fitzfabulous

First wrote about this on Wardrobe Refashion. Now that my brain is wired to constantly think this way, time to move some of those refashions over here.
Bought a lovely gray angora wrap sweater at the best Salvation Army in Chicago for $1. Wore it to work a few times, couldn’t figure out why it pooched out so much in the gut no matter how tightly I pulled the strings. Finally read tags, and discovered (duh) it’s a maternity size.

Since the front and back are only one piece, the alterations were pretty simple. You too can pull in maternity stuff to make it fit you if you love the fabric or after you actually give birth. And sewing a sweater isn’t hard; you just have to sew the seams before making any cuts, and then it doesn’t unravel.

1. Flip the sweater inside out, try it on, and measure how much needs to be trimmed. Pin the seam.

2. Lay the sweater (still inside out) flat on a table, and mark the lines you want to sew. I like chalk, and I use a ruler on alterations like this one to keep the seam as straight as possible.

3. Sew the seam. If your sweater stretches, use a wide strip of newspaper underneath to keep it from pulling or puckering. Once perforated with the seam, the newspaper tears right off.

4. Flip the sweater back out and try it on. If it fits, sew a wide zig zag on the outer edge of your seam to bind the edges. Trim close to the zig zagging. If it doesn’t fit, make the necessary adjustments and go to it. Zig zag, then trim.

5. Beautiful! Now the pooching is your lovely own gut, instead of bunchy fabric.

I hail from total scavenger stock. My mother’s father survived the Depression and never got over it. My Pop could stash some stuff away. The TV we used to have (until it conked out) came from my Pop’s house in the Villas, NJ, from his TV room. And by TV room, I mean a side room in the house that had six Ts in it. My Mister and I plugged ‘em in until we found one that worked. I think we ended up with TV#4. My mother’s mother’s mother (got it?) lived at Yard Sales and was a sort of yard sale shark, buying cheap and marking up at her own monthly garage sale. But Pop kept me equipped in sewing stuff - better scissors, boxes of buttons and even a serger. Ditto for Mom-mom Sarnese, only her supplies were more like sparkly pins and giant beads. Love them both, though I think they didn’t like each other.

Saturday night, I found myself grabbing empty OB bottles off the table at Korean BBQ so my Mister can use them for the beer he’s been making all winter. And all week, I’ve been walking off with cartons of discarded cigar boxes - beautiful wooden boxes from the Dominican Republic with real hinges and all - from the cigar shop on the corner. Guess the lads are cleaning house or something.

Some will be shared with lady friends, some will stash supplies around the house in a manner a tad nicer than shoe boxes.

It went up into double digits this week in Chicago, up from a weekend average of 7 F. Yikes - a hibernating sort of cold. Georgie-girl was just coming out of a winter fast, tearing up a little sausage, but she’s back in now. And still, this lovely surprise popped up on the kitchen sill. An old terrarium - a Christmas gift years ago from my brother and his wife - made for an apt salad starter, catching enough sun in about four days to sprout some winter mesclun.

Speaking of green, I’m working on this top from a favorite old shirt printed with a fake-o girl band. The original white top grubbed up quickly, and the excised design had been sitting on my desk for many moons. I asked my crafty friends at Wardrobe Refashion what to do with the sleeves - whether to hem them as it, or stick the t-shirt’s sleeves back on in a puffier form.

The refashioners always know what’s best. I await their advice.

Writing about facts all the time for money made me hesitate to write for free in my spare time about my inner workings. Then 2002 called and told me to go home already; I was beginning to stink.

Writing all the time for money using my real name and accurate facts and news judgment and deadly serious (Important) topics seemed so different from spouting off about the other things I love: public records, lady turtles, growing stuff, making stuff, cooking pots of stuff, eschewing squareness and blatant consumerism, yard sales, Chicago, the Iladelph, foiled corruption, shaking it and leopard printed anything. And by different, I mean not at all the same, maybe in an OK way.

Now I get an outlet for The Fluff I’d die before writing about professionally but which occupies a lot of my brain. There’s time and space for Fluff, of course. There’s just also Important News that can be boring to sit through, but which makes for job that America needs and I kind of like. It’s that Making News Relevant, that Sitting in Court All Morning to Tell You How Many Years the Crook Got, that Digging Through Mountains of Forms and Numbers that I like a lot. It’s translating those languages for you, the taxpayer, that gets me out of bed every morning.

Enough of that already and onto the Cotton I Grew Last Summer, the little cotton plant my Mister gave me as kudos for landing a new job.