It's Life and Life Only

Hi all

On Bluesky, user Raheli has posted a warning about the possible end days of LJ - see https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.b…

You may wonder who Raheli is - she used to work on LJ as a developer, a long long time ago, and she is now the person running Dreamwidth, which as she admits is a direct competitor of LJ. But she is also someone who is hugely committed to the freedom of the internet, against state censorship (age restrictions like the current ones in the UK, and in various US states; and content restrictions like those that the Russian state has already put in place). The Russian state looks like it is cranking up some more of that, and she is sending out an advance warning. It’s worth paying attention and she is credible.

I’m decamping, and sending out this warning to anyone who hasn’t already seen it.

I took stock of the cloth I'd got and not yet used, or been given for Christmas. It's a lot! My main plan for this year, as a result, is to use what I've got instead of buying more of anything. I expect I might crack at some point during the year, but I certainly need to make a good dent in the stash before that point.


This is the main stash pile. I do have plans for most or all of it. From bottom to top:

The two patterned fabrics at the bottom are cottons to make tops or shirts from - I've got a shirt pattern that I haven't tried yet and it'd be good to be able to do it a couple of times to get better at it and learn from any mistakes on the first one.

Next up, there's a grey jersey fabric that you can hardly see - I am planning to make a third pair of comfy lounge pants, kinda like leggings but in slightly thicker fabric and - with pockets!

There's a beautiful print featuring owls, in a sandy light gold and and grey - it's to be a t-shirt for Jrmy, all being well.

Next one above is a thick wedge of corduroy to make cargo pants for my niece - you can't see from the picture but they are slightly shimmery, with a silver glitter effect.

No plans yet for the next one above - it's a flannel with a sweet print of little sheep (right side not shown in the pic), suitable for a youngster, but there's not that much of it (only a meter or so as far as I remember).

The next one, the green textured fabric, again is showing the wrong side - there's a pattern of palm leaves in black on that one. I'm aiming to make a sweatshirt or a hoodie for myself from this one.

The bright blue is some super-soft light corduroy that will make a smashing warm shirt for R if I don't cock it up.

The bright green with the blue and white circle prints is a quilting cotton that I made some Christmas present gift bags out of, but I kept half of it back to be the inside waistband of the cargo pants for my niece.

The petrol dark green is linen that will make a nice pair of trousers or a sturdy skirt from - I bought a trouser pattern to try to make some trousers for R from, might use this cloth for the first go at those before doing cargo pants in something more workmanlike.

The bronze print in geometric patterns is in principle for a dress for Kid A, but it's been a couple of summers since I got it and haven't managed to start cutting into it yet.

Finally, the orangy-red right at the top of the pile is for a cotton t-shirt for me, hopefully to be a simple but lively work top.

I've also got some stretchy jersey that I've made some things out of but that there's still a lot left of:

They'll mostly end up as t-shirts and leggings for the kids I expect.

Finally, the ones I've been given for Christmas this year!

Some lovely Liberty cotton, maybe for a nightshirt for me? And three amazing African wax cloth - check out the fantastic colours and prints! Not yet sure what these will be, apart from a small amount to be used for a bag each for Kid A and Kid B, for their kickboxing kit.

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This year wasn’t so much about learning to sew (which was 2016) or getting more confident (2017): it was a year of really getting into my stride with the whole thing. About this time last year I got myself a little black Moleskine notebook to be a sewing planner and record, and I wrote some aims for 2018 sewing. They went roughly along the lines of wanting to do more sewing, try new things to learn and extend my skills, and to make a bunch of nice stuff I’d like to wear regularly.

Well, that worked out all right! The stuff I made this year is pretty much all things that either I like and wear, or the recipients do.

The first thing I made was Kid B’s coat, which he has used more or less every day. That was in January.

Next in February I made a top with some Christmas presents I got: fabric and a pattern for a top I fancied, both from Merchant and Mills. It didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped: the shoulders feel a bit tight and the bottom band of ribbing ended up far too loose somehow. It’s still quite wearable but a bit of a second choice clothing itsem rather than a first preference.

