A competitor from the next county is opening a store in the town we left.

This seems stupid to me. Our county can't support two stores like ours. We are the big dogs in our county, and we have watched five other competitors open and close during the time that we have been open. Under normal circumstances, we would be watching them closely, but have no reason for real alarm.

But in this case, we are not operating under normal circumstances.

A quick recap, for those who have not spent the past year closely following the vagaries of my job. I have worked for a small specialty retail store for the past sixteen years. For the past ten, I was the manager of the store. Just about a year ago, the owners opened a second store in the town to the north. It looked like a mistake to me, and in fact it was. Because of leases, it was my store that closed nine months later. Since that time, I have been taking care of the website, doing conferences and workshops and sales visits, and generally enjoying being the outside person. For back to school, the busiest time of the year, I have been in the store -- the second store, in the other town -- four days a week. I am not at all sure what will happen come September. I could go back to the outside job, which would be fine with me. My employer, The Empress, could insist that I continue to commute to the store, in which case I would probably look for another job. Or, because of the amount of bad feeling about our closing the local store, the number of customers naturally lost in a move, and the costs of the failure of the two-store plan, we could go out of business entirely.

We were feeling pretty optimistic about the business. If the upcoming season is good, we should be confident about the store again. My own situation is still uncertain, but that is my own choice.

But now we have a direct, local competitor.

A few years ago, our town had a quilt shop. It was an excellent shop, with good selection and wonderful, knowledgeable staff. We are a small town, but there was enough business to support a quilt shop. A second one opened. It also was a wonderful store. The quilters divided their business between the two (and of course continued to buy all that they could from the big-box discount stores), and both went under. This is what normally happens in these cases. Both go under.

This is not what people think will happen. No one thinks, hmm, if I shop at that new store, I may end up with no store at all next year. They think that there is a new store, how exciting, they'll go to the grand opening, it will be nice to have more choices, how pleasant to have two stores, how handy to have a store in their own neighborhood again. If I were a customer instead of a worker, I would switch -- after all, my old store left town. What did they expect?

I stopped by the competitor yesterday. Their space is empty, but there are large signs in the window. They are advertising for a manager. To my husband, this is simple. I am not sure that I will have a job in September, even if things go well for our store. A job just like the one I had for fifteen years is available in my neighborhood, on a flat road that I can drive on in the winter. I should apply for that job.

I could not do that to The Empress, of course. My husband doesn't understand that. Nor does he see that I could do something that would be a betrayal of people who are almost like family to me, and still find myself out of work if both the stores go out of business, which strikes me as the most likely scenario.

Going for relentless optimism, of course, I can remind myself that we had orders from Virginia and Indiana yesterday, and that this new competitor could persuade The Empress of the importance of the website and the other things I do, relative to the physical store, and give me a stronger case for continuing as a telecommuter.

Today is in theory my day off, but it does not feel like one. I have the computer work to do, and then must take #2 son to the dentist, and then I have a work-related meeting. In the afternoon, I have the youth choir, Bible study, bells, and then choir. I ought to do some housework in there somewhere.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a smart and intriguing book about popular culture, from Left Behind to internet porn. Reading Klosterman is not like reading Bryson or Dawkins; Klosterman is not informative--except about internet porn, since he realizes that women don't know about it. In fact, he has this whole essay on how the only reason we went from no one having heard about the internet to being unable to conduct our lives without it in about a decade is because it quickly became a source of pornography, but then has to end his essay wondering how it is that women were able to catch on to computers so quickly without it. In general, though, if you don't know who Layne Staley is or what "The Real World" was when you start reading, you still won't know when you finish. There were a few of the essays which I just had to skip entirely. I'm sure the whole thing about how being a Lakers fan allows you to make all decisions on the basis of What Would the Lakers Do was very witty, but it just doesn't make any sense without the prior knowledge.

