Now, This. This.

This is the stuff that dreams are made of.

This is the first photo I took upon arriving in Iceland. It's a bit blurry, because it was starting to get a little dark, and I must have moved. And a moment later, I did take another, clearer, photo of just the rocks. But, I will admit it--first, I saw that bike coming. And I waited.

To be honest, I wouldn't actually want to ride a bike in Reykjavík. There are some bike paths, and more infrastructure than I've seen in most places in the US, but still. Even when there aren't several feet of snow making the roads nigh on impassible, the conditions don't seem all that favorable to biking. I don't know why I was expecting a flat city (à la Copenhagen, I guess) in a land mass created entirely by earthquakes and volcanoes... Reykjavík is very hilly. Very. And many of the streets are quite narrow--especially compared to the size of most vehicles on them. There are no compact cars in Iceland. We looked. We also looked very hard for stop signs, and finally came to the conclusion that there weren't any.

We did, however, find numerous signs advising people that it is forbidden to drive their tractors on the highways in and around Reykjavík--but only on weekdays from 7:30 to 9:00 and 4:30 to 6:30. The rest of the time, such action is apparently okay. Just because of this, I want badly to live there.

At this point, it's probably easier for me to direct you here for the rest of the trip photos. (Well, not the rest of the photos. Like one tenth of the rest of the photos.) It's a blog I set up, primarily for my mom, but you're welcome to visit as well. Please do. I'm posting photos and our itinerary one day at a time; we've just finished up day seven (of fifteen).

Here's one more--Gullfoss, also in Iceland--to get you started.

This Is What Dreams Are Made Of.

Oh my god, look what came in the mail today. Totally unexpected.

Gah. Gah gah gah gah.

To be honest, I don't quite like B&H as much as I like Adorama, and even Adorama, I don't like as much as Blue Moon. (Another few gahs, there.) But on the other hand, neither of the latter two have ever sent me a 450-page catalogue...

I know this isn't the post you expected. (I didn't, either.) I promise I'll post a waterfall or a ruined castle or something soon.

Everything Looks Different*

Before you begin reading, I should warn you: This isn't a typical post. It's a lot more philosophical than usual, and I think it's really more for me to get a handle on things again than anything else. I'm not going talk about my holiday (except in the most cursory way) and I don't have any pictures ready yet. So, depending especially on the purpose for which you read this blog, you may not find the following very interesting. But you can read it if you want anyway. 

I arrived back in Portland very late Wednesday night, after a straight twenty-four hours of travel. And by travel, I do not mean pleasurable-sightseeing travel, I mean crowded-waiting-rooms-and-airplane-transportation travel. It's only now that I've felt I have the time and energy to write this post; I feel like I'm still just beginning to collect myself.

When I arrived, it was dark already (well, maybe it was the tail end of nautical twilight). I recognized Portland, of course, but nothing looked quite the same. Even the MAX seemed different. But I couldn't put my finger on anything. I tried to attribute it to the fact that I was on foot (as opposed to bike, as usual), utterly exhausted, or both, but those still didn't seem right.

It's funny, I remember thinking, how going away for a relatively short period of time--in this case, two weeks--made things seem so much different than going away for years did. Copenhagen, aside from the new locations for road construction (which was everywhere in Europe, by the way) seemed largely the same to me as in 2008. Not so for the Portland of May 2012 versus April.

I've always thought a lot about the idea of 'you can't go home again,' and the fact (or, I suppose, idea) that nothing is ever quite the same as you remember it. Or, quite as good as you remember it, I perhaps should say. It's part of the reason I'm often so reluctant to repeat things I've enjoyed. Even if the subsequent attempt is still a really good one, I don't want to taint the memory of, say, an 100% day with an 85% one.

But that doesn't really apply here. In this situation, it was coming home to a place that should have been the same, but had become subtly different--so subtly that I couldn't even identify what had changed. It wasn't sad, in the way I imagine it is for people who return to the sites of their childhood homes only to find them utterly unrecognizable, but it was unnerving. I haven't lived in Portland my whole life, but I've lived here long enough; it was weird to step out of the aircraft, take a breath, and think, 'this is my town,' but a few moments later, also be forced to concede that I didn't quite recognize any of it.

