Every year we go with a group of friends to a national park, a protected seashore island, where we camp and soak in the place. I have a dream this time to draw armadillos, to fall asleep on the beach and to see the full moon above the live oaks. I have packed enough watercolor paper to share and for inspiration I am looking up Mark Catesby's fascinating paintings and prints of the these amazing places, more here...

best
Rachael

I was trying to sew a skirt on election night. We don't have a TV anymore (haven't for years) but I had the radio on and I was hopped up on coffee from a meeting with my closest advisors and anyway it was bowling night so I thought I'd try a skirt but then the news started coming in and it was exciting and my seams started getting crooked, and I wasn't sure what I'd pinned and I hadn't pinned, and then I lost all concentration and just listened to the new president elect talk about changing the world by coming together.

Rock on! We can do that, can't we?

My skirt's for naught but my spirit is back on track. With the presidential election over and a real feeling of joy and optimism and collaborative change in the air, what would have been a simple skirt is more meaningful for it's mistakes (leaning to the left a little in some of the stiches, and not as much backtacking as we've seen) and it's still not a skirt.

I'm still learning to speak seamstress. I've been burdastyling my way around the terms and techniques and the inspiration of sewing, and the inspiration factor is pretty high.

So then, I am officially on vacation and typing this in is too close to 'work' so I'm off...
take care,
Rachael

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