I started the Doctor's Bag from Knit 2 Together. Since I am making it in deep blue wool, there is no point in taking its picture. You can scarcely see the cool texture of the pattern in person, let alone in a photograph. The stitch pattern is very nice, though. It is a slip-stitch pattern in a single color, which I have not seen before, so it ends up very thick and stiff. Telemark is the perfect yarn for this stitch.

However, the stitch pattern is written very stupidly. It is a sixteen row pattern. There are four different rows, and you essentially do them 1234123432143214, which makes sense since you are after a herringbone pattern. The authors have written out rows 1 through 4, but later they begin having things like "Row 12: repeat Row 9." You go to row 9 and it says "Repeat Row 2."" This is very confusing. It really wouldn't have been that much trouble to write the rows out, if it comes to that.

The thing that got me, though, was that I was not even surprised that the directions were badly written. So many modern knitting books are. Every book that comes out -- except for the rare new book by an actual professional designer -- has an errata site. And usually it takes years for all the errors to get onto the site. It's as though the books were wikkis, but expensive and cumbersome.

Knitting patterns have become a very democratic area. Everyone who has a blog writes a book -- I've thought about it myself. And many of the New Knitters don't know the old standard knitting code. So they make up new terms for old stitches and describe things in cumbersome ways because they don't know how to say it in knitterese. I have sympathy for that.

But don't they know any old ladies? Don't they have grandmothers? I feel sure that there are lots of unemployed older knitters out there who would proof these manuscripts at a reasonable price. It's ridiculous to go to all the trouble of writing these books and then to send them out filled with ambiguities and errors. But when was the last time you made something from a new knitting book without having to figure out what they really meant?

And this is only the stitch pattern.

The bag as it is written is enormous -- 19" wide. I am therefore making it on #4 needles instead of #11s, with a single strand of yarn instead of a double. I am optimistic about it.

Otherwise, yesterday I finished up the white satin half slip and got to the gym and watched a Netflix (Serendipity -- quite enjoyed it, and I had serendipitously just read Klosterman on how all women are in love with John Cusak and therefore there is no chance for happiness in modern love) had some visits with friends and dealt with some insurance issues and spent time with my sons. Today I will be back in the store.

The four days a week that I go up there, I wake up dreading the drive and come home seriously tired. I'm fine while I'm there, though. Maybe I will get over it.

  Welcome to SWAPalong 2007! This is a lowkey SWAPalong without contests or prizes. We'll just band together to encourage and support one another.

What's a SWAP? SWAP stands for "sewing with a plan." The name comes from Australian Stitches, a sewing magazine. The idea is simple: you plan a wardrobe first, and then you sew all the pieces. I think we can extend that to include knitting, crochet, refashioning, and any other method of creating clothing.

Pati Palmer of Plamer and Pletsch wrote a book (it's called Looking Good, and there is a link at the top of this post) that goes into lots more detail, but basically you pick a becoming neutral color and another color you love that goes well with that neutral. Find a print that uses those two colors and pull some other solids from the print. Sew up all your pieces in these colors, and make sure that all the pieces work together in terms of shape. With 11 garments, you will be able to dress every day for seven weeks without repeating an outift.

The benefit is that you end up with a wearable wardrobe instead of random pieces that don't go with anything in your closet, you save money by avoiding waste, and you save time by having all your planning done ahead. Stock up on notions in your SWAP colors, and you can spend your sewing time sewing, not figuring out what to do or running to the fabric store.

Why join a SWAPalong? Well, I have joined several knitalongs and sewalongs, and I have found that they have several advantages:

• Doing it together is encouraging and fun. You are more likely to get it done.
• When you have a problem, you have people to ask for help. You can even see what problems others have had and avoid them by learning from their experience.
• When you have a breakthrough or a clever idea, you have people to rejoice with you and benefit from your sharing.

So join us! Everyone is welcome. I have not felt that I was skillful enough to join the SWAP contests, so I am hoping that this will be a SWAPalong where all skill levels feel at ease.

