someone who once said

"A bird is not an ornithologist."

And he was very funny and inspiring and I went home and wrote and wrote and wrote. My sketchbook page above is chock-full of drawings after some pr photo of him, that might become a paper doll.

Oh and apparently there is someone named Muffin Lord. If that was fiction, no-one would believe...

Take care,
Rachael

My the murky, worrisome moment is sinking into everything. So much gloom and doom and panicky predictions that the economy is coming to a sputtering, screeching, screaming stop may be causing us all to walk around like zombies. Or maybe we are all taking stock of our own luck, pluck and possibilties...I do hope that's the case.

As it starts to get colder, I head for the top of my house. I am starting to re-set up my cold weather studio space in the attic. When fully operational it is a quiet place of calm and productive chaos but until then it's as much a mess as the other spaces I try to work in. Maybe the best thing about the attic in the winter is that it can be heated easily with a small space heater and can feel very much like an incubator of ideas. A place where there are no interruptions and time flows very differently.


Oh and this OxFamily project of hopeful and strange things excited me when I heard about it last week. They have a call for submissions for their next issue...If we were quieter...

If we were any quieter, not a word would be heard...

take care,
Rachael

I don't really want to slow down in the making of these odd little dolls but because people keep asking me, I have posted 18 of my dolls and their stories on etsy. It's here and there will be a little brag thing for it here, too. Look to your left. See.

I'm going to try to add a few paper dolls every week but it's more important for me to make 'em and get to sleep on time and try to remember the joyful things in this murky gray moment of an almost recession in which the poverty so many people live in will just get worse, worse and worse.

Economic situations may be souring, but people are good and possibly getting better, trying to help others. I see that every single day, don't you?


goodnight,
Rachael