Sewing together with A+ is helping me learn so
much about making and re-making, and about saying
yes.
I'm not good at saying yes. Sometimes it's because
I have no idea how to make something happen, and I
don't want to overcommit. Sometimes it's because I
don't think something will be practical or
worthwhile. Sometimes it's because I want to spend
the time or money on other things instead.
Sometimes I don't know how to make it something
that she can help with. But A+ asks with shining
eyes, and I'm learning, slowly, slowly, to say
yes. I'm beginning to trust that the mistakes
don't matter as much as the memories do.
A+ has always had ideas about what she wants to
wear. At five, she was all about floor-length
dresses. I sewed her A-line dresses in comfortable
cotton Lycra, peasant-style dresses that matched
my tops. I also made a knee-length swim skirt for
her. She liked it and requested a floor-length
version so that she could twirl and twirl and
twirl at the splash pad. She wore it into the
wading pool too, enjoying how it swirled around
her, trapping air under the skirt and marvelling
as it ballooned. The following year, she asked me
to attach a bodice to it to make it a dress. I
turned the knee-length skirt into the bodice for
the floor-length dress, took out the stitches that
had previously narrowed the then-too-large waist,
and it was good for another year of twirling.
When she was 6 and in the throes of a Cinderella
obsession (we read through 50+ variants of the
story from the library), I made her a powder blue
charmeuse ballgown with a full-circle skirt
supported by the petticoats and tutus that she
layered with abandon: 19 layers of tulle in total.
She loved curtsying and twirling with that whole
shebang at the pretend tea parties she hosted at
the playground, and it survived the washing
machine surprisingly well.
A+ is nine now and has long outgrown the ballgown,
which has been stashed in the closet until I
figure out if it's going to become a skirt for her
or for me. But she still wears the A-line dresses
from years ago, which now reach her knees instead
of her ankles. She still likes fanciful clothes. I
made a floor-length light blue dress so that she
could wear it to her cousin's wedding. She picked
out some ribbon for the waist, a lace trim to
place near the hem, and some ribbon flowers as
embellishments, and she asked me to sew a hooded
cloak with a ribbon closure. After the wedding, I
trimmed the dress to knee-length and re-sewed the
lace close to the new hem so that she could wear
it while biking to the playground.
Inevitably, she's beginning to grow up. Her fancy
is tempered by a few nods to practicality:
knee-length skirts because they don't get in the way of riding her bike
she likes stretchy fabric more than woven fabric
skorts are great for doing cartwheels or hanging upside down.
We prefer to buy fabric in person so that she can
feel the fabric on her skin. At the store, A+
zeroed in on a sheer floral print organza that she
had seen on a mannequin in the window display.
"The organza doesn't have a border," she said. "We
can make it a circle skort." She's learning to
think about the characteristics of the fabric and
what we can do with it. She matched the sheer
floral organza fabric with a peach
polyester-spandex from the swimwear section and
the right colour of thread from the basement.
This will be the fourth warm-weather skirt this
year. We make little tweaks each time, as she
learns more about what she likes to wear. Here's
the progression so far:
For her first summer skirt this year, I made a
lavender knee-length rectangle skirt with
scallop-edged embroidered mesh over bridal
satin, gathered at a 1:2 ratio. She liked the
dressiness of it, but 1:2 turned out to not be
enough ease for cartwheels, so she changes into
something else when she wants to be more active.
The second was a mermaid scale skort made from
the swimwear fabric I ordered last year, based
on one of the purchased skorts she liked. It'll
be her new swim skirt.
The third one was a purple skort. I changed it
from side seams to a single back seam so that
it's easier for A+ to tell the difference
between front and back.
I love being able to change things based on her
feedback. We've browsed nearby clothing stores and
bought a few pieces, but she rarely finds things
that she really likes. Her last pick from the
store was a peach skort with a matching top. I
removed the waist elastic from the top because she
doesn't like elastics, and now it's good to go.
It'll be the model for the new skort, I think: a
non-stretchy skirt with a stretchy fabric used for
the shorts. This time she wants a knee-length
circle skirt instead of the mid-thigh length of
the commercial skorts. Easy enough - just a matter of
drawing a bigger circle.
I appreciate how all this experience re-making
things makes it easier to say yes to A+'s ideas.