Here are the rules:

• Join the blogring by August 1, 2007, and post your storyboard (a graphic representation of your plan) by the end of August.
• Pick one of these buttons and put it on your blog. You do that by saving the picture to your own system (right click on any of the pictures) and uploading it to xanga. Then put it in your custom module if you have one, or in your posts about your SWAP, or both. You can post to the pool, too. We have some tech-savvy people in the ring who can help if you have trouble with this. You don't have to do this, but it helps us find each other. I'm going to put one in my sidebar as soon as I decide which one to use.
• Make 11 garments and post about them between now and December 1, 2007.
• All the pieces you make should work together as a cohesive wardobe. If you want more guidance, the official contents of a SWAP are as follows: one jacket, four skirts or pants, and six tops. The jacket should work as a suit with a skirt and/or a pair of pants, one top and one skirt should work together as a two-piece dress, and everything should be made from TNT (tried and true) patterns that you can make with confidence. You don't have to follow these detailed guidelines, but doing so will guarantee success.

What will you post?

Well, I hope that you will post about your adventures as you work on your SWAP. I learn a lot from those posts.

I hope you will post about your fabrics and patterns, any great resources you find, and any suggestions you have. I hope you will post tutorials for the things you do well and questions about things you want to do better. I hope we will all post encouraging comments and suggestions for one another.

I will now send invitations to those I think might be interested in joining. If I don't invite you, that just means that I don't know that you will want to join in, so please do not wait for an invitation. Join us!

One of the books on marketing says that men hesitate to join a group of women for fear that they will be talking about underwear. Accordingly, I am warning you here: I am going to talk about underwear. Male readers can now leave for some more decorous blog.

Here is the site that started it all, way back when Dweezy first linked to it.

This site contains sentences like "If you feel difficulty, observe your panties. It's easy!" and "Is not difficult, but I dared to make it complex." Drawn by the fascinating syntax and the clever pictures, I read all the pages. By the time I had done so, I was seized by a desire to make panties.

Well, maybe not seized, since a year or two passed and I am only now getting around to it. But I thought about it from time to time.

Why would anyone want to make panties? This of course is half the appeal. It's like Everest. If it is possible to make something yourself, yet no one does, then I want to make it.

But the online lingerie makers are so enthusiastic. They say that you can make panties yourself in 20 minutes from old T-shirts and scraps of cocktail dresses. They claim that their lingerie is way better than store-bought. They talk about it as though it were, well, hand-knit sweaters or something.

Now, I have nothing against store-bought panties. We will not speak of my Fruit of the Loom experience, except to say that my mama always warned me against false economy, but as a general rule I can buy my usual brand and put them on in the morning and never think about them again.

But I did once notice La Bella's underthings in the green room, and I have to say that I could tell her gear came from somewhere a lot more elegant than my Land's End stuff. I don't remember anyone else's undies, either, so I guess there is a clear cachet to really fancy pants. And I know for a fact that I will never even consider dropping $119 on a pair from La Perla. So it is possible that handsewn underthings would make you feel more distinguished in the dressing room, or impress your husband or something. And, from the other side of the question, you could save a bit if you really can construct your whole intimate wardrobe from scraps and old commemorative Ts.

So, supposing that you want to make your own knickers, how can you do it?

Here is a tutorial with photographs and interesting sentence structure. It also has pattern diagrams. So does the first link, but that pattern has an upward rather than a downward curve at the back. If you want a cheeky effect, that's fine, but do not expect coverage. The first link does, however, show you how to place the pattern pieces on a handkerchief, so if you want to do that (and do not measure more than 35" at the hip) check it out. Here is a PDF pattern to size up. This last pattern has directions here, but starts by telling you to use "a clean (if you care) shirt." There is a casual charm to the instructions, though, and the author points out that your collection of T-shirts from camp or whatever will get more use in your underwear drawer, which seems reasonable to me. Here is a source for what seem to me to be specialized panty patterns, for those who want to make Magic Knickers or Granny Pants. And you can also copy your own. If you have a pair of scanties that is ready to be retired, you could cut it apart and voila, your pattern is ready.

