Me-Made May, Week #4

Wearing: (left to right) Liberty #1 dress, Bluebird dress, Green Cookie Book dress, First Light dress, red twill skirt, Yardley's dress, Liberty #3 dress

The weird weather continues--I started out the week still needing tights and a light sweater, but by the week's end, we had popped into the low 90s and I'm suddenly pulling out my sandals and anti-chaffing gel!!  (That stuff is magical, by the way--I'm never going to have a thigh gap, and I don't care one way or the other, but I do care about friction rashes while walking in the heat, and since I don't want to wear tights year round, this has been a life-saver for me)

Only a few more days of Me-Made May to go!  Now that the weather has really heated up (we went from late winter to summer literally overnight), I'm eager to switch over to my summer rotation on Wednesday.  I keep going back and forth as to whether I have enough stuff for my summer, since I tend to sweat through my clothes more frequently, and thus need more frequent laundering, but I guess I can always whip up another Dottie Angel frock if I find myself short.  I'm aiming for about 27 garments per rotation, which seems to be about right for my needs and laundry cycle.

Some thoughts about clothes this week.  After the heat of the last three days, I think I can safely say that lawn will be a great fabric choice for the hot weather.  It is cool, thin, and has a nice feel against the skin, even in the drip.  The Liberty #1 dress continues to be a favorite, and I rediscovered my liking for the Green Cookie book dress this week as well.  I really love Cotton + Steel fabric, and am so eager for their Rifle Co. fabric collaboration to come out in August!  I had planned my sewing projects for the rest of the year, but I think I may have to work in a few dresses from that collection.

My Yardley's dress needs some attention.  I still think it is borderline as far as length, and am considering adding some lavender trim to the bottom to visually lengthen it a bit.  The fabric also is pulling a little under the arms and has developed some holes along the underarm seam.  It is fixable; I just need to take the time to do it.  I made this dress when I was still tweaking the shape of the armscye on my Dottie Angel sloper, and the early iterations didn't have enough of a curve on the underside of the sleeve, which makes it pull at the seam over time.   I've since fixed this (I'm hoping to write up something in June about all my changes) and it hasn't been a problem on the more recent dresses (except for the Pots and Pans dress-turned-blouse, but I think that was a function of old fabric being brittle, rather than the pattern shape)

I'm holding 3-4 pounds of water with the heat and my cycle, so I'm feeling a bit sloshy today; my legs and feet feel tight.  I went for a run on Wednesday and it felt really good to put on my sneakers and hit the pavement, but I'm really sore after not exercising for so many months!  I'm hoping to get to the gym this weekend, or possibly later today.  I've been eating a lot of salmon this week, and finding it to be a good thing for my system.  Unfortunately, it is kind of expensive, so I don't know how long I can keep it up, but I'm trying to experiment with different ways to keep my calorie counts reasonable, my blood sugar levels steady, and still feel like I'm actually eating during the day instead of having a liquid or mush diet.  Today I tried having Greek yogurt with honey for breakfast instead of my usual corn chex.  I find that the extra protein really does help me feel full longer, but I have a lot of trouble getting the yogurt down since it forms a bolus and kind of sticks in the webs in my throat.  As long as I take it slow and take small bites, it is okay.  It is not a food I can just gulp down and go.  (alas)  But that is progress, I think, so I'll take it.  I'm to have another endoscopy with dilation on the 6th, so perhaps that will help some as well.

I'm planning to wrap up both my spring rotation and Me-Made May on Tuesday, and will preview my summer rotation on Wednesday, God-willing.  I've finished Crawford's book, and am reading some really interesting stuff right now; I hope to discuss it in more detail soon.

Yarn Along: Down the Rabbit Hole

~knitting~

As promised, photos of the Saucy Librarian sweater!  I confess, I'm a little meh about this sweater too.  

Blocking helped the length issues considerably, but also made the neckline much wider, and some of the shaping given by the ribbing was lost in how I blocked it.  I realize I could reblock it slightly less aggressively to fix that, but I dunno.  

I just can't decide if the color suits me--it is so dark!  The fabric does feel slightly better on that the Sapphire sweater, even though they are the same yarn, so that is something.  

Having a layer underneath seems to help too.  I guess I'll just put both sweaters in the bin until the winter and reassess then.

This photo shows the color most accurately--it tends to read quite dark at a distance, but it really is a lovely shade of green.

