The Middle of the Night // Creation Myths and Rituals

Stolen from Seamwork again.

I take my inspiration where I can get it.

I feel compelled to point out that Ms Tharp is a taskmaster who does not suffer much.

I'm putting REG in here because I love him.
Deal with it.

My sewing ritual is more of a unruly thing that i am trying to change.

For the last..... twenty-two years, I have been someone's on-call, in house mother.

The sons have both been out of the house for the last year, but those years have burnt a few habits into me, habits I would like to break.

That is: I can't start doing anything creative until after bedtime. 9pm.
And this is annoying, as I have other hours I could be doing this stuff in.

As much fun I have at the expense of them, I do get inspiration from the Seamwork/Collette emails, and the idea of the sewing ritual reminded me how I have been avoiding my problem with it.

Yes, I'm going to illustrate this with GIFs.
I consider writing stuff down as a form of "I will do what I said I would do", and I can think of no better scold that Dwayne Johnson. Mr Whupass.

A friend of mine and I passed a can of Whoopass (shown below) back and forth as a  "get 'er done" reminder to do what we had said we would. We finally opened it, and it was piss yellow and ghastly as hell. Ice cold would be the only way you'd get er down.

https://bevwire.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/jones-whoopass.jpg I no longer have the can, but you can be sure I looked for it for twenty minutes because this blog isn't getting down slowly enough

My sewing process, my 'creative' process doesn't really start until after dinner and the dishes have been done and the kids are in bed.

But the kids do that somewhere else now. There's no reason for me to wait.

But I still can't get going until about....9pm. Even on days where I have the whole day to work on a project for me, I just can't get the juice going until the sun comes down.
I'm writing this at 10:15pm. and editing it at 6:16pm a day or two later, while I'm cooking dinner.
Or burning it, I should say.

It soaks out pretty well, though. We ate the not-burnt stuff in the middle with a lot of peanut butter and coconut milk mixed in. Tasted just like peanut butter with coconuts.

Luckily I can start earlier if it's a work project. Hemming would not get done in time if it only happened from 10pm - 1am. Same thing for costumes and mending jobs.
And now it's 10:19pm.

I keep a notebook on me at all times. I find no matter what time it is, I can do some good thinking with a pencil in my hand, and I am getting a little better at spreading that creative time over the day. Instead of opening up the phone, I open up the notebook.

I am also trying to make myself keep office hours in the cave. 
Which, like Vegas, is open 24 hours.
It could be some of the hours during the day.
However, I did spend time letting dinner burn making this a pretty GIF of worthiness.

I am not worthy but he is.
This is clearly a work in progress.

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Mary had to lean way over to stoop to my level.

I had a wonderful time chatting it up with Mary of PDXSquared at Seattle Frocktails yesterday evening; I was an honorary Stumptowner. Mocktail consumed, runway applauded, and bus stop right outside of event location was for my bus route. Practically perfect night for me.  Mary and I have never met in person before, and it's super nice to put a person to a social media account. 

@Pimpslapped does the twirl

Tell me about my hat

The hat in question

Last spring, I was waiting at a bus stop, and I was wearing baggy pants, a big shirt, and a round hat without a brim. A young man came up and asked me about my hat, and I told him I made it.

Yes, I wear these out of the house. That's not the topic today.

I have been writing and rewriting this since then. I am very comfortable with overthinking. Much of this is me overthinking out loud. I could keep editing it but it's time to let it out.

If you aren't into this, please come back next week. We'll have new choir dresses.  I'm picking up the first tomorrow: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ORDERED.

😮😮😮

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A few months ago, White Middle Class Woman was waiting at a bus stop, dressed in MC Hammer/Thai fisherman pants in a cable television cartoon character print, an oversized shirt of indeterminate design (Issey Miyake Vogue, but hacked) in a African wax print manufactured and designed in China, and a round hat in a large multicolored print. A young man of color, wearing a Pacific Northwest REI rain anorak and 1890s California gold rush worker pants (aka Levi's) (don't know his shirt because anorak) came up and asked her about her Kofi hat, and she told him she made it from fabric she had hand painted herself. And then she went on about the rest of the appropriated clothing styles she was wearing. It was very civil and pleasant. No one said anything mean. She did gas on and on. She does that. She's working on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kufi

The notes on the company for this indicate where the materials for their items come from, not usually a feature on Amazon. Also, pretty hat!. 

