Category: All (-ish)

Postcards from Germany, Hawaii & Indonesia

This is a picture of the Herkules Monument which is a town landmark.

Here’s one from Hawaii, picked out by my co-worker’s daughter especially for me.  She knows my Channing Tatum/hunky men preference.

This is from Ines, who included a quote from the Little Prince. “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

Parking lot disorientation.

The movie theater is on the right side of this picture, in line with that tall building in the middle.  The last time I was here, there was just a huge parking lot and the orientation was different. Now?  We have a diagonal path for the pedestrians (yay!) and lots of bioswales for the rain to escape too.  It was disorienting, but fun!

Postcard from Virginia

This came with news of the beginning of the sender’s re-watch of the Veronica Mars TV series.

Also some instructions.

I’d like to say that I was the the one to assemble, but it was Matt.  I was having one of those vacation days when there wasn’t enough time to get things done, and I just couldn’t make this work.  So Matt happily assembled.  It’s now a pretty bird on our pot rack.

Laurel Dress. Making more bias tape and a setback.

I concluded I did not have enough bias tape to complete this project, so I made some more.  Matt helped.  I have good spacial relations, but not good enough to be 100% confident that I could make the bias tape exactly as before with those stripes.  

Also, I discovered my iron has sprung  a leak.  I store it on top of the file cabinet when I’m not sewing and I discovered a wet, rusty mess below the file cabinet.  This involved moving the file cabinet and cleaning under it.

Then I propped it up on bars of soap so air would circulate under and dry the bottom, without leaving rust stains.

I felt very smart to think of this solution.

Should there be any future reference needed, this is the way you slice your stripy bias tape to get bias tape to come out vertical.

Here’s my new bias tape maker!  It’s the yellow thing on the right, nosed against the iron.

Here’s my good helper.

And here I am sewing together sleeves.  You can see where the iron drips.

45RPM: Both Hands Ani DiFranco

Where I match a song to specific memory

 It was perhaps inevitable that I would come across Ani DiFranco’s music in college.  It was the 90s, it was a women’s college, there were a bunch of girls from everywhere in the states, so DiFranco and I were fated to meet.  In this case, she showed up on a soundtrack of  a play my friend had written.  Our college was small and fostered the belief that we could do anything.  So when two women said, “Let’s each write and produce a one-act and then direct it” that’s exactly what happened.  Well, nearly.  The other women didn’t write her own one-act, but she directed an already written one.  My friend wrote and directed, because that’s the kind of woman she was.

I was enchanted by this friend: she was from Canada and had a father in the Air Force, so she had lived many different places.  She was intelligent and a strong feminist, and with a long-time boyfriend.  Strangely, she seemed just as interested in me.  Her play was the first time I saw the words of a person I knew come to life, and realized with a jolt how much of their own lives writers use in their work.  This song always reminds me of her, not only because it was used in the one-act, but also because after we left school, she disappeared, not answering the letters I wrote to her.  It turned out she had, without telling me, applied for the same full-ride scholarship to a transfer college and got it, leaving me high and dry.  I heard about her coup from a friend.  We never spoke after college.

Postcard from China, the Netherlands & China

Here’s a pretty one from China.  One of the things I list in my Postcrossing profile is that I collect quotes.  Here’s what this postcrosser said in response:
“You said that you want to collect quotes.  So I tell you, China to foreign postcard is 5 yuan (RMB)”
I giggled, I must admit.  I’ll have to revise that word to “quotations”

This is from Maya, who sends this lovely view of her hometown.  She lives with her dog and six cats.

This is a beautiful place in Beijing that used to belong to the Royal Family.

Postcard from Virginia

Thank goodness!

Although message written on the back of the postcard laments that it keeps snowing in Virginia.  I took a picture of the obverse, because this postcard got rather damp in its travels, washing out the ink.  Perhaps it was snowed on?  Also, I was intrigued by the stamp cancellation.  Who knew ball point pen and odd circles had become a thing with the USPS?