But!  I also promised a yarn stash post.  Since I've discovered some new-to-me yarn lately, plus taken advantage of some sales and overstocks, I've got a lot of projects in the hopper!  This is just a small selection of what I've got planned (I have yarn for kid projects that I'll get to as I have time)

First is O-Wool.  It is super local to me--the shipping address is less 2 miles from here, as the crow flies!  I bought some overstocked Balance, which is a cotton-wool mix, and this stuff is delightfully squishy and soft.  My primary complaint about cotton yarns is that they are too round and feel really awful to my hands while knitting, and then don't hold their shape afterward.  I've had some really great wool/cotton sweaters in ready-to-wear that felt similar to this yarn, so I'm hopeful that this will be a great sweater.  I'm planning to make the Rincleau sweater, also from O-Wool.

Next is Quince and Co.  I've been sort of peripherally aware of their yarn for a while, but never really took the time to check out the offerings.  I decided to start with Lark, which is their basic worsted weight, and bought the Cypress colorway.  It is not quite as bright as I was expecting, but I think it will make a superb pullover.  I'm planning to make the Stokey cowl neck from Amy Herzog's book with it.

I bought some Valley Yarns Northampton in charcoal gray to make a button down vest for my husband to wear with his cassock (he has a linen kombu, and I have to remake his woven woolen one, as he just lost the old one...tragedy!) but he wanted a knitted one as well.

I was sad to discover that Valley Yarns has discontinued their Stockbridge line--I made my Rosemont cardigan out of it, and I really like the yarn.  They still have plenty in stock at yarn.com, and it is on crazy good sale, so I bought the red-purple colorway to make a sweater for next winter.  I've not decided on the pattern yet.

After much trepidation at the price, I also bought a couple skeins of Malabrigo Rios over the winter, just to try it out, and I think I'm going to make it into a L'Enveloppe.  I find in the winter I often want something extra over my shoulders, but a scarf feels too bulky or something.  I really like cowls and neck warmers, but wanted something more like a shawl that I didn't have to hold or pin together.  This pattern intrigues me.

I've had some navy blue Misti Alpaca that I got on clearance last year and have been dithering about what to use it on.  I think I've finally decided to make Clouds in My Coffee by Elizabeth Smith.  I was debating between it and another cardigan pattern, but I think I will get more use out of a Clouds cardigan.  I'm simultaneously intrigued and daunted.

As for my current projects, I decided to scrap my plans for another Ramona, and use my bulky gray yarn on a Sulka cardigan instead.  It has a nice shape and texture to it, and so far I'm enjoying knitting it.

It is knit in pieces from the bottom up and then seamed, so I'm currently working on the back part. I'm debating adding waist shaping because I'm making it longer than the pattern calls for.  I'm not feeling that great this week (GI flare) so I'm not really getting a lot of knitting done.

I'm also still working on my dad's vest.  I'm shaping the arm holes right now, and have a few more rows to go.  Now that the lower body is done, it is going pretty quickly.

I'm not sure about the look of the arm hole bind off--I wasn't expecting such a strong line along the edge, but it doesn't look that obvious in the finished photo on the pattern, so perhaps it just gets subsumed into the ribbing on the edges at the end.

~reading~

I finished Putin Country in two afternoons over the weekend, and I will say it is a mixed bag.  I would recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in Russia but with caveats. The book is part-journalism, part-memoir of Anne Garrells' many years visiting the Chelybainsk region, which is just to the east of the Urals; it was closed to outsiders during the Soviet period because of was the site of many military and nuclear installations.  There are still several closed cities in the area, because of ongoing nuclear projects.  I like her writing style, and mostly appreciate her perspective on things, but I think there are some deliberately misleading sections that blatantly ignore the longer history of the region (for example, she calls the Bashkir and Tatar peoples that live in the region "indigenous," which is far from true; they are what is left of the Mongol hordes that brutally occupied the country for 400 years...a fact she conveniently forgets to mention and which goes a lot of the way to explain why ethnic Slavs don't have a high regard for them)  The past is longer than 200 years, and Garrells seems quite short-sighted in this regard.

She brings a totally secular eye to religion in the area (and in Russia more generally), and seems incredulous that people might really believe what they say they do.  She has a fairly jaundiced view of the Orthodox Church in particular.  She doesn't seem to understand faith, or the historical role of Christianity in Russia.

