THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE - W.B. Yeats

Dressmaking in Paris, 1907.

I was talking to a coworker recently and offhandedly said I wasn’t exactly competent at a lot of things. He reared back in obvious visceral disagreement that made me stop midsentence.

“What do you mean you’re not competent?”

“I guess I mean compared to the people I’m surrounded by? I’m not very handy, I guess.”

He looked baffled.

I tried to illuminate with a story. So at the sex shop we needed to vacuum every night, right? But one time after my days off I could tell the carpets hadn’t been vacuumed since I last saw them. I asked the other girls why not. It turned out that the screw that held the handle on the vacuum had been stripped and it wouldn’t stay in. Why was that down to a single screw? Bad design.

So any attempt to vacuum meant the handle just popped off when the screw jumped ship. I looked over the vacuum. I found a junk drawer. I found the biggest screw I could that still fit in the hole wrapped it in tape to bulk it out. Then I shoved/screwed it in place. Then I duct taped the opening so that fucker couldn’t pop out. Voila, a working handle.

The other girls were utterly delighted that I’d fixed the vacuum but I was painfully aware that my solution was neither elegant nor long term.

My coworker listened. Finally he said, “I think being competent just means you have the ability to learn a skill you lack, and you can do that. Your solution worked, and you were the one that tried to fix the problem.”

I digested that and agreed, but admitted any new skill learned would prompt me to be a huge baby about it.

"ohh my god you can't just-"

Am I yours to command? Does the collar 'round my neck have your name on it? I kneel to no king nor god, and I see no crown on you.

Why did you give the last of your food to that poorly disguised mimic? You were finally at peace with letting go, but now this odd thing won’t leave you alone and is even turning itself into various items in an attempt to aid you.

Links to my free sewing patterns! - big manta ray - smaller manta ray - monster friend (those monsters with horns I’ve been making lately, but without horns) - pie slice - Fred, the Fish of Minimal Effort - tiny cat (aka Jiji) - mini mothman - whale shark/donut whale shark - juggling frog/toad (aka my smallest, simplest frog pattern of the three I’ve made) - large frog - tiny hedgehog - minecraft bee - minecraft zombie - blorbo - Strawberry Hearts quilt pattern - starfish - little octopus - canvas tote - basic bat and ghost - mini mushroom friends Tutorials: - flannel baby blanket tutorial - tomato pattern design walkthrough (how I design the pattern, not a link to the pattern itself)

The itching to be back in forests and mountains

2 more months

Hiking is the best way to spend your time, seriously.

Mr Darcy is so fucking unsubtle all of the time I truly don't understand how Elizabeth doesn't get it. Someone mentions Elizabeth likes books? Darcy immediately goes into a rant about how he wants a wife that reads. Elizabeth says she wants to live close to her family? Darcy is bending over backwards to figure out how far is too far, would she mind it if she could easily travel back at forth, would she miss the people or the places. My girl he's so down bad, he's just autistic.

As a blue collar woman, I could love nothing more

My new favorite hobby is weaponizing my Mom Friend status against my male coworkers, of which there are a surplus because I am A Woman in The Trades. It's hilarious to me. I have been the Mom Friend my entire life and working construction means I've expanded my territory from Mom Friend to Site Mom by virtue of always knowing where things are and also having pain meds and general life advice if you need any. Do you know what happens when you are so aggressively mom-shaped despite not even being 30? All the young guys I work with have subconsciously put me in the mom category of their brains. Do you know what that means? I live and work in the American South. These guys have been raised both socially and culturally to Respect All Mom Figures and I've snuck myself into that classification like a cuckoo in the nest. Like, listen, I can take it and dish it out with the best of them and I'm "one of the guys" 97% of the time, but I have my limits. If they're being dicks to each other and I'm tired of it all I gotta do is look really disapproving and scold them with some classic Mom-isms and it will stop them dead in their tracks. It's a total short circuit of their brains. Not one of these guys has withstood my telling them "manners are free and it costs nothing to be kind." Sometimes I just give them a look and say "Really?" in that tone of voice all moms use when they're completely fed up with you and it makes them straighten up in 10 seconds flat, guaranteed. It's psychological warfare of the highest order. One time I jokingly pulled out a "I'm so disappointed in you" after hearing this barely 18 year old tell some story about being obnoxious in an online game voice chat and it was very obviously a joke but somehow it rattled him so much AT WORK that he later told me he stopped doing it. It's a perfect storm of factors and literally all of them are in my favor. Should I care more about not enforcing gender stereotypes, especially in such a male-dominated field? Probably, but let's be real, the power has completely gone to my head.

Mossy mushroomy A-frame cabin commission, with its little pals

I got no photos of my favorite design decision: ceramic "rafters" supporting the needlefelted moss. They'll get their time to shine whenever the felt biodegrades, which will be a while.

*faux leather no animals were harmed! :)