The less adventuresome might like to do what I did, and buy a pattern. Here is mine:

I read that this is old-fashioned. The source I read it in claims that slips are No Longer Worn, camisoles are strictly for outerwear, and teddies and tap pants no longer exist.

So I sort of figured I had better buy a pattern, for when I am the only woman in America who still wears a slip. Then I will be able to make my own. Men catching a glimpse of lace as I step into a car will be fascinated, and yong girls will ask one another "How does she do that?" When I tell them, they will ask whether this "slip" of which I speak has a pocket for a cell phone.

I also have the Kwik-Sew book of lingerie patterns and the Martha Pullen one. I use them for nightgowns, but they contain patterns for panties. I got mine in a bookswap at  frugalreader.com, but I bet you can get them at fabric stores or at Amazon. I also have a 1940s Singer sewing book with diagrams for drafting your own, but those really are old-fashioned. They have buttons. I may be the last slip-wearing woman, but I am not prepared to button up my panties.

So I was musing on these things while I worked with the satin yesterday afternoon.

I made a half slip to go with the camisole. It also has a curved hem, and I put a diagonal line of the ribbon at the edge to make it match. I have not completed the hem, but it will just be a plain hand-rolled hem

This is a crepe-backed satin, using the Vogue pattern. I changed the pattern to have just one seam instead of two.

I think that this set could be worn under a suit in the summer with no need for a blouse, and it could also do service under a low-cut dress to avoid any peekaboo effect.

It has a simple elastic waist through a casing, and it was very very easy to make.

 I also finished my socks. These are plain utilitarian socks made from Knitpicks Essentials in "burgundy."

They are just calculated. I like to keep Mary Thomas's Book of Knitting handy when I get to the parts with shaping.

And by the time I had polished off these projects, I had determined that I would try my hand at making panties.

 Now, if you went over and read those tutorials, you had a practical test of your visual-spatial intelligence. The first step is making enclosed seams, or the point at which you get your knickers in a twist.

If you are like me and this seemed terribly difficult and implausible and made you not attempt making panties for a couple of years, I have to give you the good news. This part is not hard.

Everyone has exactly the same instructions on this, and if you just follow them exactly, you will have no difficulty, even if you can't imagine ahead of time how it will work.

Once you've done that, the rest is very simple. Two straight seams on the sides, normal elastic application, and you have a pair of underpants.

It took me longer than twenty minutes, but not much longer.

I know it was longer than 20 minutes, because when I started, the guys were watching Man vs. Wild. That is, the boys were being impressed by the host's exploits, and my husband was giving recipes for all the creatures he tangled with.

I think that it would be very lowering for an adventurer to go adventuring with my husband. The adventurer would be getting all dramatic and trying to scare everybody with how dangerous the things were, and my husband would reach over and snap the cobra's neck and start building a fire.

You see, if you are going to eat a cobra,  you want to boil it and pull the meat off and eat it with rice and hot peppers.

He said that the snake on the TV was not posionous. He said that rather dismissively, frankly, since the poisonous ones are tastier.

Anyway, by the time I finished, there was some guy trying out jobs involving manure, so it must have been at least half an hour.

I made the panty and camisole set in about two hours, total, including adjusting the camisole pattern to make something a little more casual and comfy that the recipient could sleep in, and spending some time with needle and thread fixing up little flaws in my machine stitching.

I made this from a slinky novelty print knit, with black stretch lace, from patterns in The Kwik-Sew Book of Beautiful Lingerie. The set took half a yard of the fashion fabric, as the sewing bloggers say, and I bought a plain white T-shirt for $1.99 (on sale at Hancock Fabrics) to cut the crotch lining.

I have a day off today, and I hope that I will stop fooling around and finish up my SWAP part II. The SWAP part III looms on the horizon. Khali Mama, who is good enough at sewing that she might even be included among the sewing bloggers, is going to join the SWAPalong, and perhaps you will, too. I will make us a blogring when I get back from the gym. Toodles!