At the end of March / 1st of April I made a top for Kid A with some great fabric from Kitschy Koo, who have some great prints and patterns. The same material (Orbs) was intended by me for a waistband for a second pair of trousers following an earlier successful pair made the year before. I should have bought more really, it’s such lovely stuff and I wouldn’t mind making a top for myself another time.

(April/May) We went to visit our dear friends Ruth and Sheep and family up in Northumberland and I took a sewing project to do during the visit: a bag from the Merchant and Mills teach-yourself-sewing book, made mostly out of oilskin cloth bought also from M&M. The bike print on the front of the bag is from a local shop though (Freelance Fabrics in Kidlington). Because Ruth admired the combination of fabrics I also made her a hat, and finally I had fun making a dress for their youngest, A.

I must have been on a roll because I also made Kid B a natty shirt later on in May: the fabric was a long quarter I bought on the visit to R&S but not enough of it to make the whole shirt from that robot material unfortunately.

Clearly I didn’t stop buying fabric because the same online shop that I got Kid B’s raincoat makings from. I did offer the chameleon print to the kids, honest, but they didn’t want it - go figure! So that was June.

It’s pretty rewarding sewing for the kids, partly because they will pretty much wear it almost whatever, but also because they’ve started to have at least a bit of a go on it themselves. Kid A loved the shape of my chameleon tunic and wanted one too: she helped cut out and even helped to sew this plain-but-pretty tunic for herself.

No sewing during our summer hols in France, but more fabric buying and planning: another button-up short sleeved shirt for Kid B, and a new vibrantly coloured dress for Kid A.

I’d been meaning to make myself a pair of pyjamas for quite a while and finally made the time: it took a while to get both halves finished, but it was so well worth it and I love them every time I wear them.

Not quite the last make of the year, but two re-runs of a successful pattern from earlier: the Merchant and Mills men’s t-shirt. It’s rather an elegant pattern overall because it’s for woven cotton instead of stretchy t-shirt material. Having said that, the prints that R and I have chosen between us have been more vibrant than elegant! Here’s R in his new evil eye shirt, and not pictured is something similar made for pal Woodrow.

Phew! I’ll stop now but those are just the photos already on Flickr. I also made some very comfortable trousers, plus a vest and a cardigan, from a teach-yourself-how-to-sew-knit-fabric book I also got. The resulting items are very comfortable and easy to wear, but not particularly photogenic in themselves so I don’t think I immortalised them.

Best item made? Tough choice but I think it’s have to be the pyjamas, which bring a smile to my face every time I put them on. Also, how else would I ever get jama bottoms with actual pockets, big enough to fit a phone into?!

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My home computer has broken down, and my phone is turning unreliable of battery too. Yikes! I do want the computer repaired or replaced, because it has so much on it - old songs and photos and scans of Jinty images (though those are mostly also on Dropbox). I use the phone ever so much more than the computer though - in fact I've hardly been turning the computer on, recently.

The house is always and ever a tip. Every so often we prod the kids into helping clear the floor of their toys, or clearing out old clothes or old books to take to charity. We keep up with the washing up, the launtry, the basic cleaning of the kitche and bathroom and brushing the floor. Everything else is a slowly-increasing pile of grot. It'd be kinda depressing except I try not to think about it; I'd rather do stuff with the kids or play on my phone or do my sewing.

I have finished some lovely bits of sewing that I'm very pleased with; the projects I've got on my to-do list are exciting but sometimes a bit daunting just because they are so many. It's very rewarding though, I'm happy with having got really into this creative hobby.


There're also a good number of interesting blogs to read, so it's good for the times when I'm not actively sewing, too.

Work is busy, too busy really but acceptable and exciting.

Too many people have died recently and over past years but that's how life is, I know.