I wish this conversation had not been a monologue on my part, because he brought up something I do think about a lot. The 'don't touch my stuff' conversation. The 'it's my culture and you can't have it' conversation.

Kate on Fabrikated has written about this, and I am finally publishing this because of that

and this photo.

PM May is wearing a local designer; the Nigerian guards are wearing the Empire's uniforms. You could spend a month unpacking this photo, about soft power and colonialism. Just let this image linger in your afterbrain while I gas on and on.

I like other people's stuff. I am a magpie. I secretly love fashion because I love adornment, I love the shiny and expressive. I want everyone to have the shiny happy feeling of being their own true selves.

I owned this print for awhile.  And then I didn't.

https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/seattle-centric-prints-from-peace-for-profit-167900?

read the comments

I grew up knowing that I can be invited to the blanket dance of the local First Nations, but that I can't invite myself (and thanks for inviting me when I was a kid).  I no longer buy 'native inspired' stuff, because these items are crowding out First Nations artworks from the galleries.  Life is tough enough as it is for them.

I really love this hat.

Remember those "Aboriginal inspired prints?"  I have heaps of them. Many are forgeries of someone else's sacred ritual paintings.  I will admit that even as an atheist, I am uncomfortable with wearing anything resembling a rosary.

I have mixed feelings about African wax prints. I rationalize my wearing of them by observing that they were originally made in Holland for export to India, and dumped on the African market. African designers made a Dutch fail into an African success. The only reason I have seen them is that they were made popular by African designers with a lot more flare than I can ever hope to have. My self-defensive mechanism here is that there are no particular images in these that are sacred; I admit the debt, but I am not giving them up.

I no longer own a qi'pao, but I have owned several as I am 59 and I live on the West Coast of the United States and we have a rich history of Pacific Rim souvenir clothes (Aloha shirt? I have a few). I can't begin to talk about this, but ..

https://youtu.be/vLgzFCifhaY

The Fung Brothers video does a nice overview and starts a great conversation.

In fact, if you do anything here, watch this video. 

An example from my closet is this kimono style cotton robe.  It's made from a IKEA duvet cover, in a faux Balinese block print. By IKEA. International sauce on top.

Going back to the question that started this thinking: I am guilty of doing the thing that I resent others of doing. I'm capitalizing it to make sure it sticks.

Don't use language to shut down the conversation.

I buried the honest question under a pile of carefully stacked word structures that repeat "YOUR QUESTION IS NOT VALID AND I WILL NOT ANSWER IT"  It's just an evasion. 

I do envision a day when all people share their cultures and don't keep their stuff to themselves. Where everyone lives in equality and harmony, and you know that speech.

But we aren't there yet. 

We practice identity politics because we haven't had our identities respected yet. Before we can have that idyllic future, we really do need to work it out between ourselves, stop pretending that it's all okay BECAUSE ITS CLEARLY NOT.

It's going to be uncomfortable for me to talk about my privilege; it's always been uncomfortable for others because they don't have that privilege.

But I really truly love this hat.

What I wish I had done was ask him  "Tell me about kofi hats". I wish I hadn't done the jargon pile thing. I am sorry. We could have talked about things because clearly, he was there to engage, not to judge, and I was embarrassed and used my word salad defense to shut him down.

So please, tell me about my hat. Please.

What Not To Read: Advertising Links

I love the advertising brochures on the ferry boats.  Yes, we have legal weed in Washington. And Teatro moved to the eastside 

The internet is full of wonders. And advertising, because baby needs a new pair of shoes. 

I don't carry ads on this blog. This is no shade on anyone that does; I used to participate in a Mom/Dad Blog group that did embed ads, and I think over the course of the years I got....a dollar.  

