Author: Amanda Wynn

nerd. book lover. coffee addict.

Pattern du jour: Hot Patterns 1016 Hello, Sailor Pants

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My current sewing project. I’ve been sewing like crazy for the past couple of months, with very little success, since my learning methodology with crafts seems to involve trying to most elaborate interesting project and failing repeatedly until it sticks. Case in point–these. I’ve never owned a pair of pants like this, so I have no working knowledge of how they work to draw on. The instructions are also pretty brutal.  But that’s why the internet is amazing because there are a few other blogs I’ve found with the same problem to draw on. Also, buttonholes–my machine is very basic, so I have no button hole function and have been winging it with chalk markings and my zigzag stitch. As a perfectionist, I tend to be appalled by the results–but then eyeing buttonholes on my ready made clothing makes me realize no one notices these glaring mistakes when they aren’t the ones making them. There are huge asymmetrical oopses all over my storebought clothing, and sewing has really opened my eyes to this (and, more on this another day, the fact that my store bought things are probably made by hand by someone overseas working in awful conditions for little money and I never think about the ways I’m feeding into that system with my happy little “bargain hunts.”)

I’m sewing it first in this ugly military green suiting that I bought online. I’m a sucker for a pretty color on my (poorly calibrated?) computer monitor, which upon arrival, tends to fall far short of my expectations. I’ve learned to buy reds that look almost black on screen to get that rich, bluish deep wine red that makes me drool. I’ve been burned a few times into buying what I thought was a beautiful burgundy that ended up being bright tomato, which isn’t my thing. So I can mangle this pair if need be in the attempt to figure out that front flap feature. No grommets this time around, though in the future I might try them for a fly closure.

Which brings me to why these pants are amazing, theoretically, for my body type. It has taken me decades of living as a woman to realize the real meaning of the fact that body types differ structurally. No amount of stomach exercise will ever make me look like a Victoria Secret model, not because I am less of a woman somehow, as I tended to assume subconsciously in my younger years. But because of fucking geometry. The mass of my body is arranged in such a way that a broad rib cage sits on a nearly nonexistent waist stacked on narrow hips. I will never have an hourglass figure, and the little belly that results from this configuration used to make me feel crappy. But I’m starting to understand the female skills of style and dressing as a systematic analysis of body types and how to flatter them. They are visual representation hacks. And these pants will be fantastic for that, since the flare at the bottom flatters my body type (apple shaped. See: Penelope Cruz, Angelina Jolie, Sigourney Weaver) and eventually when I’ve mastered the pattern I will attempt it with buttons on the side seams instead, which will take mass away from my already pronounced belly curve and put it on my undefined hips where it actually does some good.

So for today: attaching all the parts together in the right configuration. Hopefully.

a valentine offering.

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Not much to say in terms of my own life / thoughts these days; feeling hermit-y, I suppose. But I do have this lovely little offering. Tilda Swinton’s speech from the V&A Bowie exhibition. (Original source: here.) I love it so.

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Tilda Swinton at the opening of David Bowie isDear Dave

When I asked you if you wanted me to say anything here tonight

You said ‘Only three words, one of them testicular..’

So i’ll pass that on

Here I am at surely the most eclectic of all the London branches of Bowie Anonymous
All the nicest possible freaks are here

We’re in the Victoria and Albert Museum preparing to rifle through your drawers
It’s truly an amazing thing

This was my favourite playground as a child
Medieval armour : my fantasy space wear

And, alongside, when I was 12 – and a square sort of kid in a Round Pond sort of childhood, not far from here – I carried a copy of Aladdin Sane around with me – a full 2 years before i had the wherewithal to play it

The image of that gingery boney pinky whitey person on the cover with the liquid mercury collar bone was – for one particular young moonage daydreamer – the image of planetary kin, of a close imaginary cousin and companion of choice

It’s taken me a long time to admit, even to myself, let alone you, that it was the vision and not yet the sound that
hooked me up – but if i can’t confess that here and now, then when and where?