For example, the hat I sewed for her last year is
starting to feel a bit small. I cut pieces for a
new bucket hat using the free AppleGreen Cottage
pattern that I'd previously used to make two other
hats for her and one for me. This time, I wanted
to make the outer layer from the floral canvas
left over from reupholstering long-gone dining
room chairs and the inner layer from the linen tea
toweling that we decided not to use in the
kitchen. Midway through the process, A+ asked me
if I could make the hat pointy instead, like a
witch's hat. I put the brim pieces together,
sketched out a quick quarter-circle, sewed the
outer layer, and tested the fit on her head. Then
I used the inner brim layer to cover up the seams,
finished with some topstitching, and it was good
to go. I figured that if she changed her mind and
wanted a flat hat, I could easily make one from
the scraps, or I could even modify this pointy hat
to put a different crown on it.
Sewing is becoming more enjoyable and less
stressful. I worry less about making mistakes
because I've learned how to recover from many of
them. Sometimes something's more of a loss, like
that lavender floor-length cotton dress with a
split organza overskirt that she wore a couple of
times before it was declared too uncomfortable, or
the scraps that she cuts up when trying to fashion
a dress for her doll. That's fine, fabric is
tuition for learning.
A+'s becoming more adept, too. She's no longer
limited to standing still for measurements,
fetching pieces of fabric, or other make-work I
could think of to keep her busy while I sewed. Now
she can get the sewing machine to wind the bobbin
and she can thread the needle. She can sew
straight seams and stop when the machine makes an
unexpected sound. She can turn straps right side
out and unpick seams when we make mistakes or
change our minds. She knows it isn't just a matter
of how a fabric looks, but also what it feels like
and how it moves. She's gradually learning what
she likes and what she doesn't like. And if I have
the temerity to remind her how to do something
("Make a 'p' shape with the thread when you put it
in the bobbin case"), I get a glimpse of the
teenager she'll become ("I know how to do it,
Mom.").
We're getting better at seeing the clothes as
their component parts: patterns, fabric, pieces we
can recombine. "Can you copy this, but without
sleeves?" she asks, and I figure it out. Looking
at the yardage left, I can start to think: ah, I
can squeeze a matching training bra out of this
part, and I think I have enough here to make a
top, and this rectangle is large enough for a
headband, and I can turn these scraps into flowers
while I'm waiting for her at a playdate.
I'm learning from all her requests. By myself, I
tend to settle into comfortable routines. In 2015,
I made 18 tops based on the Colette Sorbetto woven
tank top pattern, eventually taking advantage of
Hacklab's laser cutter to precisely cut the fabric
so that my notches lined up every time. When I
find something I like, I make it again and again.
A+'s still figuring out what she likes. We're
learning so much.
Sewing for A+ is a time-limited opportunity, and I
want to make the most of it. There are only so
many clothes I can sew for her. Eventually she may
want to wear the same things as everyone else, or
eventually she might be comfortable doing all the
sewing herself. Eventually she'll be off on her
own life. Maybe the ballgowns will turn into
skirts or camisoles, and from there into headbands
or scrunchies.
・・・・・
Re-making echoes through our past. My mom tells me
this story of how her mom sewed, and how their
family was poor. My mom rarely got a new dress, so
when her mom sewed a red dress for her, that was
special. She wore it until the bodice couldn't fit
any more. Her mom undid the seams, sewed a new
bodice onto the skirt, and gave the dress back to
her. She wore it until the skirt was all worn out.
Her mom undid the seams and replaced the skirt. My
mom said to her mom, "Does this mean I have a new
dress now?" This was not the only dress my
grandmother made for her. My mom also tells a
story of how one time she hovered by her mom's
sewing machine, impatiently waiting for her mom to
finish sewing the dress that she was going to wear
to a party that day. My grandmother must have also
worked on re-making, on learning how to say yes.
My mom didn't make clothes for me, but she passed
on the stories.
All this reminds me a little of two picture books
we borrowed from the library. My Forever Dress by
Harriet Ziefurt and Liz Murphy (2009, video) shows
how a grandmother extended and transformed a dress
as her granddaughter grew. Something from Nothing
by Phoebe Gilman (1992, video) retells the Yiddish
folktale about Joseph's overcoat, this time with a
special blanket that gets worn down and
transformed into a jacket, a vest, a tie, a
handkerchief, ending as a fabric-covered button.
