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.
For my first attempt at making pants for myself, I made Arenite Pants from Meg of Sew Liberated. The pants have a ton of ease and lots of options in terms of style and fabric choice, so the five pairs I made from the same pattern and size feel very different from each other.
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.
