Tea at Milk Coffee Bar (RIP) with Carly, which we ended up throwing into a to-go cup when the stand up comedy show we didn’t know was happening (stand up comedy being a thing I would never subject myself to by choice) got super racist.
Then Waffle House coffee in Florence, KY as we drove down to visit Athens, GA, where I went to grad school.
Ballpoint pen and marker.
Five weeks ago today my sweet friend Shorty died.
These are the last photos I took of her, back in September when we were still enjoying our mornings together on the front porch.
Towards the end of the summer she had started climbing into my lap if I wasn’t quick enough to dole out the nuts, and trying to crawl into my pocket to get them herself. We’d reached a level of trust that even allowed me, just a few weeks before she died, to reach out and flick a bit of dried leaf off her head without so much as a flinch from her.
I don’t know what happened to her. One minute she was fine, running up and down the fence, wiggling her silly little stump of a tail, and taking walnuts from my hand like always. Four hours later my partner found her dead in the alley with no signs of trauma.
She’s buried in the backyard at the base of this little log feature I made in July out of some cut off pieces of utility pole the workers left in the alley when our poles were replaced.
It took me all summer to complete this job I had expected to have finished by the end of May. It’s the only big job I managed to finish all summer. But just look at how pretty my shed is.
When we went to look at rust paint colours, we assumed we’d be choosing from the traditional range: red, cyan, Tonka toy yellow, John Deere green. But we found out something very exciting: when you buy the Home Hardware store brand rust paint, you can have it tinted any colour. As in, any colour from the wall of paint chips for the regular paint. We were like kids in a candy shop.
Here’s how it looked in late June, with just the front and sides finished. That pasty non-colour on the door, with fake wood grain, is what the whole thing used to look like.
The painting seemed to take forever, because due to all the bending and crouching involved (and my ageing body and bad back) I painted the shed one side at a time. Having to plan for, and wait for, adequate stretches of dry weather dragged the project well into fall. I started with the hard part, the narrow space between the shed and the fence, and nearly passed out in there from breathing the paint fumes in that hot, tight space. Fun!
I stand at this window every single day feeling pleased with myself, and enamoured with these colours. Please don’t look at my unhemmed curtains; that’s a winter job.
Here it is in the first snowfall of the year:
And the next day, with more snow. I grew up in a much snowier place than I live in now, and my family made fun of me when I sent them this picture.
And here’s what it looks like now, a bright flash of colour in an otherwise bleak urban winter landscape, under what is, most years, about as much snow as we normally get here.
We left a gap in the fence at the back of the shed, which faces onto our alleyside parking, so that the alley cats would still have their familiar back door into the yard. Right behind the rose of Sharon is a kitty-sized gap. There’s now a row of four baby roses of Sharon here to make the kitty door more private.
For a few years now I’ve kept a practice of making myself a new dress for my birthday. This week as I was finishing up Cobbled Bodice Attempt #5 on a dress by a careless and sloppy designer I both love and hate (Tina Givens, IYKYK), it occurred to me that I should be making myself a new dress to celebrate my Gramma’s birthday instead (or in addition to). My Gramma was a professional sewist, making and altering things for people right up to the day she died. She gave me the skills and the confidence to make my own clothes. She taught me how to read and use a sewing pattern while guiding me through making the most fiddly and ridiculous shirt I’ve ever sewn, with cuffs and buttonholes and an asymetrical closure and an incredible ruffle that ran all the way up the front opening and around the collar. She bought me my first sewing machine, and bequeathed me her last one, which I still use. She would have turned 99 today.
As I should have expected, the bodice fix I was attempting didn’t work out (um hi, it took me five tries to realise it’s not the bodice that’s the problem). That dress is back on the sewing room floor, destined to become a skirt or rags, and I’ll make a whole post about my struggles with Tina Givens and her beautiful yet deeply crappy patterns another day. Fortunately, I had another dress nearly finished so I had something far better and more beautiful to wear today than that utter failure.
Pattern details: like most of what I make, this dress is a pastiche. The mullety two-layer skirt is from the Metamorphic Dress by Sew Liberated (pattern link: Metamorphic Dress). I had at first made this using the same bodice pattern I used for my thesis dresses, an apron-ish style I still love but the shoulder straps of which tend to fall down constantly from my narrow shoulders. I’m working my way slowly through my closet and remaking everything that’s not perfectly comfortable, the majority of which have that irritating strap problem. I adapted this new bodice from the Orchard Dress by Helen’s Closet (pattern link: Orchard Dress). I wore it to the public library knitting club today and the straps didn’t fall off once!
The top layer fabric is pieced together from large flour sack towels that I dyed with tea and screenprinted with all of my favourite motifs: cartoony flowers, clusters of floating arches, twisting segments of warped spacetime, and layers of gritty monoprinting blocked out with paper cutouts. The bottom layer is my old standby, the SCA’s favourite chemise cotton from the Bleachery in Aurora, Illinois, dyed a softly mottled pale olive tan with goldenrod flowers and iron water.
The Captain, whose pose I’m trying to copy here, is wearing my Gramma’s ribbon full of pins won in the Senior Games, along with my Granddad’s steam show hat full of badges.
Visiting the home of my friend Monica, drinking coffee from a mug with her name on it, marvelling at the small extravagance of fresh flowers.
Here’s a project recently dug out of the vault and dusted off ready to resume work on. It’s part of a complete left turn my 2025 Daily Stitch project has taken, which I’ll tell you all about later. For now, enjoy some fraying, delicate patchwork of 50+ year old fabrics I’m not quite ready to let go of yet.
Eyes, circles, and fungal growths. Ballpoint pen, Sharpie marker, various coloured markers, bingo dabber, white gel pen. The recto is a tipped-in newsprint bingo card, saved from our payouts while working the volunteer sessions at the bingo.
Jasmine tea with lunch at Basil Court, ginger beer with dinner at Terra Cotta Pizzeria. Ballpoint pen and markers.
You might remember a few weeks ago I mentioned that Shorty had shown up here after an absence of more than three weeks. That was 3 January, and she didn’t show up again until this past Saturday, 8 February. Long enough that I’d done all of my rationalising, reminding myself four years old is pretty old for an urban squirrel et cetera. And then Saturday morning I looked out my bedroom window and there was her familiar bald back and scraggly short tail popping up out of the hole in the lid of our neighbour’s garbage bin. And today she came and sat with me and gently took walnuts out of my hand while I froze on the concrete step in my bathrobe in -12°C on her behalf. I’m so relieved to have her back.
Lots of layers on the verso with spirograph, fungal growth, folding spacetime, and a bird. The recto is a tipped in newsprint bingo card (this is the back) with some stuff Profesora was saying in Spanish class. That little antler wiener character is giving a bit of side eye to Tito wishing his girlfriend would drink some beers.
Ballpoint pen, Sharpie marker, coloured markers, white gel pen, opaque white paint marker.