During Me Made May, the Wiksten Shift was blowing up the internet. Well, you might rightly say, it wasn’t blowing up MY internet. And you would be right. But I follow a few fellow sewists on social media, and everyone was making and wearing this new pattern in May. And raving, raving, raving about it.
I’ll talk about the book pictured above in a minute, but can we first talk about how it’s also a photo of a housewife reading a tawdry romance novel?
One of the hunks I’ve bitten off in the past year is shame. I want to look at how it’s showing up and how I’m dealing with it. One of the most recent examples is that I went from reading mostly historical fiction for much of my adult life, to this year reading a LOT of nonfiction, especially spirituality books.
I wasn’t giving myself a break from this type of reading and was feeling overwhelmed with my reading list and also a little burnt out. When I gave romance a try this spring as a way of giving my brain a break from the nonfiction, I felt a certain amount of shame.
One of Meg McElwee’s patterns, I made my Metamorphic dresses during Me Made May. I liked the idea of making a reversible dress – I would get two dresses out of one make. I knew that it might be a bit of a challenge with its curved hem and lined bodice. As it turns out, two dresses means twice as much work.
Something magical happened today. I slept in. When I got up, the Chaplain left with the five middle kids for the strawberry fields. Our oldest was already at school taking a test, and I was left with the baby.
The baby and I read a story over and over (Tickle, Tickle, by Helen Oxenbury), then he described the pictures to me. (He pointed to one baby’s butt and said the longest string of intelligible words I’ve ever heard from him: “Poop diaper yuck sorry.”) After storytime, he played happily by himself and stayed out of trouble so I could sew.
When the truck pulled in later in the morning and everyone poured out of it, arms full of clementine boxes brimming with strawberries, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to set aside my sewing to start jam.
It turns out I didn’t have to.
I like to throw a little YA/Middle Grade lit into my reading diet every so often, and The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, by Stacy McAnulty, fit the bill.
My twelve year old daughter actually got to the book first. She said “it was interesting. It was a good story.” Which isn’t very enthusiastic, but I interrupted her from doing something else to ask. She’ll tell me if she didn’t like a book.
I started it weeks after she’d finished it, when I was out of renewals at the library and was afraid I’d have to return it without reading it like I had to do with two other books sitting on my reading pile this month.
Appropriately, I read the first third sitting in a middle school/high school auditorium at one of my daughters’ stage rehearsals for a dance recital.
