more fabric fun

I’ve got a ton of sewing projects ahead of me. Above, I just finished Amy Butler’s Swing Bag as a birthday present for my baby sister, this time making the pockets larger and two instead of three. The pockets sag a bit, so I added some velcro to keep the outside looking clean. Like mine, this one’s reversible. One side’s a wonderful linen blue pattern, and inside a cotton orange/yellow paisley.

I also whipped up my first Hourglass pillow, one of Amy Butler’s free patterns. The contrasting fabrics—the red aloha fern pattern with a more traditional Asian floral pattern—might seem like a strange combination, but I’m hoping they’ll serve as diplomats among the warring pinks/reds and blues of my living room. In Hawaii, I decided that patterns make me feel at home. The homes of my grandmother and both my aunts use patterns in abundance. No more of this blank, modern palate. Patterns on patterns on patterns. Maybe it’s the buk-buk in me, but I love it.

One down, three more to go.

summer reading

“The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” — Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

My summer reading, which I had looked forward to all spring, is over. Today I opened Three Cups of Tea, which I’ll be teaching in the fall and which promises to be wonderful, but summer reading has the allure of being completely my own. So begins lesson planning and required reading.

I had wanted to read page-turning, feel good stories such as Water for Elephants, with a few classics thrown in to make me feel less like I’ve been schlepping through my reading life. But between writing, working, and Anna Karenina, I only made it through Joyce’s Dubliners, Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift, Moore’s Sleeping Beauties, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Choi’s Foreign Student, and the massive Anna.

People with English degrees continue to tell me that I must read the classics so that I can understand what’s come before me. And I can say, from this limited sample, that I preferred the contemporary stories to the classic ones. Granted, I chose them because they touched on things I’m interested in right now, mostly self-exile. I loved Fugard, Moore, Ondaatje and Choi, and I learned a great deal about technique from Joyce and Tolstoy. Making this distinction, reading for pleasure versus reading for form, makes me feel as if I’m growing as a reader.

This is not to say that I did not learn from the contemporary writers as well, it’s just they had the added bonus of being hard to put down. I inhaled, as always, Moore’s work; I seriously pondered Choi’s characters, I reveled at the brilliant POV shifts of Fugard, and felt lost in the beautiful poetry of Ondaatje’s novel.

Also (since the Tolstoy read deserves a mention), what’s wonderful about Anna Karenina is it’s breadth; it’s wonderful, intersecting story lines that have the pace of real life. Things take time. His characters are distinct, three-dimensional, with wonderful interior monologue. His humor and tragedy is spot on. I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again as its student.

In all, it was a wonderful summer of reading. Francine Prose, in her Reading Like a Writer, states that we read for courage. I believe that. There’s a world full of books that break the rules, that show us how it can be done and it’s sometimes more beneficial than a classroom full of people to tell you how it can’t.