Category: Wonderings
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The genuine article
I’ve lived on the Isle of Wight for two and a half years. Today, I finally got treated like a regular. I walked into the charity shop and straight to the back where the linen is kept, because I’d been in the day before so there wasn’t going to be much new in the racks.…
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Once Upon a Time at Bennington College
I’m listening to The Shards, written and narrated by Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho. He only published it last year, a long time after his most famous novel, the only book I’ve ever had to close my eyes for. The Shards is a fake autobiographical coming-of-age-in-LA story. I found the introduction so convincing…
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Repurpose: Hawaiian shirt
Saw this old, holey cotton shirt in the charity shop and knew it was destined to be a play set pour moi. The clouds! The colours! I wanted to repurpose as much as possible so I didn’t have to do the work – the buttons, the hems – so I didn’t use a pattern and…
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The Little Carnival of Women
For many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, women have experienced organised and spontaneous events of shared madness. Before Christianity got rid of everything fun, an Italian community in Puglia had a kind of festival, later named il carnevaletto delle donna (the little carnival of women) by a seventeenth-century physician called Georgio Baglivi. It allowed…
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A 1940s gymsuit
I was looking SPECIFICALLY for a 1940s gymsuit pattern because they’re incredibly hard to come by. When I at last found one, I was fooled into thinking it looked quite simple. Not many pattern pieces, short instructions. But no – it was that there basically were no instructions. I’ve bemoaned this before: vintage patterns assume…
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