Sewing, fast fashion and me

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog post about the author’s realization that she’d replaced buying fast fashion or disposable clothing with sewing fast or disposable clothing (sadly I don’t remember the site, it’s not one of my regular sites). Fast fashion items tend to be poorly made from cheap materials and generally don’t last more than a season, if that. They’re often made overseas in wretched factories like the one that collapsed last year in Bangladesh. I don’t like disposable fashion for a number of reasons, and generally avoid buying any.

But.

I realized I have a pair of PJs I bought at Target three or four years ago that are close to disposable—and I’ve gotten close to four years of use out of them. Conversely, I have some clothes I’ve sewn that have gotten zero use, either because of fit or the end result didn’t look good on me or some sort of user error.

So there’s my dilemma: am I falling into the trap of replacing one less than ideal product with another? Waste is waste whether I made the item or not. Certainly, the process of manufacturing cloth produces a lot of pollution no matter where that cloth goes.

I’m writing all of this because Sunday Kent and I shopped at Old Navy. Now I’m not pointing a finger at Old Navy, well maybe just a bit, but neither of us have any illusions that the items we got are couture quality. Of course we didn’t pay couture prices, either. I justified my purchases by getting things I can’t make well for myself (shorts) but must confess I also bought a camp shirt because I love the fabric.

So the other part of the dilemma (aside from moral and environmental issues) is budget. Those clothes were inexpensive: we got four shirts for Kent, two pairs of shorts for me, the aforementioned camp shirt and two tank tops for under $100. The fabric alone would have cost far more than that—never mind the additional cost of notions like thread, interfacing or buttons or the cost of patterns if needed.

Clearly I’ve got no answers. What do you think about this issue?

Thanks, Sue*

One of the worst bits about having the Ferals as neighbors in Boston was getting the heebie-jeebies every time I heard an accent like theirs or saw people with their coloring and height walk by. Since they are Indian, that’s a whole lot of people to have the heebie-jeebies about.

At my new consulting gig, I’ve been in close contact with Sue who is also Indian. Unlike the Ferals, she’s exceptionally nice, professional and just all around great. It’s been a wonderful antidote to the effect the Ferals had on me.

*Not her real name

Wrapping up Me Made May

As I predicted/expected, I didn't wear a lot of me-made clothes this month. I knew I wouldn't be able to in Boston, which took up a full week. And most of my sewn items are a little more casual than I normally wear to work. But I did wear a me-made dress to a wedding last week, and last Friday I wore pants I made.

Yesterday I finally wore this dress. Holy cow it wears well. It's been pretty hot and humid here but that dress didn't wrinkle at all! I'm pretty pleased with that. Today I'll be wearing another dress I made and probably a third dress on Friday (although I may wear the pants I made since the office gets pretty cold with the a/c).

I haven't had any time to cut out any patterns let alone sew anything. Maybe I can do it this weekend, which will be the first weekend I've been home since April. Whew.

Big boy needs a big box

Our boy kitties are quite long; a non-cat loving friend pointed this obvious fact out to me a few years ago. She was impressed with their incredibly long tails and then commented on their long spines. I hadn’t really put it together but then I got curious, measured them and then looked up average cat tail lengths online. Sure enough, Wally and Eddie are long kitties.

Over the course of the last seven years, we’ve had a variety of litter boxes to accommodate them. We finally ended up with about the biggest actual litter boxes you could get, with high sides but no tops. As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been experimenting with changing the litter, and between that and poor Eddie’s bum, he was not a happy cat and had recently started pooping in the dining room.

After consulting Google yet again, I suggested we get a plastic storage bin and try that as a litter box in the dining room on top of one of the poop spots. It seems that cats really hate to feel crowded while doing their business, and they don’t much care for being cooped up in small spaces while doing it either. Since Eddie is so very long, even the biggest proper litter box is too short. Fair enough, I dislike latrines and Port-A-Potties for the same reasons. Well, all the cats started using that box—Kent does the scooping and there was pretty much nothing to scoop in the other two boxes.

