Month: September 2025

First Day of Newport Trip

While most people said, “You will have amazing weather!” when I told them about our trip to South Beach State Park outside of Newport, Oregon, planned for late September, it poured rain all the way from Portland to South Beach.

We stopped at the park near the Pronto Pup in Rockaway Beach to do a short walk (in the rain) to see a big tree.

Along the way, we encountered some upper elementary students who wove a tall tale of a creepy monster they encountered. They were amusing, though their tale telling could use some work.

The tree was big, as advertised.

Here’s a Matt-person for scale.

Thankfully, it had rained itself out by the time we got to our yurt, so we didn’t have to unload while the rain continued.

We took a walk to the beach, and then settled in with an Exit escape room game. This time, it was the Catacombs of Horror.

The game was a challenge, as usual. We took 189 minutes and needed ten help cards. That gave us a score of five (out of ten) in the assessment.

We thought our favorite riddle was the last one, and the last one was the trickiest. Our score sheet answers the question “The player who solved the trickiest riddle was…” and we answered “The help card.”

Exit games have been a fun addition to our vacations.

Paradise Blue at Portland Playhouse

I kicked of my vacation with a trip to Portland Playhouse to see their latest production.

It’s 1940s gentrifying Detroit, and will the Paradise Club survive? Netta McKenzie, Mikell Sapp, Lester Purry, and Cycerli Ash put us through the paces of this engaging show. It required a few of the actors to act like they were playing instruments in parts, and they did a good job with that tricky task.

I also enjoyed the set design. There’s a hidden room that appears later on.

Instructions (If Only Someone Find Them in Time)

When we sold my aunt’s house, we moved all her photo albums over to my mom’s house. My mom and I took my aunt out to lunch today, and I brought along one of the photo albums to look at.

But what’s this thing sticking out of the top of the album?

It’s a note! That might as well be addressed to me.

The picture in question:

My aunt and I are in agreement; and I’m glad I found this note before it was time to write her obituary.

My First Hollywood Hem

Despite my sewing-underwear adventure, mending/fixing things comes before sewing. I’ve had a pair of jeans I bought from Goodwill (using only measurements because they took away the dressing rooms during the pandemic and never put them back) that were too long. This is par for the course for pants because I’m very short-legged.

I have been taking all my pants to the tailor to hem them, but my sewing machines are handy, so I thought I would do the job myself. I watched a tutorial for making a Hollywood hem, which is where the original hem is retained, the excess length is cut away, and then the hem is reattached.

Success! Thanks to the very helpful step-by step video from WeAllSew, I now have a good looking hem and my jeans are the right length! In the picture you can see the fold where the new seam is at the top of the picture, but looking at it from a distance further away, it looks like the original hem.

I’m very pleased, and big thanks goes to Alison Freer, the author of How to Get Dressed for alerting me to the existence of the Hollywood hem.

Granny Panties

Fun fact about me: panties is a word I loathe and avoid saying in the normal course of events. But it’s appropriate in this case.

I sewed some underwear!

Now that my sewing machines are accessible, I’ve been casting about for what to make first. I cycled through a lot of fun things (dress! pants! top!) before coming to the conclusion that what I really needed was new underwear. And while I know that bras are not something I want to integrate into my sewing wheelhouse, knickers seemed to be in my skillset.

I took a class from Sincere Studio, a new-to-me sewing studio. The class was great, walking us through what kind of elastic to purchase, what kind of material works the best, and then taking us step by step through the sewing process. I’d not worked with fold over elastic before, so that part was very helpful.

The instructor let us know that the first pair of underwear we make will probably not be quite right. But by the third pair, we will have locked in the skills and will love our underwear.

When cutting out the pattern, I went for a higher waist because my current underwear slides down in the front. I almost went for the highest waist, but the instructor said the high waist was really high, so I knocked it back to a medium-high waist.

The pattern (Iris Knickers, by Tilly and the Buttons) was easy to follow and had a little trick for joining everything up that was helpful. When finished sewing them, I tried them on and found that, my goodness, that underwear was high waisted! The legs are the slightest bit tight, but not terribly so.

I’ve been wearing my very large pair of underwear with dresses and such, and one thing I do like about them is that they don’t crawl up. I put them on, and they stay in place for the day.

So I do have some iterating to do, and I wish I hadn’t bought quite so much of bright white organic cotton, but I’m looking forward to my homemade underwear future.

Valance Completed

I have finished sewing my valance. Here it is on the wall.

Do I like it? I do not. For some reason, I didn’t figure out that it would be wavy, even though I knew I was cutting it longer than the width of the curtain rod. I don’t like how puffy it is.

But I also didn’t like the curtains that were the previous tenants of this window, so the valance is continuing the tradition.