Walking home, I began to realize what I think was the difference--there was no mud on the sidewalk. There were no puddles at the corners of the streets, no decaying leaves clogging the gutters. It had been cloudy, but it wasn't damp. It wasn't so much that the city seemed cleaner without the remnants of winter lying around; it seemed fresh, alive. (Which I know is a really weird thing to be thought by someone who has slept for maybe seven hours of the last forty-eight, who is lugging an increasingly heavy backpack through the barely-lit streets of southeast Portland, stumbling along on largely on muscle memory alone. (Oh, yes, my eyes drifted closed. I kept dragging them open again to find that I had weaved all across the sidewalk. I'm actually glad it was dark--no one else was out to see me.))

It wasn't until the light of the next morning--when, of course, two days of typical Portland wind and rain commenced (I don't know if it actually began then. It could've been rotten the entire time I was gone, for all I know. But I had just come from a day of wearing shirtsleeves)--that I became aware of what was really different: the trees. Not only were there no dead leaves on the ground, there were leaves on the trees. Full-sized ones. Everything was green.

Today, the forecast gives us a high of 79 degrees; yesterday was nearly that. I guess--I hope--the difference is that maybe, just maybe, it's finally spring. And if 'it's finally spring' isn't a good ending for a blog post, I don't know what is. I'll settle for that difference.


*even the Blogger interface is different. I'll get used to it, I know, because I have done with similar things in the past, but I don't like it.

Oh, Right. (Northern) Europe.

Two days from now I will get on a plane, go to sleep, and wake up in Iceland.

Okay, that's probably not exactly how it will happen. But, as I have a seven-hour through-the-night flight coupled with a seven-hour time difference, meaning I'll arrive just after 6 a.m. (though it probably won't feel like that to me), I'd like to try to sleep as much as I can. Last time I was in Europe (a month, for school, years ago) I felt exhausted and jet-lagged about 85% of the time. And I'm hoping that won't be the case again.

But wait. I should explain where that came from. Even though I have a blog, it's still very hard for me to talk (or, I suppose, write) about myself. I've avoided talking about this impending trip to a ridiculous degree.

This photo (from last time) is here
for the sole purpose of breaking up
the vast amount of text.

Let me put it this way. My sister, little b, is spending a semester studying abroad in Ireland (not Iceland--note the difference of the second letter). Her US college study abroad office messed up the flight scheduling, and her Irish college doesn't make/let visiting students sit for exams; they just write a term paper. So she now has about five weeks in Europe with very little academic to do. Hence, traveling.

She knew, roughly, where she wanted to travel. But little b is very bad at planning. So in January, she asked me to help her arrange a trip to Iceland. Iceland is one of the places I've always wanted to go. (Since everyone asks, the scenery is gorgeous and unlike any in the world, and I just wanted to go there--that's really the whole reason why. I don't always have concrete reasons for wanting things I want; I just know I want them.) And, a very short way into the planning, I decided that it would be better if I went with her.

Anyway, long story short (and yes, I could make it much longer), we're meeting up in Iceland, then going around Northern Europe together.

For years we've had this sort of fantasy about spending a summer backpacking around Europe. Every so often I'd look at train timetables, and we even picked a year--this one, in fact (I'd still be young enough to qualify for the youth rate; she'd be in her last summer of college and wouldn't have to worry about leaving a job)--but it never went further than that. I didn't ever really think it would happen. It's not quite the same, but this opportunity came up, and, well... everything just sort of worked.

In addition to Iceland, I wanted to tack on a day or two in Copenhagen, and then b was worried she wouldn't have anyone to go to Scotland (her other priority country) with her and asked me to add that, too. So we'll be in Iceland for four days, Denmark and a wee bit of southern Sweden for two and a half or so, and then Scotland (to include a trip up to the Shetland Islands, because why not?) for five, plus some travel time.

