I’m reading a book called Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk. I’m not going to say that this is the ideal summer reading book. In fact, if I had a trashy novel on hand, then I might not be reading it at all. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting book. It begins with the idea that wealth used to be based on real things, like land and gold (which, while it may not be useful, is rare and has a physical presence) but has now become a matter of faith.

That is, stock in AOL was only valuable in that people believed that other people might, in the future, be willing to pay more for it than the current people.

The book is giving numerous examples of cases throughout history in which people treated money as an object of faith rather than as actual wealth, and the bad ends to which those people came. It’s early on, so I don’t know what will happen next, but I’ll keep you posted.

Summer top #10 of the Summer Top Project is coming along nicely. In the picture above you can see the yards of bias binding I cut from the fabric, and at the right you can see the top with some of the binding completed. I plan to wear it to a party on Friday night.

This is yet another top made with Butterick 5470. This is in fact the fourth such top I’ve made. They’re cool and summery without showing any bra straps, and they’re floaty and therefore don’t cling, and they look respectable under a jacket, too, which isn’t true of T-shirts, however much we wish it were.

But I probably can’t make any more of them. I’m thinking about making the pants or jacket from that pattern, though. Once this top is finished, I will have made 10 summer tops for the STP, and that’s enough. It’s time to move on.

Accordingly, I went to Jo Anne Fabrics and looked around. I was surprised to discover that they have a really nice selection of fabrics.  Since I don’t have a proper plan yet, I resisted the urge to buy yardage and instead bought some 99 cent fat quarters in all sorts of colors and patterns. I think I can use them for a gift for #2 daughter, whose birthday is coming up.

While doing the handwork on summer top #10 and contemplating both #2 daughter’s birthday gift and what I should make next, I watched a TV show called Dirt. Netflix has raised their prices, so I feel that I should use their services as much as possible in order to continue feeling as though I’m getting my money’s worth. This could mean that I both pay almost $24/month and also use up lots of time watching TV. Still, it is over 100 degrees outside, so what would I be doing instead? Cleaning house? Shopping? Reading about the financialization of finance and the influence of the Chicago school of economics?

Exactly.

Today I will of course go to church and I must blog for my Aussies, but then I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I didn’t watch the remaining episodes of Dirt while binding and hemming.

Google Camp is going to put us up at a 4 star hotel on Via Nazionale. Apparently there will not be cabins and lanyards. #2 daughter is coming along.

We’ll be leaving three months from today. I need to learn KML and Italian (well, actually, the languages so far represented among the campers are English and Dutch, so I guess KML is more important than Italian). I’m thinking about my fall wardrobe, too, though I think Americans in Europe should probably always wear jeans and T shirts. Maybe my Google T-shirt would be the thing.

However, I have only one top left for my STP, so I’m thinking about fall sewing anyway. At the moment, I’m contemplating this Vogue Wardrobe pattern, 1100, which seems suitable for fall in Italy, as well as for client meetings and classes, which are what I would mostly be doing in it, realistically.  

In three months I could also lose a few pounds, save up a little shopping money, improve my skills at photography, and write lots of blog posts ahead so I won’t have to work all the time I’m in Rome.

There is a book about sewing a travel wardrobe (out of print, but people have talked about it in the sewing blogs) which advocates making a coordinated dress, jacket, pants, and skirt. Presumably you also have to make a blouse, so this pattern would be perfect. I figure I could use linen and rayon challis, so I would be wrinkled all the time but look as though that were intentional. I could also make the jacket in this Italian silk houndstooth fabric I have, this showing respect for the country I’m visiting.

This is the international color palette for this fall, so I could even follow the color suggestions in the pattern as long as I made the dress in Honeysuckle Pink instead of red.