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Really enjoyed myself at the Bournemouth event: my paper went well (must put it on the Jinty blog), I met lots of interesting people thinking in interesting ways about comics, and I saw three very different and very special talks the opportunity for which only arises very rarely.

On the Wednesday I arrived just about lunchtime as far as my stomach was concerned, but the scheduled lunch break was a little later (1:15), so I sat through the last minutes of a talk and the questions arising before I had a chance to check where I was supposed to register and what the lunch situation was. It all turned out to be on the 7th floor rather than the 2nd floor where one set of talks was, so up I went and snagged myself some lunch and a programme booklet. By heck there was a lot on! Each slot normally consisted of three 20 minute talks grouped together with time for questions at the end; but there were three sets of talks running in parallel, so lots to choose between.

I bumped into several old friends - Selina was doing a talk in the same group as I was assigned to, which made sense as our talks meshed well. Guy Lawley was there - he’s doing a PhD in comics! - and Roger Sabin, but I didn’t really get much of a chance to catch up with either of them. Alex Fitch was likewise there and I said a brief hi but didn’t catch up properly. But at the end of day yesterday Woodrow and Bridget were there and I did get time to properly chat with them about life the universe and everything. So lovely to see them and both as sharply-dressed as ever.

After lunch on that first day there were a couple of talks about how time works in comics - how do you depict time, what does a reader have to do to understand that time is passing. They were quite interesting but a bit larded with some academic jargon which I found a bit tedious in places. But after that there was a super session with two really engaging speakers, both women, talking with verve and enthusiasm and not too much jargon (and anyway I was prepared to forgive them). Barbara Chamberlin talked about horror comics and the revisiting of the Sabrina the Witch title, whereby Archie Comics have redone it as a knowing horrror comic with lots of referential nods to eg Rosemary’s Baby. I’m not massively interested in horror comics but I like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and as I say Barbara was an engaging speaker. She also had on an excellent top, with a gigantic print on it that mashed up images from The Cure with retro horror cover images. Very enjoyable! And she was followed by Olivia Hicks, a new comics scholar based in Dundee and therefore focusing primarily on the D C Thomson titles. She did an interesting comparison between boys’ comics character Wilson and girls comics character Valda. Both are sports-based stories about sporting prowess and beating rivals, but Wilson is clearly rather more Imperialist in ways I’d not thought of before. And again Olivia was very engaging to listen to, as well as talking about something I’m familiar with and interested in, so bonus.

The keynote talk that day was Anne Digby being interviewed by Mel Gibson - lovely to meet Anne Digby for the first time as I have interviewed her for the Jinty blog but not actually met her before. Afterwards we went to a local Caribbean restaurant for cocktails and food: pleasant but a bit stressful as it was very noisy, the food took a long time to arrive, and I was trying to work out if it fell to me to entertain Anne Digby despite the less than ideal circumstances for making polite conversation. (I did, but I think that the noise was offputting for all of us.) And then to my hotel to check in. I had been going to do a bit more bloggery-pokery once I had peace and quiet, but instead I just went slump.

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We headed off up north on Saturday lunchtime on the second week of the Easter school holidays - up to Hexham to see Ruth and Sheep and family. They have a lovely large home which they rescued from being a near-ruin and are slowly turning into something rather magnificent. In the meantime even though there are various building site bits of it, there was enough room for all four of us to bed down very comfortably and to enjoy lots of great hospitality. Highlights:
* family games of all sorts - card games (the renamed "Before I Kill You Mister Bond" was a particular hit) and other turn-taking games packs (here is R balancing a load of wooden animals).

* Outings - one in the sunshine, to Beamish (an industrial heritage outdoor museum), and one in the wind & rain (Vindolanda, to see Hadrian's Wall). Also a day of relative quiet and downtime, where we walked to Hexham's public library in the lashing rain.

* a protracted trip home via Leeds, where we stayed with my uncle and aunt for two nights so that we could fit in both the National Railway Museum and the Jorvik experience (both in York).