  Alexander  McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street is a novel written as a daily serial in a newspaper, sort of a fiction blog on paper. He has an introduction describing the challenges of this form, but I think he is ideally suited to it. I've read half a dozen of his other books, and it always seems to me that they are like collections of short stories masquerading as novels. This way he has 110 little bitty short stories adding up to a novel by the end.

I finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Everything. He ends the book with the development of humankind. I was an anthro minor in college, I studied physical anthropology,and I have kept up pretty well with developments in the field since then, so when I read these discussions, it is like reading a formulaic genre novel -- you can enjoy the story, even though you know how it's going to come out. (It's going to come out with a lot of uncertainty, in case you were wondering, and Bryson does an excellent job of making the unsettled information fascinatingly mysterious.)

Still, it was a particular pleasure to read about the early humans' crafts. Apparently they were wild about making hand axes. "They made them in the thousands," Bryson quotes Ian Tattersall saying, "It's strange because they were quite intensive objects to make. It was as if they made them for the sheer pleasure of it." What's more, they carried quartz and obsidian for miles to their special workplaces, which didn't have such pretty materials to hand naturally.

Yes, my dears, the early humans had stashes.

At this point, you have several philosophical options. You can say that these early people, created in the image of Creator  God, were naturally creative. You can say that there must have been some adaptive value to it which we have not yet discovered. You can resist the desire to explain, and simply feel kinship with these early craftspeople.

Here is where I was reading last night, for the Summer Challenge.

This is how far I got on my knitting -- almost finished, as you see.

Regardless of the eventual fate of Erin, my Fair Isle cardi, it is too hot to go on with that now, so I have just under an inch to decide on my next knitting project. I am debating between beginning Lavold's Ivy in Knitpicks Essentials, or doing the Doctor's Bag from Knit Two Together in Telemark.

If I begin the sweater now, it will be ready to wear when the weather is ready for it. It will be part of my SWAP Part III. I need a sweater more than I need another bag.

The Doctor's Bag, however, will be made up of smaller pieces, an important consideration for hot weather knitting.

The Doctor's Bag is done in a fancy stitch, and Ivy is all stockinette till you get to the lace edging, so I might in fact be wise to do both. That way I will have plain stockinette to knit while I am reading and the pattern stitch for times when I want something a bit more involving.

Yes, I was thinking about all this in a desultory way, along with thinking about questions of utility and pleasure in making things, which I have been thinking about at a somewhat aimless level for a couple of weeks.

I am about to begin another round of workshops, during which I will no longer have time for desultory thinking  because my mind will be taken up with thinking through the workshops. I noticed this when I did the first round in June. Of course I think all the time -- you have no choice, really -- but in June I was thinking about more and more clever ways to convey physics to little children. When, in July, I found myself thinking about pantyhose and the distinction between art and craft and random stuff like that, I was almost surprised. It was like, Oh yes, that's how I usually think. Discursively.

Here is what I plan to do today after church. Grocery shopping will have to come into it somewhere, of course, and housework, and I will finish that sock, but I have quite a bit of satin to play with, too.

And, for the sake of random thought, I offer you this picture of food with an in-your-face color scheme.

I didn't plan that it would be like this. I was just putting out the things to go on last night's burgers. I am getting sick of making and of eating hamburgers, but my husband had gone to the grocery and gotten the ingredients so that I would have something easy to cook when I got home from work. When three big old guys were hanging around all day at home, not working.

Anyway, that is an orange tomato from our garden, quite delicious, and I think that it set the tone for the extreme vividness of the colors.I almost switched to a white plate, but fortunately I realized in time that doing so would have been a little bit loony, and I didn't.

And today is my xangaversary. I went back to read my entries on this date from 2004 on, and I find that last year I wrote about the craft vs. art issue in a completely different way. Fortunately, I didn't write on this topic in 2005 or 2004, or it would have been spooky.