What stops me is clickbait. You know, you click on the blog page, you click on a picture, and suddenly a host of pop up windows open like a swarm of locusts. My goal on this blog is to be as easy to read as possible, and as nonannoying as one can be when one is me. Therefore, I don't do the ads. I have links to my shops on Spoonflower and Craftsy and that's annoying enough. Also why I don't keep comments with ad links. Or comments from bots. Bots don't sew for themselves. Yet. 

This ad is right next to the regular content download button. Guess which one pulses? 

The website at work has Google Ad Sense links that inevitably screw some poor bastard up, because you cannot choose AdSense ads, you can only complain about them. Knock down one pulsing "Download Now" button next to your more sedate "Download" button (for content the user paid for), and another three appear. A real part of my job is just using the website to patrol for this stuff. 

I subscribe to and participate in Bloglovin' because it's handy. Several times a week, it sends out a roundup of style blogs, which I never go look at. For this post, however, I did click on one (and it doesn't matter which frankly, but it was about styling with sneakers) and the page won't stop loading. I have Ghostery on my browser, so I can see what inbedded ad trackers there are (because I do analytics on pages and I love to see what people are using) and that purple list is longer than the page is tall. 

The worst is Threads. Love you guys, but to watch the videos, I have to turn off Ghostery, and that means I open the door to the pop ups.

At the bottom of the Threads webpage,  there's two rows of photo links. The second row is Threads material from the same website. The first row is all faux stories/clickbait.

Reader: I fell for it.

And this is embarassing, because you've heard about this one: What Mature* Women Shouldn't Wear

From the website: It’s great when we feel much younger than we are. But it’s not great when it appears we are trying to look a whole lot younger—and not pulling it off! Sometimes we need to come to terms with our stage in life and begin to dress more appropriately. That’s not to say that we can’t have fun, but there’s nothing more aging (and embarrassing) than wearing trends that make you look silly at your age.

If you want to be classy and mature with grace, try avoiding these trends in this slideshow.

1. DANGEROUS DENIM: Low Rise, Bedazzled, Flared, Super Skinny Jeans
2. SEXY STILETTOS: Hooker Heels, Stripper Shoes
3. Silly socks
4 .Tacky tshirts
5 -   -  at this point, every time I click on the slide show, the site starts to add more popup windows, and I do not care for that sort of shenanigan. I love my tacky tshirts. Who are you, my mother? Oh no, you're an advertising farm. And no, grace is not in my rubric.

Hey, edited here! I went onto Threads just now and they have labeled those two rows of content, so that they are clearly identified as fish and foul. But check it out! 70 trackers! And the page keeps reloading and reloading so that it does not remain static. It's almost self-clicking.

On this topic: go read I Will Wear What I Like.  I love you, Man Repeller, but there is no such thing as Menocore (although the comments are a crackup). Don't fall for the bullshit. Get in on Visible Mondays. And of course, read Anne at Spygirl (keeping her in the roll as she belongs)

Wear what you want. If you wear it with your whole heart, you'll be amazing. 

There ya go. No ads. All links are clean, no subroutines, and hand pulled for freshness. 

*well of course. Mature? Me? 58, yes. Mature? Hell, no.

I have two trackers (I don't run Google ads and I don't know why that's there) and there they are. Technorati is eulogized here. If it's dead, why is this still here? Will report later. Gotta go mend some stuff)

Glue - Because You Should Test On The Material You Are Using Before You Ruin It

To be honest, I dated in the horn section

I use a lot of glues for different things and I think a lot of them are made of the same thing,  just rebranded to sell to different audiences.

While I can state the properties that I think these glues have, and the uses I put them to, I cannot list the specific ingredients in these products. 

Ingredients in glues and paints and a whole lotta stuff you don't put in your mouth are listed as trade secrets and don't have to be identified on the product's label.

I can go on and on about safety and contents*, but my immediate concern is this damn raincoat, and sealing seams/gluing seams down.

Clamping down seams with the items at hand. Tums love Too Much Coffee Woman

Nylon fabric doesn't like the same glues that other, more porous fabrics have liked.

