• crafts - domestic life - food - Living - Making

    Christmas Cultural Dissonance …

    For some reason, the annual consumerist frenzy of “Christmas” seems even more dissonant to me than usual. It’s clear there’s a class thing with the Christmas frenzy — there are people for whom the once-a-year pile of stuff under the tree is really really important, and there are people for whom it’s not. I have to admit, I grew up in a family who mostly believed in keeping it simple at Christmas. And although as a kid I was bummed by my parents’ knee-jerk rejection of anything like the “toy of the year” as consumerist claptrap (well, there was also…

  • crafts - domestic life - Making

    The Pleasure of Making Things

    The weather is still sort of strange and blustery here — intermittent rain, yesterday was windy, and while it’s been warm, its really only been warm-ish. So while I put in some turnips and beets and more onions over the weekend, it wasn’t really a gardening weekend. But spring is here and I’ve been feeling that I don’t have anything to wear, so yesterday afternoon I made a couple of skirts. I fixed/finished one that I’d sort of botched — I wasn’t using a pattern but had cut it out using instructions from Sew What! Skirts! One of my projects…