  I completed the camisole, giving it a curved edge with a hand-rolled hem. I believe I will make a matching slip for this. Then, having done the easy bits, I will embark on the more specialized things. Panties next. The sewing bloggers say that you can make a pair of panties in 20 minutes.

And what's up with that, anyway? In the knitting blog community we have lots of people who can scarcely purl, and yet the sewing bloggers consist only of those who can finish a garment in 20 minutes. Where do they keep their beginners?

I still need to finish two more pieces for my SWAP Part II, and I am hopeful of making some progress there over the weekend (my weekend is Sunday and Monday -- I will be at the store today). The sock is just about ready to have the toe put on, but I do not take its picture, as it looks so much like the first sock of the pair.

But satin and ribbons are fun to play around with. 

People who make lingerie point this out. They say that you get to use small bits of luxurious things, which is less extravagant than making evening gowns. They point out that you can wear your fripperies regardless of age or occasion without concern for appropriateness, because no one knows but you. They say that imperfections don't matter (see the no one else knows bit above). So I am overcoming my distaste for multiple projects in order to continue playing with satin.

I am also trying to make buttons for the proposed SWAPalong.

I have, after much arduous trial and error, figured out how to put words on the pictures.

I have always been enormously impressed by people's ability to do this, and, as with so many things of that nature, I am slightly disappointed to discover how easy it is. You know how, in Canticle for Leibowitz, they have been meticulously filling in all the blue parts on blueprints, and then they find out that it was white ink on a blue background and have this sinking feeling because it was so simple and they had made it so difficult?

I am familiar with that feeling. 

The thing about the buttons is that they ought to go to a page or something.

We could make a blogring for it, and have the button go there. And there would be the list of xangans who were playing along.

Or, in keeping with the low-key nature of the proposed SWAPalong, we could have the button be merely decorative. We currently have three in our group, so we can probably all remember one another.

This week's Summer Challenge books were Death Comes for the Archbishop and Bones to Pick. I will finish A Blush with Death today.

We were playing chess last night. Only two can play at a time, of course, so there was some spectating. I was knitting and hemming and cleaning the kitchen in the interstices.

I never win at chess. When I play with #2 son, we often get down to the stage of his chasing my king around the board until I give up, but I never actually win. This is because, out of all my family, I have the least  visual/spatial intelligence.

I expect you are familiar with the idea of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, in 1983, proposed that there were eight different forms of intelligence, eight ways that people could be smart, eight ways to approach teaching and learning tasks.

Other people have proposed more divisions, too.

I don't know that the divisions matter much. As long as we get the idea that there are different ways to approach the world and they all have value, we have probably gotten the most out of the theory.

I had proposed playing Scrabble. I completely dominate in Scrabble. We rarely play it at our house.

Mostly we play more even games. Why play a game in which you know who is going to win ahead of time?

#1 daughter gave us a video trivial pursuit game which I always lose. #1 son pretty much always wins. While I am generally a good person to have on your team for trivia games, this one is all about stuff on TV, and I just don't know that stuff. When they ask sports questions, I answer "Kobe Bryant," because he seems to be the answer a lot of the time.

Like little kids in the children's message at church. If the person doing the message is one of those who asks questions to which there is an expected answer, there will always be some kids who call out "Jesus" because Jesus is so often the right answer.

I'm like that with Kobe Bryant in that game. Occasionally I mix it up by saying "Michael Jordan."

My husband and #2 daughter are the visual/spatial people in our family. I mean, I am the lowest, but then comes #1 daughter, then the boys, then #2 daughter, and then my husband. This is why he has pool-playing trophies. And let me just give you a friendly warning never to play cards with him for money. He remembers them all. He can also fix cars.

But he dares not play Scrabble with me, let me tell you.

The annual fried chicken feast took place. The cookies are supposed to be flags and Liberty Bells.

There was also banana bread.

Both the banana bread and cookie recipes are from Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book. She has some nasty suggestions for cooking, but is pretty sound on baking as long as you replace "shortening" with something more wholesome.

