Seamstress.

In a former life, I sewed a lot. I grew up, of course, in the late sixties and seventies, and loads of people made their own clothes, or adapted clothes, or remade things, etc. I took Home Ec. I sewed dresses for myself and also I learned to make food items from other food items, like Balloon Buns from a butter and cinnamon-sugar dipped marshmallow rolled into a crescent roll dough triangle and baked till the marshmallow melted, leaving behind an ineffable caramelized redolence of sugar. That, my friends, was a culinary art unto itself.

However, sewing: I learned how to lay out a pattern and how to rip out a seam that I sewed badly because--as with everything else--I was and am impatient and hasty and a hurrier. I learned sewing situations that were ideal for my skill level--making the same pattern for the third time, for instance--and sewing situations that were always going to be a disaster--high fashion-pretender patterns that ended up just being weird. Also, over the years, I find that filling a bobbin with thread is, like, quantum physics, and thus my sewing machine sits idle.

However: I can hem a clothing item. And I can sew on a button. I can mend a torn pocket.

Last night I sewed loose buttons on one two three coats while we watched an especially speedy and plot-stirring episode of The Good Wife. Tonight, whilst the historian did tedious and swear-inducing work at his desk, I hemmed a skirt that was just a little bit too long. I cut off the too long part in a three-inch wide swath. Then I folded the cut edge into a narrow hem and stitched away while watching Master of None. Very satisfying.

Over the past few weeks, I did some of my most delicate work yet by hand, mending the pockets of a pair of jeans that my youngest son would be taking with him when he moved to Massachusetts. The fabric of the pockets was quite thin, so thin that I surmised the makers of this garment had chosen a cheap and unsuitable fabric for the pockets of a young man's jeans, what with car keys and coins and whatnot. Even so, I fitted the torn edges together while we chatted away about this or that. At least I think we chatted while I sewed. I like that image, me fixing the pockets for my son, because I had learnt to sew in olden times, and him talking to me while I sewed my very sturdy stitches. The pocket, if flattened into a single layer, would look like a crazed scar. But it was mended, and it's possible--I like to think so--that he may even have worn the jeans when he got in his new car and drove away, across America.

OKAY.

So, this week has included, thus far:

1. vacation Monday, which ended with

2. ceiling collapse/need a new roof Tuesday.

3. roofer consultations and bids galore.

4. visit to grandchild's classroom for class opera The Friends (excellent, by the by).

5. lunch with grandchild and fam.

6. second lunch with colleague and friend.

7. book group.

8. breakfast with daughter and grandson.

9. food shopping for

10. baby shower for other colleague and friend.

As full of delights as this list is--and it is full! heaven knows, busting out all over with delights!--I need to get to work.

The historian and I just had a little midday phone call, because (a) more roofing talk, and (b) I left my phone at a store across the street from where I had breakfast this morning. He said, "So what have you got to do today?"

To which I replied, "I have a whole list":

1. straighten (this verb includes a myriad of stuff and messes)

2. wash (the whites and the sheets)

3. make videos (which I owe, in a sense, my college...therefore, I have procrastinated and resisted--one of my small handful of key, signature moves)

4. sew (I have inventoried the piles of fabric I have accumulated over the years. I am going to make things out of this fabric. Some things.)

5. cook @ 4. For the baby shower.

So it's time to get cracking.

Notice how there's no writing in that list? I wonder: what's that about?

Is it May yet?

It kind of feels like it, and I am in the process of checking out entirely of the current moment, except to notice the crocuses, sunshine, light, and also the trees leafing out.

I bought some fabric about an eon ago because I have another life, a secret life, possibly a life that only exists in my brain, where I sew. Why? I don't know. But this week, I sewed three skirts. By hand. With a needle and thread. Why? I don't know. It felt like the right thing to do.

Also, I bought a sack full of orange dye because I need orange pants. Orange-orange, not salmon or peach or coral. So look out for orange pants, coming to a theater near you.

New career plan #119: pattern-maker.

In a profile of designer Rick Owens in the issue of The New Yorker that came to my mailbox today (also arriving: tickets to the Ben Folds concert on April 24!, the Nordstrom catalog, other crap), I read this:

"Owens left Otis-Parsons [art school] after two years, to study pattern-cutting at a trade college. He began creating costumes and sets for local artists and performers, members of what he has called 'the wicked Hollywood hustler-bar world.' For four years, he worked in knockoff houses in Los Angeles, copying in cheap fabrics the work of well-known fashion designers. The experience proved invaluable. Many designers never master the difficult art of pattern-cutting, and the originality and sophistication of Owens's clothes--his ability to plant seams in unexpected places and to hang fabrics on the bias so that the cross grain clings to or drapes dramatically from the body--derive from his years in the knockoff mills. 'Picasso did classic figure drawing in the beginning, and then, after that, he's abstracted,' Owens told me. 'You can't convincingly get abstract until you really know the fundamentals. It's the same thing with pattern-making. You can't start distorting things unless you kind of know what you're doing.' As Cathy Horyn wrote last week in the Times, in an admiring review of Owens's Fall 2008 collection, 'A designer who controls his pattern making can say the most with his clothes. It's just like a writer with language.'"

"Just like a writer with language." Ta-da! Where's a trade college that teaches pattern-cutting?