clumsiness and a new skirt

It is the outside of enough when an adult woman can't seem to keep from injuring herself from one day to the next. I cut my finger slicing a bagel last week. Then Friday I sliced into another finger while cutting fabric for a skirt. Yesterday I got a sliver in my palm from a shelf in the cupboard. Today on the bus I bashed the side of my knee. I'm not sure if it's clumsiness, carelessness, or a combination of the two. The slice in my finger was the most impressive, though.

I was cutting out pieces of old jeans with a rotary cutter and managed to cut my finger as well as the fabric. A rotary cutter (in case you've never heard of it before) is like a pizza wheel for fabric. It's very sharp and there's a guard thingy to keep you from cutting your fingers, but when you press on fabric with it, the guard moves out of the way enough to let you cut, and if your hands are in the way, woe betide you! I did get the skirt finished, in spite of the wound. I was going to take a picture but I wore it all day today and forgot. I cut out panels of fabric, gored to give it some fullness (aka, narrower at the top and wider at the bottom) because I don't like straight skirts unless they're wraparounds and trying to gather denim from jeans makes for headaches and broken needles, sewed them together, zigzaged along the seams because I don't have a surger, and then did a folded over hem and waistband, with elastic in the waistband. It turned out pretty well. I'd thought to embroider it when it was done but I rather like it plain. Next time I'll do embroidery. My husband buys jeans from the thrift store and then wears them a lot until they rip in odd places where it's difficult to repair them (one he spilled acid on the front and then it ripped around the pocket), and I can't justify just tossing the material, because most of it's good. I'm thinking of making a new purse with some of the odd pieces.

I was listening to the latest episode of Cast On while I made this skirt and it seemed to go along nicely with the theme of the podcast. This latest series, about making do and mend (inspired by booklets on rationing from WWII), has been really interesting. I like trying to re-use old clothes in interesting ways, but it's not nearly as much of a necessity for me as it would have been back then. Given that I don't have much money right now, though, it's more relevant than it would have been a few years ago. And while I don't have much money, I do have plenty of fabric I've picked up as remnants, been given as leftovers from a friend, and inherited from one of my grandmothers who didn't want it anymore (vintage fabric, yay!). I'm not lacking for clothing now by any means, but if I want something new, maybe I should try making or re-making it first.

During my first year of university, my roommate was an art major. She liked ripping apart her clothes and turning them into something else. I remember one skirt made of different layers, frayed at the edges. One of her black sheets became our curtains for while, and then turned into pajama pants. Most of her clothing was black, so mixing and matching was easy. I wasn't doing as much sewing then because I didn't feel I had the time, and I hadn't learnt to knit yet. My quilting supplies came with me, but I didn't sew a lot until the next year, when I had my own sewing machine and an apartment. Her boldness has inspired me now. I might as well rip apart some old clothes that can't mended to remain what they were. I've got nothing to lose, and it'll save buying a new skirt or a new purse if I'm successful. And my purse is starting to fray.

Oh, I finished a cowl I was working on. Very pretty lace. I think it'll be a Christmas present, although I haven't decided who's getting it yet. The llama hat is nearly finished. There's a couple pairs of socks on the needles, but as those take more concentration than hat linings (cables!), I haven't worked on them a lot yet.

And I got a look at the books I'll need for the fall courses I want to take. Just one, thankfully, but it's expensive. Why is that I think twenty or thirty dollars is a stretch for knitting books, but I have to pay sixty for a book on historical linguistics, and that's fairly reasonable for a textbook?