It took me three hours to prepare all this.

My memory tells me that we used to do all these preparations as a family, and that they were fun in those days, but I could be misremembering.

My requests for help yesterday led to teenage snippiness and quarreling, which was the downside of the day.

Fortunately, it was a brief part of the day.

I called my daughters, and found that #1 was having a meal in a casino and #2 was going to a ball game.

The boys and I spent the afternoon watching the Monk marathon, playing chess and/or video games, and setting off firecrackers. 

My husband was working on the cars.

He keeps trying to get the rest of us to be interested in the cars, and we are not.

I am willing to help try to figure out what the auto repair manual is saying, but that is it.

When the girls lived at home, their boyfriends would often be willing to go peer into the bowels of the cars with him, but our own sons are like me -- if the car goes, I do not otherwise care about it at all.

We are fortunate that Daddy keeps the cars going.

After dark, we played with sparklers. I love sparklers.

I made progress on my sock. However, while I was working on it I realized that I have been doing very mundane crafting. I have been making ordinary practical wool socks for the cool weather, and ordinary everyday clothing to wear to work.

Nothing wrong with that, but we need a bit of irrationality in our crafting, too, don't we? A bit of suspense, even. Planning to make things and then making them as we had planned is good (and I hope that some of you will join me and Canadian National in our SWAPalong doing just that), but there should also be some foolish projects.

I have therefore decided to go ahead and do something I've been thinking about for a while, and make some lingerie.

I'm starting with a camisole, something that I have made before.

This is from the Kwik-Sew Book of Beautiful Lingerie, a book with patterns in it. It has camisoles, teddies, panties, and nightgowns in sizes XS to XL. You simply trace off the patterns onto tissue paper or interfacing (in this case, I just traced it directly onto the fabric). I was fortunate enough to get this book from a Frugal reader pal.

This is white crepe-back satin, cut ont he bias for stretch. I am making it tailored rather than frilly with a fancy ribbon mitered at the points of the front.

I did French seams, which is to say that I sewed the wrong sides together and then turned it and encased those seams with another line of stitching.

This is the back, with a self-fabric bias facing.The straps are silk cording, and I put them inside the seams.

I added a front facing, and will be doing a hand-rolled hem.

All this means that there will be no raw edges and no machine stitching.

I will be up at the store today, and then walking in the park with Partygirl, but I may finish the camisole this evening.

I finished Bones to Pick and moved on to A Blush With Death. Both are very lightweight mysteries, and neither is good enough that I would recommend it to you. Even so, I will be reading A Blush With Death today, because I have the settled intention of lying around reading.

I was looking at the family photo albums last night to see what we've done on Independence Day in past years. There the family was, going on hikes and visiting museums and fairs and concerts and rodeos.

Not anymore.

If you have children and they like you to take them places, be thankful. They grow up and move away or want to do things with their friends or in World of Warcraft and think that 90 degrees is too hot for going to pet goats and stuff.

Adults can't really enjoy going to pet goats without children.

So, since I live in a houseful of stodgy teens and adults, I will be spending a day in lassitude. Iced tea, air conditioning, knitting...

The boys have come up with a menu for the Independence Day feast, so I will also be cooking. We will probably watch fireworks on TV.

We're getting old.

Still, that is a pleasant way to spend a day off, isn't it?

Enjoy your holiday, exciting or relaxing.

Canadian National is toying with the idea of joining me in a SWAPalong. I am in favor of this. All the official SWAPalongs are a) contests and b) populated exclusively with sewing experts. We need a casual SWAPalong where we can encourage one another and assure each other that our set-in sleeves don't look that bad.

I had the opportunity to look at Australian Stitches, the magazine that came up with the term SWAP in the first place. Palmer and Pletsch wrote the book, and I guess Timmel fabrics came up with the strict rules, but the Aussies are the ones who should get the Nobel Prize for sewing.

