I found a better way to fidget! (Also an occasionally frustrating one, but nevermind.) These are stressful times, and I, at least, need all the tools for dealing with them.
Photo of a wooden sock loom with white plastic pegs,
warped with orange yarn.
This sock loom, once a sock is underway, provides an almost zen-like activity.
We take full-size pillows when camping, thanks to various back/skeletal issues. The pillows themselves are dedicated to camping only, though they´re not much different from the ones we use at home.
Photo of a turquoise and a purple enclosed pillowcases,
showing a shallow hem at the back, and the fold
in the front which covers the pillow completely.
We quickly discovered that life would be less complicated if our pillowcases were likewise dedicated to the camper only, rather than raiding the linen closet. Since our interior camper colors are bright and cheery, I wanted our camping pillow cases to be the same. This quickly ruled out anything I could buy ready made.
Lately I´m always searching for small projects, and I´ve been on an eternal search for woven equivalents of t-shirts: Something that makes up quickly and is easy to throw on and forget about. And I didn´t learn my lesson from making the Donny Shirt.
Line drawing of a sleeveless, boxy top showing front and back.
(Image from stofdepotet.dk)
Enter Leni — boxy, cute, and simple-ish. Naturally, I changed it up.
I´m struggling to figure out how I want to dress now that life has changed so much since Covid first hit. I´ve been thinking all along that what I really need are a series of short woven white tops, to treat as t-shirts, and toss on over any pants at all.
Line drawing of The Friday Pattern Company´s Donny shirt.
This does not seem to be the case. Here´s a perfectly nice top — The Friday Pattern Company´s Donny. It´s also a perfectly fine pattern, but it just doesn´t work for me. No fault of its own!
It looks like a golden trash bag (!) because I can´t resist trompe d’oeil, and I find this fabric endlessly amusing.
Photo of a small cotton bag hanging on a door.
The fabric is in golds and browns and looks either
like crushed trash, or crumpled satin.
It slips over my wrist when I´m using my sock loom, keeping the yarn and all the bits and pieces in one place. It´s incredibly useful, and only took an hour to make.
This post is a composite, with photos, of all the tips we´ve gathered as we figured out how to best maximize our Aliner experience.
Photo of a white, triangular, camper with a high, Alpine-style, roof.
The camper is parked with woods behind, walking sticks leaning on
an air conditioner attached to the side of the trailer, and a blue
striped rug on the ground beneath the camper door.
As trailer camping newbies, we had a lot to learn. Tips below are in two sections: Organizational and Mechanical. A lot are specific to our Aliner Scout, but some may be at least a little useful to other new campers, too.
We recently bought an Aliner Scout, a hard-sided popup camper. We´ve been looking for ways to find tranquil moments, and this turned out to be our solution. Simplicity and convenience are really important to us, and our tow vehicle is a near-vintage Honda Element with a low tow weight limit, so camper weight was also a critical consideration.
Photo of an Aliner Scout triangular pop-up camper in woods
showing a blue rug outside the door, hiking sticks to the left of
theair conditioner, a love seat to the left of the camper, and a
picnic table further left. There´s a fire ring in front of the
picnic table.
In the previous post about our new Scout, I wrote about our first overnight in the camper, and our long trip home from the dealer.
This post discusses why we chose the camper we did, and how we keep the weight down for towing.
This is something a little different for Noile, which is being presented here along the lines of ´better living through crafting of one sort or another´. It has nothing to do with fabric, sewing, or weaving, though, but just generally to do with ´better living´: We bought a hard-sided Aliner Scout camper.
Since we got our Aliner, we´ve been camping every chance we could. We camped the night we bought it — in a thunderstorm, 120 miles from home! — and stopped last fall only when burn bans were put into place which kept us from making the campfires we love.
Our first meal in our Aliner Scout. The meal, set out
in the dinette side of our camper, was homemade baguette;
green grapes; multi-colored grape tomatoes on stainless steel
camping plates; a slab of orange Mimolette cheese (on a cutting
board with a purple knife); and a green Granny Smith apple.
Dinner, our first night, shown in the photo above, was delicious. We´d driven only a few miles from the dealer, and it was pouring rain outside. We were well-fed, snug, and cozy inside.
However, the drive home the next day was a nightmare: We had no experience towing any kind of trailer, the highway was daunting, and we both wondered if we´d make it out alive. They let people pull trailers without any training?!? YIKES!
At any given moment, we were this close to parking the rig and leaving it by the side of the road — it was harrowing.
When I was growing up in San Francisco, two brothers dominated the department store scene — I. Magnin was the store for fashionable affluent women, and Joseph Magnin catered to a similarly affluent, but generally younger and livelier clientele.
My mother shopped occasionally at I. Magnin, but on the rare occasion when I needed something a little closer to ´adult´ than my usual apparel, or outerwear that I was likely to wear for years, Joseph Magnin was the place to go. I hated shopping as much then as now, and was just as inclined then to keep clothing forever than as I have ever been, but this wonderful Joseph Magnin cloak was more than worth the cost (and the pain of entering a store).
I found this jacket at a resale shop sometime in the 1990s, and was quite taken with it — probably because of all the zippers! Underarm, side, neck — zips everywhere you look! Also, the low-key color-blocking, largely in my favorite blues, was a bonus.
Photo of a 1990s teal, purple and black color-blocked
Columbia jacket with a newly-added pocket hidden
under the central purple flap.
But I´ve worn it a lot less than I´d hoped, because there´s no convenient pocket for small essentials — like a wallet or phone. Disappointingly, that decorative flap on the front is just that: decorative. There´s no pocket underneath. Who knows why not?