It's a big trip, especially for someone who, like me, has only gone on like three vacations, ever, out of state. And I'll actually be in Iceland for five days, as I arrive in the early morning and b not until late afternoon. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself while I'm waiting for her to arrive. And that's pretty much the only part of the trip I have not planned down to the minute.

Yeah, I have a whole notebook full of this. Plus everything I typed. And also everything I just have in my head. Figuring all this out has consumed my life for the last three months, but I did really enjoy it. Now I'm just terrified it's not going to work out right.

That said, re planning, if anybody does have any suggestions about destinations/activities that we shouldn't miss (or that we should definitely make a point of missing), please feel free to let me know in the next... thirty-six hours. Yeah, I realize I should have asked that a few months ago, but that would've meant talking about it. And this way, I got to plan everything myself. (Myself, really. Little b gave me about five grains of input.)

We're trying to do this as inexpensively as such as thing is possible, and are packing light. We won't have computers or electronic devices (I'm not even bringing my phone, not that it would work if I did), and if we do find a free moment near an internet cafe, it's far more likely that we'll be emailing Mom and Dad to say that we're still okay than that I'll be trying to post something to the blog.

I also probably won't have anything else up here between this and my departure. I may find time, and I have a few subjects in mind, but it's more likely that I'll spend that time frantically packing and repacking or trying to memorize the full details of everything on my itinerary. So don't expect to see anything here for a few weeks.

When I return, however (May 3rd), you can expect quite a lot. I'm very excited.

Tweets From 1912

I was up early this morning, coming back to Portland after Easter. We listened to NPR in the car, and Teju Cole (author of last year's Open City--I knew his name was vaguely familiar) was on, talking about his latest project, Small Fates. Following a French newspaper form popular around the turn of the last century, fait divers, what started out as a chronicling of the ironies of oft-overlooked news stories in Lagos, Nigeria (the city where Cole grew up) has now evolved into a chronicling of the same types of stories in New York City (Cole's current city)--but not the New York City of today; the New York City of 100 years ago. In essence, tweets from 1912.

Cole is a writer, and his tweets, both macabre and witty, are highly readable. And they're summaries of real events, culled from the NYC dailies of 1912. For example:

Mrs Moriarty, of Bay Ridge, prefers a Manhattan clothing manufacturer to Mr Moriarty. She has therefore run away.

One of the things that struck me most about the NPR interview was that Cole said he didn't read today's papers any more; he just reads the ones from 1912. 1912 is a bit further back than the era I usually pine for, but yeah--I wish I could do that. I think this--the idea, the practice, the whole thing--is awesome.

If Cole's tweets, many of which concern unpleasant subjects (murder and accidental death are big ones) are too much for you, I also found another 1912 twitter account, LSO on Tour 1912, which consists of excerpts from the trip diary written by Charles Turner, timpanist for the London Symphony Orchestra, on their first tour of the US. I've seen this type of thing more often, where people who have acquired old diaries publish the corresponding entry on a blog or website each day. I've never found one that I've stuck with and read consistently, but they're always interesting.

If I were actually on twitter, I would follow them both. Of course, I'm not on twitter. (Quite frankly, 95 percent of the time, I don't remotely understand twitter.) But if you are, you can.

PS I did a horrible job of explaining Small Fates. But it's been done better elsewhere, both by Cole himself and by Matt Pierce at The New Inquiry.

The New Buckle

So. I wasn't happy with the belt I made for my Betty Draper dress (part of the Mad Men challenge at the Sew Weekly). Specifically, I wasn't happy with the buckle. It didn't match.

On the advice of several SW contributors, I decided to remake it. I love fabric covered buckles, and I certainly own enough kits (and I even dug up some white grommets) but for some reason I was really resisting a fabric covered buckle. I dunno. I had a lot of thoughts and had just about decided that I could make something work--at least it'd be better than the current buckle--and then I found this. It's plain white plastic, labeled vintage, but who knows. The style, at least, does look vintage to me, but to be honest, in this case, I don't really care when it was made. I think it goes with the dress and the buttons perfectly. I'm very happy.

Here the new and old are side by side. If you can't tell which is which... hm.