Without pressure, Tear Mender dried nice and flat and Stop Fraying made the seam curl on the 

rubbery Yaya Han 4-Way Jumbo Stretch Matte Fabric. Different results on coated nylon later 

Anyway, I have seams to seal and seams to stick down.

Here are your contestants!
Fabric Fuse by ThermoWeb, Loctite Vinyl, Foamies Glue by Darice, Aleene's Fabric Fusion, Quick Dry Fabric Fusion, Stop Fraying, Flexible Stretchable, Beacon's Fabri-Tac, Tear Mender. Not shown: Tiger Bond.

We will divide them into two groups:
Stinky and NonStinky
Stinky:
Loctite Vinyl, FabricTac, QuickDry Fabric Fusion

Nonstinky
 (that is, no obvious flammable or brain shrinking solvents)

 Foamies, 
Aleene's Fabric Fusion, Flexible Stretchable and Stop Fraying
 Fabric Fuse
Tear Mender
Tiger Bond

I do use permanent tapes (Peel n Stick by ThermoWeb  and
Glue DotsTM) but I need to be able to topstitch and seal, and tape won't do that job this time. Both will hold slick fabrics well enough but really cannot be washed with confidence. PeelnStick has migrated from time to time, so I use it for bags. Glue Dots will hold stuff with a tooth to it, they will hold fabric to paper if you use enough pressure to grind it in. 

Foamies works for foam. It takes forever to dry, and you need to make sure it's mixed well. Shake or cry: it will run otherwise and not set up. I have my doubts about the strong and permanent claim, but it does not melt craft foam and when that's what you need, that's what you use.  Pals use it on felt. It did not work for me.

Fabric Fuse is made by the ThermoWeb family, and I can find no contents or safety sheet listings. Yet. Same deal: shake it or cry. It's easily spread, you do want to put pressure on it to get good contact.

Fabric Fusion is a Water-Based Polyurethane Adhesive, and a member of the Aleene glue family. Dries clear, won't run. The safety sheet is exciting reading. 
The Flexible Version is, I think, exactly the same product. It works just like it.
The Quick Dry Fabric Fusion version is NOT the same product. It is very stinky, flammable and stringy. "Extinguish all flames and pilot lights, and turn off stoves, heaters, electric motors, and other sources of ignition during use and until all vapors are gone." 
Oh yeah. That stinky.

Fun note: Blick Art Supplies links to their MSDS (material safety data sheet) on their product pages. Dharma Trading has one big page.
Mail order companies will usually have data sheets, as some things can't be shipped and state laws on contents vary.

Tear Mender is sold at outdoor stores with the intent that you can use it to mend outdoor gear. Based on natural latex, as long as you keep treat it like rubber cement (coat both sides lightly and join), it works pretty well.It takes a few days to dry entirely (it sets up but still is rubbery-tacky on the surface. Like Tiger Bond, it will separate in the tube so always shake it.  And like rubber cement: once dry, cleaning it up by rubbing it off often pulls it out from where it's holding stuff together. It likes to stick to itself better than anything else.

Tiger Bond is the favorite of many pals, go read the reviews online. I can't get this sucker to mix for me in the tube, and it separates and runs and makes a mess and doesn't work. But Emily SWEARS this is the bomb, and it is not stinky, so I'm keeping it in here. Best practice is shake the tube like crazy before you open it, test the mix on a scrap of paper, then lightly coat one side, then the other,  and then stick together. And wait.
People use this for rhinestones. That must be some serious glue action.

Fabri Tac is recommended for glueing rhinestones. It melted the backs of the plastic 'gems' on a prop a year back. Didn't just remove the shiny paint, it liquified them and took over a month to solidify. And stank up the joint in the meantime; it had to go live on the back porch. The faking of that prop was sad and pathetic. Sorry Kayla. I ruined your jar.