The button gets lost, but it turns into a story.
Of the two, I liked Something from Nothing more.
I liked the lighter touch it told the story with,
and I liked the reminder that cherished things can
be turned into stories.
A+ was in the kitchen, making a grocery list on an
LCD writing tablet. She wanted to buy apple sauce,
yogurt cups, and mac and cheese. She wanted to do
it herself, with her own money. W- will walk her
to the store, let her loose, and meet up with her
in front of one of the aisles. "Mama, you can stay
home," she said.
Challenge: She wanted her own bag for groceries.
Her backpack was too small. I rummaged through the
reusable bags hanging on the coat hooks. There's
this cotton tote we got from an event, but the
straps are too long. When she put it on her
shoulder, it threatened to fall down. When she
carried the bag by its straps, the bag dragged on
the floor. I shortened one strap to see if she can
hold it then. The body of the bag itself was too
long. I sewed a seam across the bottom. Now it's
the right height for her. I shortened the other
strap and serged the bottom seam to make it neat.
She wanted a pocket for her purse and the KN95
mask that she'll wear in the supermarket. W- was
almost ready to head out. "Give me another five
minutes and I can make her a pocketed bag," I
said. He waited. I opened up the scrap from the
bottom, sewed the edges together in the other
direction, turned it into a pocket, and sewed it
to the top hem of the bag. A+ pronounced it
perfect. She tucked her purse, mask, and shopping
list into the bag, looped the straps over her
shoulder, snugged the bag under her elbow, and
headed out into the world.
・・・・・
I still sweat my way through figuring out how to
sew what she comes up with, but it's good for me.
I make and re-make so she can have things that fit
her ideas, and so that she can dream of more.
She's learning that her ideas matter. It can take
several tries, but we can make them happen
together. Someday she'll make and re-make things
all on her own.
This post was inspired by the June IndieWeb Carnival theme of Take Two.
In May, I want to add more plants to our outdoor
garden, sew some swimwear for A+ and me, and see
about volunteering for Bike Brigade.
I volunteered to help with Bike Brigade's e-mail
newsletter, since they were looking for someone to
take over from another volunteer and it might be a
good way to build real-life community. I like the
cause: volunteer cyclists connecting food banks
with people who need those groceries delivered.
W-'s been volunteering for that for a while, and
A+ and I also did a couple of deliveries, and it's
nice to see her enjoy helping out. I also listened
to a virtual panel about bikes and social justice,
and I shared my sketchnotes afterwards. I'm glad
there are people thinking about these issues, and
I'm also glad that there are small, concrete,
on-the-ground ways that we can help.
We made more progress through the Toronto District
School Board's gifted identification process, but
I think we're going to opt for a regular class in
the public virtual school instead of the gifted
placement in an in-person school. A+ gets bored in
class, but I think she'll enjoy having the extra
opportunities to play with her friends and explore
ideas, and she also appreciates the way she can
read and sing in the middle of class. (Hooray for
the mute button!)
A+ took a pottery painting class and another
pottery wheel class at Clay With Me. This time she
did a 2-hour wheel workshop, and the teacher was
able to help her with a couple of pieces. We've
been using the bowls we made in the previous
class. It's nice to have hand-made things. This
seems to be an ongoing interest, so we're going to
experiment with a pottery-related summer camp. I
found one that lets me register for a week-long
afternoon camp that focuses on the pottery wheel.
We like to keep our time pretty flexible, so this
is our first experiment with a camp. I think it'll
be great to be able to build momentum and learn
from a teacher with more experience, using
equipment that we don't have access to at home.
The camp description says kids will learn how to
add attachments and other decorations to their
work, so that could be pretty cool.
I experimented with bringing a portable butane
stove to the park. We were able to make s'mores on
two separate occasions without setting anyone on
fire, hooray! It was a good experience. The kids
had fun.
On nice days when we didn't have any playdates
planned, we I went on bike adventures. We checked
out the flower event in Yorkville. We also
explored the St. James Park playground, which was
included in the recent Doors Open event. A+ liked
the tall slide there. We also went to the Art
Gallery of Ontario so that she could work on her
Group of 7 art assignment while looking at the
actual paintings. She picked Figure with Rays of
Light by Lauren Harris.