It is true that Russia is a huge multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and that historically, keeping it all together has been a gargantuan task.  It is also true that the Soviet period was one of tremendous secularism and enforced atheism, but Ms. Garrells seems to discount the earlier history of religion on the country, and the different ways that the churches and other faiths coped and struggled to survive under Soviet rule.

Her reporting on the environmental degradation in the Chelybainsk region is superb, as well as her chapters on medical care, parenting special needs kids, and the basic poverty of the villages and the lack of prospects, combined with galloping corruption.  It made me think of some of the Rust Belt areas in the United States, or even my own poverty-stricken, corruption-ridden city.  There were a couple of chapters where I was left wanting more information, and wished she had given more space to topics like Memorial and its being shunted to the periphery of public discourse.  (She has a few paragraphs on the legacy of the purges, but I really wanted to know more about that, both what people think about it today, how it is being "officially" handled, and the effect on the region as an historical matter)

I think the weakness of her book is basically that she interviews people she meets here and there, and it seems a little unrepresentative, given the title of the book.  She says that the region is largely supportive of Putin, but her interviews and friends would seem to fall mostly into the opposition camp (or at the very least, sodden despair and resignation).  She only profiles a few people who are staunch Putin supporters, and they are one-dimensional portraits.

Ms. Garrells also assumes a fairly intimate knowledge of Russia, Russian political figures, and the history of the past 30 years.  I happen to be familiar with much of it, so casually throwing around names like Boris Nemstov or Chernomirdov or referring to the economic turbulence of the mid to late 1990s without any context was fine for me, but would be confusing for a reader with only a passing knowledge of Russia.  The book is quite brief for the ground it purports to cover.  Still, I'm glad I read it.  It makes me eager to get to my Mandelstam, Kolyma Tales, and the other Russia books in my stack.  I may have to revisit John Thompson's primer on Russian history, Russia and the Soviet Union, vol. 4.  The title is basic, but it covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space, and and covers it well.

As for other reading, I'm about 2/3rds through The World Beyond Your Head (helped along by a middle of the night stomach issue that had me up most of the night on Sunday night!) and am still finding it very useful. I have a lot of dog-eared pages and am wondering how to cohere my thoughts about it into something written.

War and Peace is on temporary hold, and Ivan Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album is next up in my queue--I started it yesterday afternoon.  So far it is interesting.

~watching~

Nothing new to report from last week.  I tried Julian Fellowes' Doctor Thorne on amazon but I just couldn't get into it.  I could tell from the second scene with Ian McShane exactly where the plot was going, and my flagging interest was gone by that point.  I also didn't really take to the actors playing the parts, so that is some of it too.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: Endurance

all images via Google Images, of St. Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina, CA

We live in interesting times.  I could not have predicted the speed with which traditional Christianity would be marginalized in American society, nor ways in which Christians would be forced to abandon the public square.  

Rod Dreher had a great analysis on his blog last week, following a link to a great article that I recommend reading as it lays out some practical examples of Benedict Option style activities that some Christians are undertaking in order to live out their faith, and foster a faith-community in our society which becomes ever more hostile to small-o orthodox Christianity and indeed, most traditional faiths.

I'm very interested in the Benedict Option; I'm always thinking about how to consciously structure our family life to revolve around the life of the Church, and to make sure that our children are firmly grounded in the Faith. We will have to be much more deliberate in choosing a Christian path as a family, because we can no longer count on the surrounding culture to shore it up.   

"Over and over, we see that the biggest problem in even the healthiest churches here, where kids are being raised well in the faith, is that the rhythms of kids’ lives are not being shaped by anything related to Church,” said executive director Brian Brown. “They’re being shaped by the rat race, by the constant pressure to get the kid into college, whatever it may be. We have ‘liturgies’ that are formed by checking our smartphone for Facebook every hour, that are far more formative than the liturgy of our religion that’s supposed to be the center of our lives.” ~John Burger, What is the Benedict Option, and Why it Might be Coming to Your Neighborhood, Aleteia blog, May 11, 2016

I worry about the world my children will inhabit, because I think it will be very different from the one that I knew growing up.  I want them to have the tools to live as exiles from the world, to stay strong in their faith, and to order their lives according to the rhythms of the Church.   We can learn much from monasteries--I've discussed previously how much I admire the rhythms of life at the monastery of St. Herman of Alaska in Platina, CA.  Their lives are not physically comfortable, but I find there is much to learn in how they live them in accordance with the liturgical life of the Church.  It is not an easy path, but it is one that Christ called us to as Christians. 