We even also managed to see R's brother and sister in law, who drove down from Glasgow to be fed a home-cooked Sunday lunch by Ruth and family. An ace week away from home, and it felt so much longer than just a single week (and that in a good way!).

Now back home and have been back at work for a week, but it's that rare instance of a holiday which seems to have left me with more energy than it has taken out of me.

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End of term festivities at the kids' school was slightly impacted by the rain - the Easter Bonnet parade was cancelled but the kids still managed to snaffle an egg each in the egg raffle, so spirits were high when I got home after work on Thursday.

Friday was intended to be a fairly quiet day and so it was; I think that taking them out to the local park for a run-around while trying not to get too wet was about it for excitement that day. I was surprised that the local hardware store was open on Good Friday (which Kid B kept calling "Good Luck Friday") and so I bought a couple of odds and sods there - light bulb for the oven hood, bracket for a dripping gutter. Until the evening, that is - I'd got a yen to eat Chinese food and we ended up going to The First Floor restaurant on Cowley Road, a multi-cuisine buffet reachable by bus ride from our place. Pretty good food, but more importantly one which the whole family enjoyed (Kid B pronounced the initial trials of thai fish and the chicken in ginger and spring onion delicious and had lots of subsequent helpings - Kid A wolfed down some chicken korma and naan).

Saturday was a normal market day and we usually go to the East Oxford Farmers' Market, which we did, but then we ran it straight into a playdate for Kids A and B, followed by a trip over to Mum and Dad's almost as soon as the playdate had finished. Poor Mum was feeling under the weather when we got to theirs - having not totally recovered from a viral attack of some sort a few weeks ago - but it was still lovely to be there.

On Sunday there was a small egg hunt (just one bag of the small foil-wrapped chocolate eggs was enough to be fun for the two kids and enough chocolate to start them off on the day). It was a lovely day actually, lots of beautiful sunshine. Again not much in the way of planned activities, mostly just a walk to the ice cream parlour and some playing in the garden. Dad gave the kids £1 each for helping to stack some logs, which they did a good job on actually. My main achievement was starting and finishing a t-shirt for Kid A:


She was very happy with it and wore it today, when we went to Slimbridge WWT (I think that stands for Wetlands and Wildlife Trust?). Good place to go (well, assuming you like birds of course) with lots to see, though the obligatory tick-off-the-items-you've-seen hunt was a bit over-long by the end. The flamingos in particular were visually astounding, but I liked the little touches best, like the insect houses. The food on offer was quite good and the tat shop at the end was high quality, so no complaints from me.


Now home, and glad of it.

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Returned to the osteopath on Monday. He confirmed that things aren't any worse but he can't see any particular great change / improvement either - which apparently isn't anything to worry about at this stage (though of course it's annoying). Sciatica typically has a period where you worsen, then quite a long plateau stage where it stays at about the same point of rubbishness, then a gradual improvement which is a reversal of the earlier worsening period. So initially the pain / symptoms creep downward from lower back to bum to top of the leg to knee and so on, and then the improvement phase sees it creep back upwards fairly literally.

I would say I am looking forward to it but I can't say I'm actually looking forward to it being just a pain in the bum... better than strugglig to put your own shoes on tho.

Another appointment has been booked for two weeks time and hopefully by then I / he should be able to see a definite change, even if I might not necessarily be on the upward path to full health quite yet. In the meantime he crunkled my back and massaged my tight muscles - quite a lot of the impact is muscular, because the sciatic nerve passes right through the gluteal muscle and so both of them get inflamed, not just the nerve itself. Certainly it feels quite a lot like muscle cramp some of the time. A hot water bottle helped last night, I'll try it again tonight, rinse and repeat.

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About five weeks ago, on a Friday, I went to pick up the kids from after-school club. I somehow did something to my back, probably as I pushed my bike home (maybe in a more twisted posture than usual, trying to talk to the kids behind or in front of me, or some such). It was uncomfortable over that weekend and on the Monday it was painful enough that I even rang the GPs. They rang me back and ruled out a few things (in so far as you can do that over the phone - there was a fair amount of 'take some painkillers and see how you feel').