What are the chances that I will actually do this? Hmm…

Summer top #9 of the Summer Top Project is completed, and very comfy in the oppressive heat we’re currently having. I can’t quite decide what pattern to use with that embroidered satin, so I knitted yesterday instead of sewing. I also did some work, went to the farmers market with my husband and bought lots of nice vegetables, did the grocery shopping, hung out a bit with #1 son, talked with #2 son, and finished building the file cabinet for my office.

Really, my husband did most of the work on the cabinet. This is not because I’m lazy, but because he can’t stand to have it done as badly as I would do it. In fact, any time I take a bit of initiative and do something in the building line, he has to take it apart and redo it because I’ve done it so badly. I therefore just hang about and provide moral support.

The file cabinet matches the new desk desk . Both came in boxes and then needed to be put together. If you have the skills, this is a great way to save on new furniture, but it does require skill. It’s like having your sewing cut out for you — definitely faster and easier than having to cut it out yourself, but by no means ready-made. We’ve been working on it a bit at a time for most of the week.
Here’s all the filing that has to be done.

It’s a good thing I don’t use paper much, or   I’d really be a long way from having my office ready.

I think I need to go through all these files and make sure that I actually need to keep the papers, and also that I know where they all are.

The other thing I did this week, besides working, was to start attending cardio pump class with The Empress and Mrs. Brown. I hadn’t seen The Empress in a year or so, and haven’t been to an exercise class in longer than that. I was having fun till we got to the squats and planks, and then I really wanted to quit, but didn’t.

I’m planning to go three times a week till the new semester, at which point I’ll have to change my schedule and won’t be able to go with friends any more. Presumably by then I’ll be in the habit and won’t have trouble continuing on my own.  

Work has slowed down a bit. More accurately, my class ended, which frees up 15 hours of work time for me. I don’t know whether work slowed down because I was teaching all those hours, or if perhaps it’s good that I’ve been teaching all those hours because my other work slows down in the summer.

Either way, Monday was a holiday and Tuesday was all about grading and paperwork, but then we got going on some internal projects. I’m doing ebooks for our educational site.

#1 daughter ran some numbers and calculated that this could be a profitable product for us, so we’re risking the time and money involved.

The thing about a service business is that you can only increase the income of the business by working more hours. The thing about a product is that you have to put in the time and money for design and production up front, in hopes that it will pay off.

We’ll see what happens. I’m enjoying it, but whether we’ll be able to pay the boys’ tuition next month remains suspenseful.

The other notable thing this week is that I’ve now been at Xanga for seven years. Clearly, I should have just paid for a life membership instead of paying year by year. When I started here, I had just learned the word “blog,” and now I am a professional blogger, writing every week about things like home security systems and software. Amazing. My own blog has certainly suffered.

Following an extremely lazy weekend, I have top #7 of the Summer Top Project on the left, and the major seams of top #8 finished, as you can see below.

Today I have to grade papers, calculate final grades, and turn all the stuff in. At some point soon I probably need to print them out and take the up to the Next County and sign my fall contract.

I enjoyed my summer class very much, but I am definitely ready not to teach for a bit. In fact, even though I just had a three day weekend complete with rodeo, farmers market, socializing, and  Philly/sewing marathon, I am actually ready not to work for a bit. This won’t happen, but I seem for some reason to think that there should be hiking, water, and hammocks in my future.

In fact, there will be analytics reports, articles on public health issues, and possibly the launch of our latest website. Also lots of blogging.

These are all good things.

The Empress invited me to join her at her exercise class MWF mornings bright and early, and I will certainly do that. Also, I am at my desk in blue jeans and bright summer top, so there is a sense of summerishness.

Just a few years ago, summer was a mad time of very hard work in back to school retail, so I’m not sure where I’m getting  this mental image of summer as a time to relax and commune with nature.

Possibly I’m going back in my mind to my youthful summers, or summers with my kids when we mostly went camping.

I’ll finish up top #8 this week. I was drawn to it by its complex pleats, which are lost in this batik quilting cotton I’ve made it from, and I made too large a size, so it ends up looking more like a smock than a blouse. A summer smock will be fine with me, though. I might make this one again in the right size, in a solid color so the complex pleats will show.