We all have our own roots
And routes
To this room

Some of us – the enviable – found the fellowship early in the funfests of Billy’s Bowie Nights
or equivalent lodges from San Francisco to Aukland to Heidelberg and all points in between

For others, it was a more lonesome affair, paced out in a sort of private morse code like following bread crumbs through a forest

I’m not saying that if you hadn’t pitched up I would have worn a pie crust collar and pearls like some of those I went to school with
I’m not saying that if you hadn’t weighed in, Princess Julia would have been less inventive with the pink blusher
Simply that, you provided the sideways like us with such rare and out-there company
Such fellowship
You pulled us in and left your arm dangling over our necks
And kept us warm – as you have for – isn’t it ? – centuries now
You were
You are
One of us

And you have remained the reliable mortal in amongst all the immortal shapes you have thrown

Nothing more certain than changes

Always with a weather eye out
Always awake and clocking the fallout

Those Mayans must have known something when they set their calendar down before
January 2013

Because, of course, now all bets are off

I know, because you told me, how tickled you were to knock Elvis – for once! – out of the headlines on your shared birthday this year

There’s so much for all of us to be happy about since then

Yet, I think the thing I’m loving the most about the last few weeks
is how clear it now is – how undeniable – that the freak becomes the great unifier
The alien is the best company after all
For so many more than the few

They wanted a Bowie fan to speak tonight. They could have thrown a paper napkin and hit a hundred.
I’m the lucky one, standing up to speak for all my fellow freaks anxious to win the pub quiz and
claim their number one most super-fan tshirt

I want to give thanks to the Victoria and Albert Museum for indulging us so
For laying on our dream show

For showing us – look at their advance ticket sales – that , as is
written along the bottom of this months Q magazine,
‘why we all live in David’s world now’

To Gucci and Sennheiser for putting up the cash, laying on the sound and vision
To Geoffrey and Victoria for curating an entire universe so beautifully, on behalf of us all

When I think of what it used to feel like once
To be a freak who liked you
To feel like a freak like you
– a freak who even looked a little like you

And then I think of the countless people of every size and feather who are going to walk through this trace of your journey here and pick up the breadcrumbs
in the great hub of this mothership over these Spring and Summer months..

And how familiar and stamped you are into ALL of our our collective DNA

I’m just plain proud

So

Where are we now?

Well
I know you aren’t here tonight, but
Somehow, no matter

We are –
And you brought us out of the wainscotting like so many
Freaky old bastards
Like so many fan boys and girls
Like so many loners and pretty things and dandies and dudes and dukes and duckies and testicular types
And pulled us together

Together
By you
Dave Jones
Our not so absent, not so invisible, friend

Every alien’s favourite cousin
Certainly mine

We have a nice life

Yours aye

Tilly

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

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In a year, this is my only blog post. I facebook things sometimes, but have the stomach for it less and less. It’s hard to log on to that or my newsfeeds and see things like rhino breed pronounced extinct juxtaposed with I saved $30 couponing or this new keratin treatment is sooo amazing omg. People act like the Internet changed everything for my generation, this strange generation on the cusp of digital nativity and free range disconnected existence. I don’t think it’s the Internet so much as the cell phone and the development of our willingness to be constantly in contact. There’s an inner wilderness that demands conservation. Though I used to blog my ephemeral overwrought gooey feelings quite prolifically, I find it difficult to put much out there these days. And the more voices chatter on, the less anyone listens, I suspect. 

Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day

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Remember when U2 was good? Me, neither, I think I was a zygote. Ah, but once. There was a time when they were…oh, Bono, in your bemulleted Joshua Tree Days.

But about new years.

One of my resolutions is: to work more diligently at the writerly blog. I used to keep one, back before my Internet puberty hit and I began to distrust everyone and feel a need to mask my interior life a little better. And to log IP addresses.

I’m still uncertain of how to navigate the personal/public divide that the internet so problematizes. So all I can promise is some half formed essayistic rambles from time to time, and a kind of collection of things that inspire or intrigue my consciousness. A newsfeed of things on my brain. Mostly though, hopefully, a nest of inspirations.

My goal is two posts per week. Even I can manage to take note of a few things I find stimulating or invigorating or challenging to my worldview a week. A few things to incite me to engage more fully with the world than I was doing before I noticed them.

I have interest ADD, so I offer no promises what these might be. You, oh Gentle Reader, might be stuck with knitting patterns, gardening tips and memes trashing Monsanto. I also might, at times, become a bit tiresome in my gender/class warrior modes. I also might bore you with a barrage of recipes and productivity hacks and interior design enthusiasms because I’m domestic like that. You’ve been warned.

We’ll see how this all plays out.