The discomfort didn't go away, so much as change - sometimes more of a feeling like a leg cramp, sometimes moving away from the lower back and into the top of the leg. Last Monday I was fed up with waiting for it to just be gone and I made an appointment with a local osteopath, who I saw the next day. It's sciatica, which goes by itself but only eventually - it can take maybe a month or two (or three...?) to go. He did say that the good news was that as I'd already had it for 3 or 4 weeks I was a fairly good amount of the way through the pain!

I'm taking painkillers, doing the recommended stretches, and trying to avoid the sorts of activities that will cause the spinal disc to press on the sciatic nerve (hence the name). So not too much sitting down for any length of time (lots of standing up and wiggling if I've been sitting down for too long!). Hope it doesn't stick around for much longer, I am quite fed up with it already!

Two interesting factoids learned as a part of this process: the spinal discs dry up as you get older, so sciatica is really something that you don't get after about age 50 or so, it's not an old person's ailment as you might have thought. And the other factoid - it is worse in the mornings when you first wake up, because while you are asleep the spinal discs reabsorb fluid from the vertebrae, they become plumper (and you become a bit taller), and so they are more likely to bulge if you make the wrong move and thence press on the nerve...

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After finishing B's raincoat (which was a bit of a tour de force) I wanted to be sure to do a bit more bloggery-pokery, otherwise I'd lose the impetus entirely. I've been slightly fitfully posting about the IPC title Sandie, which ran a little earlier than Jinty and not for as long (only 69 issues). This was because I had a lucky break with someone wanting to sell her mother's complete run of the title, 'make me an offer', and even better, she was travelling down past Oxford on a convenient weekend so I didn't even need to pay for postage! But I'd only got as far as posting about the first few issues since that time.

Well, I got on with a few more once my brain was released from sewing, and even got to the stage where I was ready to post about the first story that was finished in the title - a historical story called "Little Lady Nobody", featuring a mistreated heiress. Now, in these old comics the question of attribution is always tricky. Sometimes you can clearly tell who the artist is, sometimes you think you can but it is open to dispute, and sometimes it's just not known at all. I thought that "Little Lady Nobody" looked rather like it might be by an artist called Roy Newby, who drew some historical stories in Jinty; but on further research and asking around it seems not. It did result in a productive back-and-forth with Roy Newby's two children: see more on the blog post here, including a lovely little pencil sketch by him of his daughter as a child.

So having got the comics blogging out of the way (all right, actually the Newby post took a little longer to get ready and it's only just gone up today), I went back to the sewing again. For Christmas I asked for some sewing-related presents - cloth, patterns, and the like - and this is the result of one of those presents:


Merchant and Mills have got some lovely fabric and some nice patterns, but the photography on their website always shows the results in monochrome crumpled gloomy artisticness, from which I can tell very little about whether I would actually like the finished object or not. But on a recent M&M blogpost they highlighted someone who really likes this pattern and who - hallelujah! - was photographed in real daylight, wearing well-lit versions of this item, which looked hugely more attractive as a result.



It's very comfy and wearable, but I'm sure there are things I need to change the next time I make this. The fabric is gorgeous and the colours are great, but I'm not really sure if this is the right size - I made a size 14, based on the body measurements given, but the shoulders don't feel quite right. At the same time the back is a little tight and the biceps definitely so, so I will try a broad back adjustment and creating a looser sleeve, perhaps alongside a smaller size so that the shoulders are better. Finally, something did go a bit odd with the lower back, which was very baggy - if I'd spotted it earlier I might have put some darts in or something, but as it was I just did a slightly bodgy pleat:


Which is fine. Some of that might just be because the cloth was a bit self-willed, being a rather bouncy mix of wool and linen - I'll use what should hopefully be a better-behaved stable cloth next time and see how it comes out. Experimentation!

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