I still have my embroidered satin left, and I think that will be the end of the Summer Top Project. It has definitely been a success; I’ll have nine summer tops for just about the price of one  RTW (okay, I know that it’s possible to buy summer tops for $10, but the ones I contemplated in catalogs were all in the $60+ range. Since it’s a hypothetical blouse, I might as well choose one I like). I used four different patterns, not counting the utter failure of the Hot Patterns Dolman, and they all went pretty well. I spent some time not working, and watched a whole bunch of lawyer shows via Netflix, thus becoming more knowledgeable about pop culture. I got better at pleats, darts, and gathers, too. All around, a successful project.

  Last night #1 daughter, her fiance, and I went to the rodeo. It was raining, with standing water in the arena, so the whole thing was muddier and more confusing than usual. 

I hadn’t been to the rodeo in years, and I really enjoyed it. One of my favorite events was when teams of children had to take a goat to a chosen spot, put a pair of boxer shorts on it, and then return it to the starting point, an event known as “Wild Goat Dressing.”

The Grand Entry was also impressive, though you could tell the horses were confused. The riders were trying to keep the horses out of the deepest water, so they weren’t following their usual patterns.

The bareback riding was alarming — it’s a wonder those guys don’t break their backs — and there was just a general muddiness to everything that made it seem to come down to a bunch of men and animals wallering in the mud.

Earlier in the day, #1 daughter and I went to the farmers market and to the grocery store, and I sewed this weird garment.

It’s supposed to be the Classix Nouveau Dolman Blouse from Hot Patterns, the drawing for which you can see below. It went together very easily, but it has this enormous floppy collar.

As I see it, I have several options with this thing:

• Accept that enormous floppy collars are in style. I looked around online and saw lots, some so enormous and floppy that they drape in folds. 
• Cut and sew the collar much smaller, without taking the garment apart.
• Take the thing apart and see if I can cut another top from the fabric instead of throwing it away.

The fabric is a rayon print in colors which, while they were trendy last season and are certainly bright and cheerful, are not very becoming for me, and this is the kind of print that my daughters specifically forbid me to wear.

It’s so soft and cool feeling, though…

The pattern was part of a huge collection of hand me down patterns a friend gave me last year. The appeal of a dolman sleeve is obvious: no set in sleeves. The problem with a dolman sleeve is equally obvious: no shaping.

Even without the collar issue, this might be a bad choice, since there are lots of odd folds. It doesn’t look anything like the pattern drawing.

So I guess today after church and a bit of work I will take it apart and see whether I can’t get a nice shell out of it.

So far, I’ve made two each of three patterns for my Summer Top Project. I’ve liked all three of the other patterns, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I have a few more fabrics left, too.

I’m through teaching for the summer — now comes the grading. So, apart from client meetings and a conference at the end of the month, I can work every day in jeans and a T shirt if I feel like it. However, I was able, courtesy of the STP, to dress reasonably well throughout summer school and I think I can continue wearing my summer tops happily.

Maybe not the giant floppy collared tropical print thing, though.

Yesterday included a few hours of work, but also a couple of church services, a walk, talks with friends an family, sewing, knitting, a game of Scrabble with #1 son, and a spell of reading out on the patio, where a nice lush jungly effect has been achieved.

I really like a jungly garden. My husband likes neat rows of plants, preferably not blooming plants, and vegetables are best.

The field beyond the back yard was mown on Saturday, so the scent of new-mown hay is in the air along with mint and nasturtiums. It’s lovely to sit on a lawn chair with a good book in such a place.

And then I picked peas from the vines for dinner, along with mint and parsley for the salad dressing.

Morgenstern recommends that people who have trouble not working keep track of the fun non-work things they do so that they can remind themselves of what’s enjoyable — and discover, if need be, why they’re not having fun. I find my work fun, too, but yesterday was a marvelous summer day. No swimming, but otherwise just right.