There were quite a few rainy days. We got a lot of
sewing done. A+'s getting better at sewing simple
seams, and she can stop the machine when things
sound weird. We made a fancy skirt with an
embroidered mesh layer over satin, a couple of
skorts made of spandex so that she can wear it
into the splash pad or even the swimming pool, a
swim set, and a few tops.
Rainy days were also good for playing together. A+
was curious about playing a farming game, so we
started playing Stardew Valley, and we all got
into it quite a fair bit. A+ likes collecting
eggs, cooking food, and building friendships. I
enjoy farming and mining. It's a lot of fun,
especially when we play co-op. Even W-'s gotten
into it on his phone. This could be a fun way to
learn more about life and parenting. Having my own
solo farm is also nice, too. It helps me be more
patient when we play in co-op because I know I
have a different space where I can try things out.
It does mean I get tempted to stay up late. I can
definitely see the impact of this new interest on
my time graph and sleep totals, but that's fine.
It's good to ride the wave of our interests,
especially when we can do it together.
In our real-life garden, the radishes have been
very happy, and other seeds have sprouted too. The
mini roses, dahlias, and strawberries have come
back, and so has a dianthus. The
daffodils are done with their blooms. Last year's
compost turned out pretty nicely, and I've started
turning this year's trimmings into compost. I love
letting A+ plant seeds wherever she likes, and
I've been enjoying learning how to identify those
sprouts as well as other ones that turn up in our
garden.
A+'s been enjoying the sourdough rye from the
Dufferin Grove farmers market, so I revived the
sourdough starter we got from a trip many years
ago, which we'd revived in 2020 or so and then
re-dehydrated. I thought I got it to be pretty
active again, but I haven't quite figured out
baking a proper loaf yet. On the other hand, W-
has been on a roll (hah) with all the breads and
bagels he's been baking. I put the starter in the
fridge for a week because we had lots of
potato-rosemary bread in the house, and now I
think the starter needs a few days of waking up
again. Oh well, flour is tuition for learning how
to bake. Fortunately, I've discovered I like
sourdough discard pancakes, so at least there's a
way to deal with the excess.
In June, I'd like to take A+ on a few more
informal field trips during the school week, to
take advantage of places before they get swamped
by everyone else on summer break. Maybe
Centreville, and maybe strawberry-picking like
last year. Her friends will probably be more
available for playdates too, so that'll be a nice
shift in our routines. I'm looking forward to more
cooking and sewing and gardening and pottery. We
like making things together and enjoying them
together. As the days get longer and the weather warms, I
shift: less computer time, more outside time. This
is good. I'm looking forward to exploring
more of the city by bike, now that we know we can
make it out to playgrounds on the other side of
town. It's the season for it!
The IndieWeb Carnival prompt for May is small web
communities. I've been exploring some thoughts on
how a little effort goes a long way to connecting
a community. Sometimes I think of it as working on
the plumbing so that ideas can flow more smoothly.
It feels a little different from the direct
contribution of knowledge or ideas. I also want to
connect with other people who do this kind of
thing.
Emacs is a text editor that has been around since
the 1970s. It's highly programmable, so people
have come up with all sorts of ways to modify it
to do what they want. It's not just for
programmers. My favourite examples include
novelists and bakers and musicians who use Emacs
in unexpected ways. Because Emacs is so flexible,
community is important. The source code and
documentation don't show all the possible
workflows. As people figure things out by
themselves and together, more possibilities open
up.
I love tweaking Emacs to help me with different
things I want to do, and I love learning about how
other people use it too. I've been sharing my
notes on Emacs on this blog since 2001 or so. In
2015, as I was getting ready to become a parent, I
knew I was going to have much less time and
focused attention, which meant less time playing
with Emacs. Fortunately, around that time, John
Wiegley (who was one of the maintainers of Emacs
at the time) suggested that it would be helpful if
I could keep an eye on community updates and
summarize them. This worked well with the
fragmentation of my time, since I could still
speed-read updates and roughly categorize them.
You don't have to fill the pipes all by yourself. Just help things flow.
I want to share some of the things we're doing in the Emacs community
so that I can convince you that building plumbing for your community can be fun, easy, and awesome.
