The image shows the paperback version of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but I actually ended up listening to the audiobook. The Chaplain recommended this book to me a little while ago. He didn’t say much about it. I just remember him telling me, “you should read it.” Since he doesn’t recommend many books to me and our reading interests don’t intersect much, I took him seriously.
If you follow me on Insta, you know that I participated in something called #memademay this year. This is an optional motivational tool and fun adventure for sewists who make their own clothes to wear what they’ve made and feature it on social media.
I don’t think most of my friends sew, so while I hope they didn’t get sick of seeing my face in May, there was also the bigger thing of maybe no one caring that I make my own clothes. And the sticky issue of who, exactly, our social media accounts are for.
Us?
Our friends?
Attention for us, from our friends?
*cringe*
I found Meg McElwee of Sew Liberated, through Rae, another sewing, pattern-making blogger. I loved Meg’s artsy aesthetic and layered style. I purchased a couple of her PDF patterns over a year ago, but I never printed them out to use them.
Fast forward to this spring – two years since I made anything meaningful. I’d just committed to taking a fast from buying RTW (ready-to-wear) clothes.
Last year’s #memademay felt like a total flop for me, but this year as May swung around I thought to myself, I’m going to start with May 1 and just stop when I run out of handmades to wear. No pressure.
I knew I didn’t have enough clothes to wear something I’d made every day of the month. I was cool with that. As though permission to fail was all I needed, I started sewing again. I got two more patterns from Sew Liberated, and ordered a ton of fabric.
An Extraordinary Union: A Novel of the Civil War, by Alyssa Cole, is an intersectional work: historical fiction, romance, and Black History, all in one place. Bonus? It’s also written by a woman of color.
When I was a young mom (I mean, when I had only three kids), One took an Aikido class. He was in first grade, and he hated it.
Through that class, we met and got to know a group of unschoolers. I was new to the homeschool community at that time and hadn’t really found where we fit.
I knew we didn’t fit with the unschoolers. Some of their life choices made my hair stand on end. Maybe it’s because they weren’t doing unschooling right, but their kids were poor readers. The families seemed to live lives of chaos where they didn’t potty train or wean until the kids were uncomfortably big, and there were no rules.
I sat next to one of the other moms as we watched our kids in the class. I mentioned we’d been making strawberry jam at our house. She looked over with interest and asked me about the recipe we used. It’s pretty easy to remember, and I related it to her.