If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you....He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father. But this happened that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, ‘They hated Me without a cause. But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. ~John 15:18-27

The analysis of the current state of affairs in America comes from a reader of Dreher's blog, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but here is the first part:

"I think the story goes something like this: In the first centuries of the Church, Christians were the minority and the outcasts, at times even enemies of the state. Over centuries, and through much toil and blood, we attained toleration. Eventually, that developed into acceptance. Finally, we were ascendant. Christianity became the faith of the Empire. Along with this came positions of power and influence for Christians, who no longer had to fear a conflict between their faith and carrying out the duties of state.

That arrangement more or less persisted for centuries. Obviously, for Orthodox Christians in the East it ended with the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam. In the West, however, the Church remained integrally involved with the state and persisted as a preeminent influence on culture.

Much good has come of this, most especially the influence of Christian anthropology on the arts, philosophy, and political theory. The Church, too, benefited from the need to articulate uniquely Christian understandings of aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. The greatest achievements of Western civilization all rest on this foundation laid by Christianity.

However, as has been much discussed, especially by you in connection with the Benedict Option, this longstanding position of power and cultural priority for Christianity has also enabled an, at times, unhealthy laxity within the Church. I’m talking about the propensity of Christians, after they have baptized the culture, to kick up their feet and relax, thinking they have constructed some sort of perpetual motion machine. Once Christianity has formed the culture, this unspoken thinking goes, the culture will perpetuate Christianity. The Church need only see to its rituals, acting as a sort of all-encompassing master of ceremonies for the culture as a whole.

The error in this, or least one prominent one, should be obvious: it ignores the Fall and the reality of sin. No culture will persist in virtue without the constant guidance, admonition, and even judgment of the Church. In the absence of these, the seeds of original sin will again sprout into tares that slowly spread and choke out the wheat of the culture.

This is essentially what has been happening to the West since around the time of the Reformation. And yet it has not been until recently that things have come to a head.

What is different now? Well, the Church has neglected the culture for so long that [the culture] now advocates for beliefs and practices that directly contradict the Christian faith.

This is where the difficulty begins, because Christians have gotten soft. We’ve gotten used to our positions of power and influence. When faced with the choice of keeping their faith or their cultural relevance, an increasing number of Christians have been choosing the latter."

~Frenemies of the Benedict Option, Rod Dreher, American Conservative Blog, May 16, 2016

Our task is to live our lives with integrity, in accordance with God's laws and the Tradition of the Church, with an increased care for that which goes on in our back yards.  We must recommit to doing all of the the things that Christ commanded us as the Church to do in our communities, with the person in front of us.  This is difficult.  I freely admit that the pace and structure of modern life make this task a daunting one, especially for an introvert like me.  It is hard to invite people over, to find the time and energy to bring like-minded people together to build community, but it is absolutely necessary to shoring up our faith, and also to give us strength to continue on the Way.  Being a Christian in the new order will require some hard conversations--indeed, some hard decisions--about what we will and will not do as Christians in a hostile land.  I don't have any answers, only my poor prayers that we may endure.

Me Made May Week #3

Wearing (left to right): First Light dress, Liberty #3 dress, denim skirt, Liberty #3 dress, Return to Tokyo dress, denim skirt, Poppy Parade dress

The weather continues on its weird course this month.  I'm mostly wearing lighter sweaters and in the last day or two have put my tall boots away (again!) but am still wearing tights for at least half the day.  Today is supposed to be freakishly warm, but then it will drop back down to the 50s tomorrow.  

I'm trying to wear my hair down more lately--just for a change of pace.  I can't really stand to have hair on my neck once it is hot and my hair picks up a lot of static when I wear heavy sweaters in the winter, so I figure might as well get it in while I can!

I rediscovered that teal-blue cardigan this week and am glad I hung on to it.  It is ending up a great transition piece that I can wear with a dress or as a top.  I like the shape of it and there is a slight bit of texture to the fabric that makes it slightly interesting.  The color is pretty good on me too, I think, so there's that.  I've gotten a lot of compliments on the Liberty #3 dress, so I think it is a winner!  I feel good in that dress, as well as the First Light dress.  Both excellent late additions to my spring rotation.

