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Well it was a productive few days off – I ended up tonight having the left hand side of the top all sewn and ready for ironing. Sure made the whole thing tall and skinny. All those seams really change the size. This isn’t really a surprise to me anymore… well not as much of a surprise. It’s definitely very very vertical.
I would guess another couple nights now to get the rest sewn and then a couple more for the ironing. Must be time to pick out a fabric for the back. Or time to go to bed LOL.
Where have I been you might be asking? Did she get buried under a pile of silliness homework?
No, I spent the past few days pushing ahead the current project to the point where I can see the finished top in sight.
Right now though it’s sewn together in one direction and that’s where the rest of my day will be spent, trying to get it sewn in another direction.
Also made dinner for Mom’s birthday – Happy Birthday Mom!
And well, I am under a pile of silliness homework because when time is limited something has to go. I printed out all my homework so I can take breaks from sewing and maybe be silly while breaking.
This week Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, has been getting a lot of air-time. No particular reason like an anniversary although there is a new book out, A Strange Stirring, by Stephanie Coontz.
I was intrigued when Robert Genn’s weekly email arrived talking about women artists. Huh – I’m one of those LOL. But what’s up with all the go-women stuff? Actually, I hope it is “go-women” stuff and not “how interesting from an historical point of view” stuff.
This was too good from Genn’s essay not to pass along:
I also see highly optimistic, ambitious women who value education and are willing to put in time and treasure (when they have it) to achieve their goals. These women cut to the chase and, in my experience, get good. Here’s what they bring to their easels:
- The capability and the desire to work alone.
- A degree of independence from outside opinion.
- Steady, well-regulated, workmanlike habits.
- The understanding that passion comes from process.
- The curiosity to explore sets and series.
- An intuitive sense of quality and reasonable taste.
- A philosophical but nevertheless combative attitude to the miserably dying vestiges of the boy’s club.
Betty Friedan would have been particularly enthused by these ladies.
Thanks Robert for the succinct list. It’s all about doing the work. And I’m all about those miserable dying vestiges of the boy’s club. That’s more of an issue than I want to think about so many years after Friedan’s book, and not just on the issue of women. It’s a constant battle.
On a different front, I took down the last twelve rows of squares and trimmed them to their new correct size. So that’s my work ahead. I have 18 rows of one size and 6 rows of another size sewn as rows and hanging back on the wall awaiting the rest. When they’re all done I will iron seams on the two halves and commence sewing the other direction.
Tonight on the way home I stopped to give the car a drink of gas and me a drink of snapple. When I went inside the place for my beverage, there was some amount of yelling which at first I thought was just animated chat between two workers. Then I realized it was one-sided and as I approached the register I saw the source: a young man with a cellphone behind the counter. The older man who rang me up never made eye contact.
In short the woman on the phone had realized what a slime this young guy is and was dumping him and he was telling her very loudly how improved his life would be by this. As he spit out the f-word he looked straight at me and moved the phone away from his face to “apologize” to me.
Well, I said, you could just stop yelling.
I thanked the other man and was on my way.
And one more for good measure:
Some left over bones
Swimming in my big stock pot
Good soup for dinner.
I spent my lunch hour in the food court writing haiku for the silliness class. This week’s theme was “bones” – did you guess that? I also used my phone to take photos of a couple of worksheets, edit them a bit and upload them to the group flickr site. That is enough to give any reasonable person pause: how miraculous is it, to be able to take photos with a phone, good photos, use the phone to crop and adjust the exposure, upload them via a phone data connection to a web site so other people all over the world can see them… Amazing.
I did think about how we spend our time. While others might have wondered what I was counting on my fingers in between writing things down (syllables), I couldn’t help but throw a few thoughts on how much one could write during 30-40 minutes if you did it with some dedication. Four haikus are better than nothing at all!
OK I already knew this – it’s that whole perseverance-persistence thing. You can get a whole lot done if you just keep going at it. Nothing gets done if you don’t do something. Got it. And with that I’m going upstairs to sew some more horizontal rows together. I think I am three rows away from the mid-point, and then things will get a little more complicated.
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