Loctite is a clear Isocyanate terminated polyurethane in Methyl ethyl ketone. Which roughly means: It's not good for you. Polyurethane is a great marine grade coating, in this case in a solvent that destroys brain cells fast. Get immediate medical attention, rinse with water...no. It works, it strings and spreads, but you don't need that level of adhesion to seal seams in a raincoat. Because of the solvent, it does dry fast, but I would really not ever use this to mend a tent you slept in any time soon.
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This is the test: the orange is two strips of coated nylon rainwear. The white is a poly cotton lining. The card is spare heavyweight scrap drawing board. I wrote in pen over the samples after they were dry enough.

All of these did the job I asked: they held the coated nylon pieces together 

Loctite: stinky, stringy, leveled well. Stayed stinky after dry.

QuickDry Fabric Fusion was stinky and made annoying web glue strings like airplane cement. It made a proper mess of itself and runs faster than Fabric Fusion.

Stop Fray had a nice sheen and smooth finish, Spread a little better than I would have liked right out of the bottle. Stuck on paper, fabric and nylon. Works well with a brush.

Fabric Fusion glued better to the nylon than the paper, made a nice bead on the seam when I used the tiny applicator tip I had on hand. 

Tear Mender, Foamies and FabriTac did not hold nylon to nylon when pulled on (and Tear Mender and Foamies still aren't dry after three days....guessing they need more air than they are getting in a coated nylon sandwich)


I have a lot of Stop Fray, in various bottles and sizes, and it's always been my "I guess it will work" craft glue. It won't form a bead (it's thin and self leveling) so it needs a brush and quick brushwork. It does fill holes nicely, dries clear and flexible in a thin sheet. The spreading part works for seam sealing better than glueing. It cleans up well.

Stop Fray wins for the seam sealing. Fusion for gluing the seams.

Now back to that blue fabric test: it proves why you should always test on the material you're using: 
Tear Mender worked better on that knit backed 4way rubbery stretch than Stop Fray. The SF curled up the seam and got crunchy and stiff. It may have had more to do with how wet the SF went on and it might have soaked in to that stretchy knit backing, vs the Tear Mender just riding on the surface. 

And how would I suggest application?

Seattle Art is long long gone. I keep my tools clean, thank you.

One thing I dislike about Aleene's glue is the tip on the spout of their bottles. You can't trim it down small enough to get a good bead of glue coming out unless you open a teeny hole with a hot tool. I have had some luck by transferring glue into a big plastic dental irrigation syringe, or a small bottle with a 'gutta' tip (gutta being a resist you apply to fabric you are dyeing).  The syringe has the benefit of being easier to clean (just suck up soapy water and squirt it out a couple times)

That baby will get you the tiny flow you need. Unpaid link as ever. They also sell the bottles.

It's easier work with the right tools

Action shot

Sometimes its easier to squeeze a bottle than a syringe. 

As long as you clean it out with a pin or a toothpick and soapy water right away when you're done, you're good. Or toss the parts in a jar with soapy water and give them a shake. That should hold them. Aleenes will not set under water.

Even with the seams I still have to do, this coat will still get a workout, even this late in the season

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*Safety Soapbox

*Bless California and their stricter safety regs for making that information less opaque to you and I, at least for known carcinogens

Even Fabric Fusion can burn:Safety Data Sheet

I worked in several workshops over the years, and am really really vocal about shop safety and proper use and disposal. When you don't know what is in something you use every day, you grow understandably paranoid.

(The mystery 55 gallon drums didn't help. The OSHA guys suited up into their HAZMAT suits before they walked into my work area at that shop space. I wore a lab coat over a vintage party dress, like the rest of my coworkers.)

I have probably inhaled so much toluene from 'just a quick shot of spray paint' that my IQ  is surely lower and I am clearly stupider.

I have inhaled enough dust (chalk, clay, wood, plastic) that I have the rough equivalent of stress related asthma. 

I have a metal contact allergy now. The earrings and watch are gone, and my wedding ring is lined with rhodium (which somehow I don't react with). I was wearing an 'O' ring

So when you're filing down that little thing with a nail file, do yourself a solid and clean up the dust with a vacumn, and wear a dust mask or a bandana. Don't put your fingers on a substance and touch your skin without cleaning them off first. Don't lick the brush and then stick in the paint. If it smells bad, don't breathe it.
You can thank me in twenty years.