Last week my dad went out of town and I went home to Rexburg to help cut the hay. I like helping out on the farm, although I don’t get to do it very often. It is nice at the end of a day of work to be able to physically see that you have accomplished something. It rained two of the days I was supposed to be cutting and I had one semi-serious breakdown, but luckily my dad got home just in time to fix it. The field I was cutting is near the river and the sand dunes and nothing else so there is a lot of wildlife. I saw seven moose at one time. Seven! My brother and I ate all the corn we could handle and then I helped my mom freeze a bunch. It was a fun week.
At the beginning of the summer I found this list of sewing tutorials. I felt like all of the tutorial writers were always making cute skirts with fabric they just found around their house, so I decided I would only use fabric from my stash. Which means I now have a Shirred Pocket Skirt that looks like an orange muppet (I can’t totally remember why I bought orange fuzzy fabric from the DI), a “Where’s Waldo” colored Paper Bag Skirt, and a Pocket Skirt made of purple velvet that was leftover from a dance dress my mom made for me when I was in high school. I would recommend NOT using really thick fluffy fabric for either of the pocket skirts, unless you want them to be kind of unflattering. After struggling with the velvet, I really admired that my mom had made a full-length long-sleeved normal-looking dress out of that crazy stuff. The tutorial for Paper Bag Skirt recommends a thicker fabric, I happened to buy some almost canvas type stuff from the DI which worked perfectly, although it did not say how long of a zipper to buy and I ended up with one that is wayyyyy too short and I have to carefully squeeze it on and off. I’m glad I practiced on fabric I didn’t care too much about messing up. One of these days I need to get myself to Suppose and buy some nice breezy cotton and make some skirts I can be proud of. You know, now that summer is ending.
My mom commissioned me to make this little quote look fancy. My youngest brother is getting married this weekend. CRAZY!
This is a print I’ve been working on. What do you think? Is it legible?
A couple of months ago at the climbing gym I got my hair caught in the Gri Gri while I was belaying. It was kind of traumatic for me. I don’t have much hair to begin with and I would have hated to lose it all. Miraculously my friends got my hair out without any damage (thanks Russ and Casey!). Since then I have heard stories about other people getting their hair caught in belay devices and having bloody chunks pulled out of their heads. I’m pretty happy that didn’t happen to me. Needless to say, my experience has really increased my awareness about hair safety while climbing. My hair isn’t very long and I had a problem. I can’t believe all the little girls on the climbing team with hair down to their waists haven’t had problems. Actually, the thing I can’t believe is that their coaches don’t require them to tie their hair back. Don’t they know the danger involved? So I started a hair safety campaign. A very passive aggressive hair safety campaign. So far I have designed a poster and hung it up in the gym next to the Gri Gri safety posters (which do not include anything about keeping your hair out of the way). I put them up a week ago and they are still there so that is positive. Either no gym employee reads (the posters) or they can see the importance of the information and are grateful someone has finally taken hair safety seriously.
Someday I would like to be good at calligraphy. Those thick downward strokes are oddly satisfying to draw.
I called my friend Holly the week before her wedding and she mentioned that someday she wanted to commission me to make her a poster of this Michael Pollan quote. Actually, the creative brief was something more like, “I want it to be big, like the N’Sync poster I had on my wall when I was a teenager, with the words Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants. in blocky letters. Maybe red or maybe not.” I’m not sure if she was purposely dropping the hint so that I would make it as a gift for her wedding, but I couldn’t think of anything to get her so I’m glad she did.
My favorite part of her wedding was at a family dinner the night before when the groom’s nephew walked up to Holly and asked “Where’s the piñata?” She explained that she didn’t have one and the kid said, “Then what’s the point…” and he was talking about the ladder they were using outside to decorate a tree but we thought he meant “What is the point of this party?!” Holly’s friends got a piñata and it produced just the right amount of danger without anyone actually getting hurt. There were some close calls, but that kid was totally right. There is no point to a party without a piñata.
I purchased a hang board to help me be better at rock climbing. I thought if I painted it up I would be more stoked about my workouts. If I had it to do over, I would paint the shadows orange instead of blue. Or modge-podge one of these posters onto it. This song came on while I was painting. I thought it was fitting.
1. Turns out sitting on your couch like this and doing freelance work for hours is bad for your neck. Shocking, right? I had a migraine for three days so I went to see Dr. Clifford, the best chiropractor in the world. He fixed me up perfectly, of course, and when I asked if sitting like that on the couch could be the problem he clapped his hands and laughed. He also explained the natural curvature of the neck and spine and apparently sitting like that is the exact opposite of how my neck should be. In my defense, it is pretty comfortable and I thought that since my back was flat it would be ok.
2. Car owners should sometimes look at their tires. I do periodically check to make sure they are not flat (ok, I did it once before we went to Lake Powell, but I do think that I should do it). My steering wheel was jumping around a little so I called my dad who suggested I get my tires rotated. When I went in, the guy at the tire store told me the wires were starting to come out of one of my back tires. I had to get two new tires and get it all aligned. I’m happy to pay whatever it takes to keep my tires from falling apart on the freeway, but I can’t believe I didn’t notice my tire peeling off. This also explains why I was hydroplaning so bad when it was raining a lot this Spring. My dad is really really really good at car stuff. Me, not so much. Obviously.