I completed my sixth top for the Summer Top Project, and it does indeed look as though I’m ready for bridge at the retirement home.

I’m going to wear it anyway, at least on the weekends. We can’t be vain, can we?

I’m reading Julie Morgenstern’s Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work. I have a problem with work/life balance. Even though I work efficiently and am very productive, I still end up working ten and twelve hour days.

#1 daughter says it’s Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. So if I make less time available for work, then I’ll still get it done, but have time for other things.

I kind of feel like I have to meet deadlines and that’s the reason that I have to work so much. However, I also agree that working that much is not a sustainable business model. I’m too old to be working really hard now in the expectation that I’ll get rich and retire early.

I’m also too old to ignore my health, and age has nothing to do with the importance of spending time with friends and family and taking time for things you enjoy.

It’s possible that Top #6 is causing me to think about how old I am.

However, I really want to be able to take weekends off without feeling as though I’m behind for the entire next week.

So I’ve made a lot of efforts to get my work schedule into a reasonable form, but I’ve also failed a lot. Not completely — I think I am having a more balanced life this year than I did last year, with more sewing and reading and social time — but enough that it still needs work. Morgenstern’s book can be useful for people like me, because she doesn’t just say, “Shut the door at the end of the workday” and leave it at that. She acknowledges that there are people who work a lot because they love their work, those who use work as an escape from an unsatisfying home life, people whose “sense of duty is in overdrive,” and people who just don’t plan for time off. She has sensible next action steps for all these people, and I think some of them will help me.

I took yesterday off. I went to the farmers market, did some baking and sewing, read, hung out with #1 son and talked on the phone with my daughters, worked out, and did a little shopping and housework. When I plan my work week tonight, I’m also going to plan some free time, or perhaps time to do things around my house that have been getting neglected. I’m going to make time for walks on the city trails before it becomes intolerably hot, and get those quilts started.

Morgenstern assures me that doing this will increase my productivity and the quality of my work.

#1 son and I came up with a good quilt block for him, and I’ve wasted quite a bit of time this morning trying to find a picture of it — or better yet, a pattern for it.

I found the design in a book called something like 500 Quilt Blocks. Maybe 5,000 Quilt Blocks. I’m too lazy to go look at it right now, and I wouldn’t want to link to it because it’s not very useful. It shows the block, but not with the pieces marked. Not only do you have to draft the pattern yourself, but you have to figure out how to divide the blocks into pieces.

Usually, I just find the block in this book and then look it up online. However, this block is supposedly called “9 patch frame” and Google has not been able to find such a pattern for me. Nor have I been able to find a block that looks like this anywhere online.

Geometry is in my future.

However, I am going to start today with the continuation of the STP (Summer Top Project). I have only one more week of summer school to teach, but I probably have a couple more months of summer, and I still have fabric bought for the purpose.

So last night I cut, gathered, basted and pinned so I’d be ready to sew up another Weekender Sunshine Top this morning.

I like the first one I made. This is a sort of iffy fabric. I bought it on the basis of a small swatch photo online. I saw that it had yummy colors and pretty swirls. I didn’t see that it was one of those weird faux-patchwork prints that old ladies wear.

Maybe I’m old enough to wear them.

The fabric also doesn’t feel very nice, another issue with buying fabrics online.

Still, I’m going to sew this up, and wear it, too. Then I’ll get on to that quilt.

Okay, I admit I’m eating at my desk, but at least it’s good stuff.

I didn’t work at all yesterday. Or at least not more than an hour so so.  Otherwise I did things like grocery shopping, housework, and planning a quilt for #1 son.

I’m using the Celtic Illuminations set of quilt fabrics, and I have 60 little Celtic knot squares plus fat quarters of four related prints and some coordinating solids, so I got out all my quilt pattern books and looked through them in search of a pattern involving 60 squares and not requiring any further yardage of the same pattern.