I think one of the pressures I feel during Me-Made May is to wear something different each day, just so the photos don't get boring (I picked my dress this morning largely on that basis).  But that's just silly.  Most of us wear the same things all the time, and the point of Project 333 is to learn to work with less on a seasonal basis.  I'm not really one of those people who gets really creative with a small wardrobe and wears things in unexpected ways.  I tend to wear the same cardigans with the same dresses, same tops with the same skirts.  I suspect many women do the same.  That's okay.  I've been thinking more about why I do Project 333, and what my ultimate goals are with the project, and I hope to come up with something a little more coherent soon.

I don't really have much to say about this week.  I'm having a lot of bad food days--both from a too-many-calories perspective, and from a "I don't know what to eat anymore and my insides hurt" perspective.  I'm discouraged.  My food list is still about 5 foods and I'm tired of feeling sick from eating.  

I looked back over some reports from My Fitness Pal and I realized I have been gaining and losing the same 3-5 pounds every couple of weeks since the beginning of the new year.  I don't really feel very good about that.  I suppose it is better than gaining back everything I lost last year, but I still feel like I have such a long way to go, that it is hard to feel stuck.  I know that I should just buckle down and cut out another 300-500 calories per day, but with my diet being so severely restricted, particularly in regard to high volume/high fiber foods that help keep things steady, I'm just kind of lost as to how to do that, and still be functional as far as blood sugar goes.  

I started using Duolingo for Russian language this week.  I have been studying Russian since 1998, and would describe myself as functional, but not literate or particularly conversational.  I want to learn more, and I want to revisit some of my PhD research on the imagery of the Soviet Union. I downloaded a Cyrillic keyboard which helped a lot--I was super frustrated with the program when it was in Beta, because I found the it didn't really like transliterations that weren't precisely what had been programmed.  I probably should have been able to test out of some stuff, except for that little quirk.  I just decided to start at the beginning and go from there.  I'm worked for several hours yesterday before my brain fried and I'm hoping to get in some more practice this morning while my sitter is here.  Better get on with it before the morning is gone.

Yarn Along: Saucy Saucy

~knitting~

So this happened yesterday:

Apologies for the flash photos--it was the only way I could get the green color to show up somewhat accurately.

I finished the Saucy Librarian sweater and am blocking it now!  The body of this sweater seemed to take forever to finish, but the sleeves went surprisingly fast.  I'm blocking it rather aggressively, in the hopes of salvaging the length issue, and possibly improving the fit, so we'll see how it comes off the pins.  I cannot believe I'm writing this on May 18, but I think I may be able to model it for photos this week!  (I'll share them for next week's Yarn Along)  It is still chilly and damp, especially in the mornings, and I'm still wearing tall boots and heavy tights most days.  I'm mostly wearing light weight sweaters, though, so that is something.

I've made a little more progress on my dad's vest, but not enough that is worth photographing.  Just a few more inches on the body.  I think I have another 2" to go before I start shaping the arm holes.  I bought a bunch of yarn lately in some sales, so I have pretty much planned out the rest of my knitting year (and then some!)  Maybe I'll do a yarn and knitting plans round up post soon.

~reading~

I bought a couple of knitting books lately, as I want to figure out how to fit my figure, and be happy with the results of my knitting.  I bought both Amy Herzog's books (Knit to Flatter and Knit Wear Love) and Top Down: Reimagining Set-In Sleeve Design by Elizabeth Doherty.  I read Knit to Flatter and Top Down earlier this week, and I think Knit to Flatter is going to be a very useful book, as it looks at knitting garments by body type.  I basically understand my shape, but didn't really understand some of the best ways to fit it in knitting.  The Top Down book I wanted to have because I wanted another option for fitting my narrow shoulders besides the imperfect fit of a raglan sleeve.  I've not received the Knit Wear Love book yet, so can't speak to that one.  I'm also intrigued by You Can Knit That, also by Amy Herzog.  I really like her approach, and her patterns seem mostly doable to me.

I am about half way through The World Beyond Your Head, and it is very very good.  I'll probably write it up here when I'm finished--there is just so much to mine there.  Crawford's writing style is funny and deprecating, and I've found myself laughing out loud at a few points.  Not exactly what you'd expect from a mostly philosophical treatise.  He makes it interesting and points out a lot of connections that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

I've temporarily set War and Peace aside in favor of Crawford, so no new progress on that this week. I'll get back to it.  At the good advice of a friend who reads Good Books, I've taken the plunge and ordered Sigret Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter.  I've heard other bloggers rave about it, and my friend really loves it, so I'm curious to read it.  It will probably go to the middle of my stack, as I have several other books I want to read first.