The kicker was on Sunday when we returned from a quick overnight trip. Eddie got our attention and then kept eye contact with us while he pooped on the dining room rug. Yikes.

So now we have two giant bins in the dining room and all cats are using them. These bins are too big to go in the sideboard we have in the office, which housed the previous litter boxes. But they are plenty large enough for very long cats to do their business without feeling crowded or having their bums hanging over the edge of the box. Unless, of course, it’s deliberate.

We’re also trying yet another litter. So far, so good in terms of no smell and far less dust. And also so far, so good in terms of the cats actually using the boxes.

The only downside is where to put these boxes permanently. I don't really want them in the dining room or the guest room and they are too big for the office. 

Out, out damned ivy

Yesterday on a whim—and because the internet clearly knows all—I Googled how to get rid of English ivy. Wow. I am not the only person who dislikes the stuff. In fact, I have a lot of company*.

While I like the idea of ground cover, and I’ve even put in ivy before myself (in a small space that was pretty contained), I’ve always known it’s incredibly invasive. Our yard has ivy up near the house and along at least two of our three fence lines and unfortunately, the ivy keeps trying to grow up under the siding. That’s not good at all.

A couple of weekends ago, I spent a few hours outside pulling up the ivy. Other than having very sore hands and very nearly tweaking my back, it didn’t seem like I made much progress. I didn’t know if that just how it goes with ivy removal, but after reading I realized nope, that’s just how it goes. One blog post I found said on average it took her two hours to remove two linear feet of ivy from her seven foot tall fence. Yikes. So I’ve reframed my expectations for ivy eradication and now hope to have it mostly gone by the end of summer.

I say mostly because another site said you have to stay on the removal process. It takes less time in succeeding years (yay) but you do have to be vigilant. So next year, we’ll need to get on the slash and burn before the rest of the plants grow in.

*In case you’re curious, my favorite site for ivy removal was called Ivy Out – Rip It Out.

Three on the tree

The car looked a lot like this

When I got my driver’s license, my dad was driving a modest four-door Dodge. I think it was a Dodge Dart but the pictures I’ve found online don’t quite look the same, and I’ve never been good at recalling car models. It’s mostly not my thing. He passed that car to me (and 11 months later my brother) to use and he bought another modest used car, a 1972 two door butt ugly green Dodge Dart.

The shift pattern

The four-door was tan and along the way someone had added air conditioning, which worked really well. The trunk was enormous, the kind you associate with gangsters or Cadillacs, I swear I could have put four grown adults in there with room to spare. And it had a manual transmission, three on the tree. That meant that the gear lever was on the steering column and also had a tiny nob marked with the gear shift pattern. I didn’t have a lot of trouble managing the clutch/gas pedal dance required to change gears but I struggled mightily with that stupid three on the tree.

One night, my boyfriend (who didn’t drive) and I had gone to an A&W restaurant for floats. All was fine, no stalling or embarrassing hitches as I drove us there. But getting home was a different story. I could not get the car to drive – it kept stalling. There we were, on a fairly warm evening and me with a curfew and I couldn’t drive the damn car. Over and over I tried and stalled the car for a good 30 minutes. And of course the boyfriend was beyond useless because he didn’t drive, even though he was 18 (he didn’t want to pay for insurance).

Finally after yet another stall and very nearly in tears – and I still don’t know why I thought of it then and why I hadn’t thought of it sooner – I turned the engine off, put the car in neutral and started all over again. And this time at long last, I pulled the gear shift hard toward me and then down into first gear. It dawned on me as everything finally worked, that I’d been trying to drive from a dead stop in third gear. No wonder the car stalled.

More pumpkin

It's not a new picture, but it's typical Eddie

Poor Eddie. He's really got a sensitive bum. As we suspected, his anal glands had started packing up again. The good news is he lost a bit of weight (0.4 pounds, which is more than it sounds when you start out at 18 pounds). And the other good news is we caught it sooner and now I know I did feel the glands.

He's to double his pumpkin intake and come back in three months. The vet wasn't all that sure that the fiber would help but it won't hurt and it does help increase the amount of water he's getting.