It is an impressive magazine. I like that there are models of all ages and sizes. There will be an article on how to choose becoming patterns if you are thin, and then one on how a man with "rounded buttock" can adjust his patterns (actually, they aimed it at his wife, but still...) and then one on how to adapt the current fashion trends to your age, with specifics for those from 20s to 70s.

There are a lot of features on fashion (they are doing winter 2007 over there, so would that mean that they are ahead of us or behind?), but also technical articles showing how to miter lace or perfect a mock fly, pieces on clothing history, and galleries of wearable art pieces.

I found a bit of a language barrier. I have no trouble with British English, and I have a New Zealand dictionary my sister sent me, so I am okay with the kiwis unless they are talking about food, but Australians are a whole other thing. I have no idea what a spruiker is, nor do I understand what it is to "get szhooshy." "Race wear" is not a clear mental category for me, and there is that gap while I calculate what 40 degrees would be in fahrenheit.

But they have the same pattern companies we do, and most of the terms to do with construction are the same as either British or American ones, so the practical information is readily available. As soon as I figure out what "elastane" is.

It rained yesterday. It was the perfect day to sit in the reading corner and read, so that is what I did. I finished up the tunic and knitted up the first skein of that sock yarn, while my husband and #2 son watched the Kung Fu movie marathon on Spike.

#1 son didn't get to be involved in this because he had to go to work, poor soul.

I did get to the gym, and there a remarkable coincidence occurred. Or began.

I was reading Smithsonian on the treadmill, and in particular I read about the peccadillos of Linnaeus and the counterintuitive information that we have relatively few ancestors if we go back far enough, rather than doubling the number every generation.

Neither of these things was new information to me, but they are a pretty random pair of pieces of data. So I was bemused when I got back home and settled in with Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and read discussions of both those topics.

Now there were lots of other topics in both the Smithsonian and the Short History, so the overlap was perhaps not that startling -- I wouldn't know without lots of calculations requiring data I don't have -- but it made me think of topics in general. The topic of topics, if you will.

Like many others, I blog at least in part because there are things I like to talk about which are not of interest to most of the people in my physical world. People in general are not interested in knitting, so we can write about it here in blogland, and the community of knitters, though small enough in general to be spread thinly across the country, is mighty online. In the physical world, I find myself in lots of conversations about politics and education and current events, so those topics rarely arise in my blog.

Math and science are also topics which are of limited interest to most people. I don't know why this should be, but it is true. So if I am thinking about those topics, I usually end up discussing them here.

But there is another topic which I discuss here and not in the physical world. Clothes. I almost never discuss clothes in daily life. And yet, I think it unlikely that none of the women I know is interested in clothes. I would have thought that women often discussed clothes.

It is possible that my interest in clothes is primarily that of a producer, not a consumer. Maybe people have actually tried to discuss clothing with me, and I have thought they were talking about shopping, which I associate with economics and marketing, and so I have responded incorrectly.

It is possible that I do not look as though I would be capable of discussing clothes, so that I get left out of those conversations. I may never know.

In the interests of hiding the squash from my boys, I made a squash casserole yesterday. Perhaps you would like to make one, too, now that the bounty of summer squash is upon us. Even if you are not trying to hide squash, it is still very tasty.

You will need some crackers. The person who gave me the recipe uses saltines, but we use Hot and Spicy Cheez-Its. Neither is a healthy choice, but I have never tried it with Rye-Krisp. Crush one cup of those crackers.

Then get out your grater and grate up a cup of summer squash, a carrot or two, a bit of cheese, and a chunk of onion. Mix all these things together with an egg and  bake them in a casserole dish at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. The original recipe included a can of cream soup, but I don't include that and have never missed it.

So, yeah, there was some sewing and knitting and cooking, a bit of exercise, some family time, some reading, and even a little work, but mostly we had a lazy, rainy day. Our cat is demonstrating the feel of the day here.

Today I will be back at the store. This evening I will have a walk with Partygirl, and see whether I can get her to talk about math, science, or clothes.

In a spirit of experimentation.