For some reason, the spam texts have figured out that I went by Patty for the first 20 years of my life. Other than various internet reasons, I can’t figure out how they got that information, because even when I was Patty, I was registered to vote under my full name: Patricia.
But the Patty texts have been coming.
Unfortunately, Ariel didn’t list the chapters she was commenting on. I was reading those same chapters, so it mattered less as I was receiving them. But several months on…
At this point though, Ariel felt the book had a good beginning.
My aunt and I had time to chill out in the cardiologist’s office at the OHSU building that isn’t on the hill, and after a bit of general staring out the window, I realized I was looking at the Fortress of Solitude, the place Matt and I lived before we bought our house.
That red-roofed house was on the street that peeled off from Barbur Boulevard, creating the triangle where our building was (and still is, though the lawyers aren’t there anymore.) The blue and orange building on the left are on the slope above our building; when there was a threat of ice, the people living there used to drive their cars down and park them in our building’s empty parking lot.
Here we have a variety of Idaho nature pictures.
“The start of the great Northwest.” It’s almost illegible there at the bottom.
Sara has been having a good time in the state of our birth, and also included some sparkly stickers on the reverse.
Hey, it’s the day after Memorial Day Weekend, so why not make another skirt? This one flared.
My instructor pointed out that if you flare too much, you might as well have made a circle skirt.
Nice visual between flared and A-line.
I’ve seen an orange cat come through the yard of late, and there are signs up for a missing orange cat, Oliver. The cat never tarries though, so it’s been hard to get a picture.
Today though, I was out early delivering the Kenton newsletter, and here was the orange cat sitting on an enclosure for the apartments on the other side of Winchell, and I was able to get a picture.
Alas, it was not Oliver.
Matt and I visited the Rose City Cemetery to take care of the Greeks’s graves.
I didn’t have as many origami flowers this year, but enough for a nice sprig on Basil and Basiliky’s gravestone.
Unfortunately, the wind kicked up in the afternoon, and I suspect that another grave might now have the flowers.
Matt put Uncle Tom’s flowers up. We did not go as early as I did last year, so the building was open.
A good showing here for Timothy B. Anastas.
One exciting development: Mabel Collins still has her flowers from last year!
They are faded, due to being outside, but didn’t blow away!
I think the first time I actually dyed something was a towel in high school. We were supposed to use strips of black towel for mutes in our saxophones, and me being the only girl, I was elected to do the dying of the towel for the rest of the group. Why did we not collectively buy a black towel and cut it up, you ask? Good question. I have no idea.
But! Today is the first time I have dyed items that I would like to turn out well.
I got my instructions from the Rit website, and noticed that Rit probably doesn’t employ a copy editor.
How does one stir “slowly and continuously” AND stir “off and on”? “Continuously” voids the “off,” and “off” voids “continuously,” so which is it?
I didn’t have a big enough pot, so I boiled water and put it in a 5 gallon bucket in the sink.
The results seem well. The gray shirt is now blue, and the white underwear I made is now a lighter shade of blue.
I may have had too many items in at once; the dye on the underwear is not as uniform as the dye on the shirt.
Still! A good result. Next: my linen pants will become brown. (She says confidently)
Here is my first drafted a-line skirt. So cute!
In sewing it together, I realized I have no idea any longer how to attach a waistband to a skirt. So that will be some learning that can happen, along with the pattern drafting.
I invested in the online Shapes of Fabric Skirt Pattern Class, where I am learning to draft ALL the skirt patterns.
Module One was to create a basic skirt pattern block that fits your (or someone else’s) body perfectly. Here is mine:
When I went to buy tag board to trace my final block, I found that Fred Meyer did not have any white tagboard. I brought home the black, and used one of my white pens. I like the effect.
I added my current measurements (in centimeters) to the block. Because my weight tends to shift, this is a way to have an easy reference telling me if the block will still work.
Module two will have me drafting half size skirts in a variety of patterns. And the half-size skirt is based on a standard skirt pattern block, which is much smaller than my skirt block. This will be speedier and save on fabric.