Speaking of reading lists, I just ordered Putin Country, and I think that one may have to jump the queue.  It is a clear-eyed look at contemporary Russia, particularly outside the metropolis of Moscow, and examines why people in Russia continue to support Putin, even if they don't particularly love him.  I've got a rather nuanced view of Putin myself, and am eager to read what Anne Garrels has to say.

~watching~

I'm watching Person of Interest's final season on cbs.com, and while I understand why the first two episodes of the season had to go the way they did, I felt like they didn't really settle into things until episode 3.  I wouldn't be bothered except the season only has 13 episodes, so I hope they make the most of the rest of the season!

I think I mentioned that I started back at the beginning of The Americans, whilst I wait for season 4 to hit prime on amazon.  I'm a couple of episodes into season 2 at the moment.  I remain fascinated by Philip and Elizabeth's strange relationship.  Since Blindspot is wrapping up for the summer, I'm probably going to start Outlander S2 soon.

In addition to my knitting, I've been doing a lot of puttering around the house this week--I finished (hopefully!) the last sewing project for my summer rotation and cleaned out the bathroom cabinets in both bathrooms, and reorganized and cleaned out the linen cabinet as well. (Our linen cabinet is this weird pentagonal shaped closet that is fitted into the ridiculously tiny landing just outside the 2nd floor bathroom.  It is difficult to store things in neatly because of the odd shape, and it just isn't very big.  We can't even get a proper door on it because the corner is so tight in relation to the bathroom door, so it has a curtain instead.  I mostly store towels that are not in use, cleaning supplies, and travel toiletries, but somehow it gets messy throughout the year.

I've also been trying to plan our summer; the kids are going to be home a lot more of it than we had originally planned, and so I'm scouting out craft supplies, looking into outings and day trips, making a daily schedule, trying to set up various therapies for the kids since we have so much more flexibility in the summer, etc.  I feel sort of overwhelmed already.  I mean, I know it will probably be fine once we get into it, but having the burden of all of it fall on me just feels like a lot.  Yes, I'll take some cheese with my whine.

I'm hoping to get back to running this summer, and want to pick up my Russian again.  I have a rather impressive stack of books to work through, and I want to do some more writing, both here and on some fiction projects I've had percolating for a while.  All in good time, I suppose.

Linking up with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: Piketty's Crumbs

Economist Tim Kane critiques so-called "inequality economists" like Thomas Picketty who argue that we are no better off than our forebearers of a century ago. Kane points out that this sort of neo-progressive thinking is ignorant at best, and willfully misleading at worst. 

“Three years ago, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) made its author the most famous economist in the world. The book caused a sensation by highlighting rising income and wealth inequality in the United States and Europe, especially in its jarring claim that inequality is just as bad today as it was a hundred years ago. Piketty writes: ‘The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910. Basically, all the middle class managed to get its hands on was a few crumbs.’

“These two sentences sum up a profound irony—the central contradiction of modern progressives. They do not believe in progress. A century ago, America’s first progressives believed very much in the power of their reforms. Theodore Roosevelt was proud to protect the environment. John Dewey was busy promoting universal education. Alice Paul was busy fighting for a woman’s right to vote. They succeeded. Today, neo-progressives would have us forget all that, and maybe it’s because economic hindsight is anything but clear.

“As a professional economist, I find myself haunted by Piketty’s book. After reflecting on the issue many, many times, attending conferences, and reading dozens of scholarly papers, I keep coming back to his disturbing comparison of our time to the year 1910. Why 1910? He could have picked 1960 or 1800, I suppose, but the year 1910 seemed to float in the back of the mind like a silent paradox. Have we nothing but crumbs to show for a century of capitalism?

“One way to value the progress enjoyed by everyday people is to imagine having to do without all of the material things we have that our ancestors lacked. How much money would you be willing to accept to give up indoor plumbing for a year? Having water on tap in every home in 2010 offers us no point of comparison to 1910. The current crisis of toxic tap water in Flint, Michigan has caused an uproar, but it’s in part a story that shows how much we take clean tap water for granted. Most homes have five or more taps between the kitchen, bathroom sinks, shower, and washing machine. The cost of tap water across the United States is roughly half a penny per gallon, which is surely far less than the actual value we get from it. But few homes in 1910 had any taps. Treating water with chlorine to cleanse it of toxins was first done in 1908.