I finally determined to make a quilt with 60 nine patch blocks, using a fancy square for the center of each block and combining print and solids in the other eight blocks. This doesn’t actually narrow the options down a whole lot, since it describes Shoo Fly, Churn Dash, Ohio Star, and probably hundreds of other blocks, but it’s a start.

  While doing this, I watched What About Brian on Netflix instant watch. This is a show about people having lots of serious problems, which is not usually my sort of thing, but I really like the characters and the way they respond to their problems. Even when they’re being stupid and/or evil.

Yesterday was my first Saturday at home since #1 son moved out. I was thinking that this would mean that I would have the car. I was imagining that I’d go to to the farmers market and the fabric store and walk on one of the hiking trails. In fact, #1 son texted me quite early asking to borrow the car for the weekend, so that didn’t happen. Instead, I zoomed to the store, bought about half the things on my list, and zoomed over to the boy’s new place to give him the car.

Among the things I didn’t buy but should have was a new teakettle. I read a novel once in which the lady of the manor routinely put kettles on and then went off to do something while the water boiled, forgetting said kettle and letting it boil dry. In the novel, the butler would simply get a new kettle from the pantry and set fresh water to boiling. I have no butler, so I have to get new kettles every now and then.

In my defense, the most recent kettle had no whistle (this must be why it was so cheap), so it was to blame nearly as much as I am. Really.

I’m now thinking, since I didn’t buy the new kettle yet, that I should consider an electric kettle, which I could put in the office, which is where I inevitably am when the kettle boils dry in the kitchen. My office space is so nice now, needing only a few more things done with it for perfection, that it seems quite reasonable to put a kettle in.

The things needed to bring my office space to a more perfect state all require time and money and the use of tools, so they probably won’t happen soon.

Nonetheless, I did make a little beginning at getting the house to look like a place where only grownups live. This may take me a little while, and my husband really thinks we should just move to a smaller place instead, so we’ll see what happens.

When my husband got home from work, we planted some flowers in the front garden. He had removed all the perennials which #2 son and I planted there a decade ago, so the usual lovely May show didn’t happen. I did, however, plant four o’clocks in long planters and they are looking hale and hearty, so we put them into the front garden in the bare places.

The work involved in this left me with a bright red face healthy glow and might have been as good as taking a bit of a hike.

We went to a conference in the big city where #2 daughter and I gave a presentation which went quite well. We attended presentations, went to parties, and generally had fun.
I’m glad I went. I got to meet people I’ve only known online,  and spent time doing sort of ordinary fun things.

This is the coffee station, which was in some ways the center of the conference.

My class is going well, work is going well, I have a bunch of new ideas, and I’m having fun. Business, #1 daughter tells me, is slow, but I still have plenty of work to do, so I’m just continuing to do it.

#1 son moved into a house with a bunch of friends, so we now officially have an empty nest. My husband thinks we should move to a little apartment, and I suppose we might do so, but for now we’re sort of enjoying having the place to ourselves.

Apart, that is, from the dogs. I think having three dogs might prevent us from moving into a smaller place, too.

I continue to feel as though something exciting is about to happen. I don’t know what, but it’s a nice feeling, so I’ll go ahead and enjoy it without requiring anything further of it.

These are three tiny desserts we had at a chain restaurant before we even got to the big city. This weekend was largely box lunches and bar food, so I think this might have been the tastiest thing we ate over the weekend.

Since then, however, I’ve simply been eating what I felt like cooking for myself, which has been wholesome stuff with fresh vegetables, plus chocolate.

All the other pictures I took over the weekend, and all the ones I’ve taken this week, too, have people in them, so they can’t be posted here.

I can’t believe how fast this week is going. I feel as though we just got back in town and here it is nearly the weekend again. I’m currently planning to have a very domestic weekend. We’ll see what happens.