This is great because enthusiasm spreads.
virtuous cycle
Other places: YouTube, Reddit, HN, lobste.rs, Mastodon, PeerTube, mailing lists….
Blog aggregator
Planet Emacs Life (uses Planet Venus) - update: [2025-05-31 Sat] I wrote my own RSS feed aggregator instead.
EmacsConf: < USD 50 hosting costs + donated server + volunteer time
Tips:
Make it fun for yourself.
Build processes and tools.
Let people help
2024-01-31-05
Some more notes on the regular flows built up by
this kind of community plumbing:
Daily: Lots of people post on reddit.com/r/emacs
and on Mastodon with the #emacs hashtag. I also
aggregate Emacs-related blog posts at
planet.emacslife.com, taking over from
planet.emacsen.org when Tess had DNS issues. There
are a number of active channels on YouTube and
occasionally some on PeerTube instances as well. I
don't need to do much work to keep this flowing,
just occasionally adding feeds to the aggregator
for planet.emacslife.com.
Weekly: I collect posts from different sources,
remove duplicates, combine links talking about the
same thing, categorize the links, put them roughly
in order, and post Emacs News to a website, an RSS
feed, and a mailing list. This takes me maybe 1.5
hours each week. It's one of the highlights of my
week. I get to learn about all sorts of cool
things.
Weekly seems like a good rhythm for me considering
how active the Emacs community is. Daily would be
too much time. Monthly would lead to either too
long of a post or too much lost in curation, and
the conversations would be delayed.
Sometimes I feel a twinge of envy when I check out
other people's newsletter posts with commentary or
screenshots or synthesis. (So cool!) But hey, I'm
still here posting Emacs News after almost ten
years, so that's something. =) A long list of
categorized links fits the time I've got and the
way my mind works, and other people can put their
own spin on things.
Monthly: There are a number of Emacs user
groups, both virtual and in-person. Quite a few of
them use Emacs News to get the discussion rolling
or fill in gaps in conversation, which is
wonderful.
Some meetups use meet.jit.si, Zoom, or Google
Meet, but some are more comfortable on a
self-hosted service using free software. I help by
running a BigBlueButton web conferencing server
that I can now automatically scale up and down on
a schedule, so the base cost is about 60 USD/year.
Scaling it up for each meetup costs about USD 0.43
for a 6-hour span. It's pretty automated now,
which is good because I tend to forget things that
are scheduled for specific dates. My schedule
still hasn't settled down enough for me to host
meetups, but I like to drop by once in a while.
Yearly:EmacsConf is the one big project I like
to work on. It's completely online. It's more of a
friendly get-together than a formal conference. I
have fun trying to fit as many proposed talks as
possible into the schedule. We nudge speakers to
send us recorded presentations of 5-20 minutes
(sometimes longer), although they can share live
if they want to. A number of volunteers help us
caption the videos. Each presentation is followed
by Q&A over web conference, text chat, and/or
collaborative document. Other volunteers handle
checking in speakers and hosting the Q&A sessions.
It's a lot of fun for surprisingly little money.
For the two-day conference itself, the website
hosting cost for EmacsConf 2024 was about USD 56
and our setup was able to handle 400 viewers
online (107 max simultaneous users in various web
conferences).
EmacsConf takes more time. For me, it's about 1.5
hours a day for 4 months, but I think mostly
that's because I have so much fun figuring out how
to automate things and because I help with the
captions. Lots of other people put time into
preparing presentations, hosting Q&A,
participating, etc. It's worth it, though.
I like doing this because it's a great excuse to
nudge people to get cool stuff out of their head
and into something they can share with other
people, and it helps people connect with other
people who are interested in the same things. Some
Q&A sessions have run for hours and turned into
ongoing collaborations. I like turning videos into
captions and searchable text because I still don't
have the time/patience to actually watch videos,
so it's nice to be able to search. And it's
wonderful gathering lots of people into the same
virtual room and seeing the kind of enthusiasm and
energy they share.
So yeah, community plumbing turns out to be pretty
enjoyable. If this resonates with you, maybe you
might want to see if your small web community
could use a blog aggregator or a newsletter.
Doesn't have to be anything fancy. You could start
with a list of interesting links you've come
across. I'm curious about what other people do in
their communities to get ideas flowing!