“How much money would you demand to give up modern public goods such as highways or emergency fire and ambulance services? How much is air conditioning worth to you? What about penicillin? Entertainment of any kind that is not live? The ability to travel to Australia from Minneapolis in a day’s time for the price of five men’s suits? Recorded music, movies, and cable television? How much would you have to be paid to surrender the Internet for a month? No Facebook. No Netflix. No email. No Google searches. No Google Maps.

“These are Piketty's crumbs."

~Tim Kane, Piketty's Crumbs, Commentary Magazine, April 14, 2016

Read the whole thing.

The very fact that many of us sit in temperature controlled environments, sleeping in comfortable beds, with the leisure to read such things on tiny screens with vast computing power that we can carry around in our pockets proves Piketty wrong.  I'm not an apologist for capitalism--I think unfettered capitalism has very serious issues--but it does unquestionably bring about economic progress and a better quality of life overall.  Let us remember the past, and be wary of the tunnel logic and ahistoricism of our age.  We forget at our peril.

Liberty #3

Guess who is 3 years old today?  

Ponchik! 

She got a doctor kit from my parents for her birthday and has been happily playing with it since we got home from church.  The other kids are basically being nuts today. 

In other news, I ended up making that 11th hour Dottie Angel dress yesterday because: Saturday.

After two freak days of warm weather, it turned quite chilly again overnight, and so it was back to tall boots, tights, and a heavy sweater.  

I used another colorway of Robert Kaufman's London Calling faux Liberty lawn and I lurve it.  If seersucker was my fabric for the summer of 2015, lawn is definitely my fabric for 2016.  It is fairly awesome.  I made my first London Calling lawn dress in April and have worn it quite a bit.  I made another one for my summer rotation from a 1930s style geometric print and am eager to wear it!  I also made a summer blouse from another of the floral lawn prints. 

I'm calling this Liberty #3 because I bought the navy colorway of this print to make up for the fall, and I had that one as #2 before I stumbled across this pink and blue print for spring and summer.  So it is out of sequence, but I really don't care.  I really love this dress.  

Nothing really to note about construction.  My sloper is in really good shape now, and I'm really loving the bust tucks on the front--they just give such a nice shape to the front of the garment.  My sewing machine was a little twitchy yesterday, so it was having a hard time making nice stitches in the lightweight fabric (I went with a 70/10 needle, but probably should have just gone with a stretch needle and been done with it!), but thankfully the print is busy enough that it doesn't show too much.  I made a tiny cutting mistake and cut the (directional) print the wrong way on the back side, but it is so busy that I think it doesn't really show that much.  The only flowers that it is even obvious on are the daisies, and even then I had to look twice to see which way was "up" (which is how I made the mistake in the first place!)  I made sure to cut it all properly on the front.

I'm not even going to apologize for my rumpled self in these photos--I couldn't take them until after church, which meant two hours in the car, plus 3 hours of toddler wrangling at church=wrinkled dress.  I do what I can.

It was a little tough to photograph it accurately--it is mostly a white background dress, which just doesn't have a ton of contrast to show up well against my Northern European skin.

But you get the general sense of it.

My plan was to wear this cardigan with sandals this morning, but I changed that plan right quick when I stuck my head out the door and about froze!  Still, it is nice to have a light-weight option for when the weather changes (again, as it will do at this time of year).  I do like both options with the dress.  I'm really glad I hung on to this cardigan after the winter.  I wore it as a pullover the last two winters, and was almost ready to let it go, but I thought I'd think about it for a while.  When I was casting around for something lightweight to go with this dress, I remembered it, and the color match for the dark blue is spot on.  

Anyway.  It will be nice to have one more piece to add to my summer pile, and also to have one more dress for the last few weeks of my spring rotation.

Details:

Liberty #3 dress: Robert Kaufman London Calling lawn (from Hawthorne Threads, although Fabric.com carries it too), Simplicity 1080, elastic, bias tape

Pink cardigan: LLBean via ebay

Teal blue cardigan: Axcess via ThredUp

Bird headscarf: flea market

Egg pendant: etsy

Tights: Foot traffic via Sock Dreams

Boots: Macy's

Earrings: Etsy