Yes, of course I had to make a new belt, too, not just swap out the buckles. Even if the new buckle weren't wider, the original belt has grommet holes at the end, and there's no prong in the new buckle. Now I have two belts, because even though I'll never wear the old one, I can't bring myself to destroy it. I guess that means I'll just have to think of someplace new to use the buckle: a new project. That'll do it.

PS Since the new buckle cost only $0.65, versus the old buckle's $0.75, the full price of the dress has now been lowered by ten cents to $4.65. Yesss.

Grape Juice

As you may have noticed from the lack of posting on this blog, I've been busy. Way too busy for sewing (or, really, anything). But last week the theme at Sew Weekly was Mad Men, and I couldn't miss that. Even though I'd never actually watched a single episode of Mad Men prior to that challenge being announced, you can't really sew vintage-inspired garments without Mad Men crossing your radar, and I've been wanting to make a Mad Men dress (or, more accurately, numerous Mad Men dresses) for a long time.

The dress I ultimately made was not the dress I would've initially thought I'd make. Yes, I love shirtwaist dresses, but I wear them a lot less than I do those with (a la Joan) more fitted skirts. I also don't love Betty, the shirtwaist dress-wearer.

But I kept coming back to this fabric.

I wish I'd measured it before I started cutting, but I'm going to guess that I had at least six yards. It's an aqua and white striped seersucker that you may remember from my last birthday--my parents picked it up at an estate sale and it was part of their present to me. At some point, I must have googled Betty Draper--this is the first image that comes up when you do so.

source

Add a few months sloshing around in my brain, and that seersucker looked very similar to the print she was wearing. Coincidentally, that fabric was also probably the only piece in my stash large enough to actually make a proper shirtwaist dress. So (even though when I compared the two fabrics in real life, they were not that close--I like my reproductions to be exact) I went with it.

I had used this pattern, Simplicity 3486, once before. I did not entirely follow the instructions, and it came out very poorly--not because I didn't follow the instructions, mind you; I think it would've come out even worse if I would have. Anyway, I made that dress two years ago, and even though I'm always cold and it is easily the warmest dress I own, I've worn it exactly twice, both times reluctantly. So this time, I treated the pattern as if it were brand new (er, brand new to me. It's still from the late 50s). I regraded the pattern, read through all the instructions, didn't try to simplify or improve on the skirt, la la la. Speaking of the skirt, here's what 100+ inches of hem pleated into 25 inches of waist looks like:

Though once I figured it out, it wasn't that bad. I followed the pattern and instructions pretty closely this time. The one thing I did change (based on the previous version) was the collar, and I like it much better. I'm also incredibly pleased with the fit, which is great, even when not compared to its predecessor.

Now that I've gone through the whole thing, I realize that shirtwaist dress patterns are really uncomplicated. Basically, all it is is a fitted blouse and a giant rectangle. Two years ago, when I bought this pattern, I may not have had any blouse patterns, and I still don't really have any properly-fitting ones, but even so, I'm not entirely sure why I ever bought this. It certainly wasn't because of the pattern illustration's Maxwell Demon eye makeup.

She actually looks a lot better cropped like this. Seriously, though--I usually think the pattern illustrations are lovely and flattering. This is one of the least appealing I've seen. Aside from 80s and 90s patterns, of course, but those garments are pretty awful themselves, so not much to work with...

I guess that's about all I have to say about this, and not all that much was about the dress. As usual, I've managed only take photos in which I am either not looking happy at all or making a ridiculous face (to be fair, I was mostly trying to imitate Betty's usual pained/pissed off expression, and then occasionally making fun of myself for it)--no smiles. I also--this time due to the size of my kitchen--don't have any standing photos where the entire dress is visible, but I'm wearing it for Easter (done in time and everything!), and I'll try to get one then.

And finally. Post title. Why, yes: that is grape juice.

My Sew Weekly post (different to this one), if you'd like to read it, is here.

And project details:
Fabric: Massive amount of teal and white striped seersucker, gift from parents, free
Pattern: Simplicity 3486 from Knittn’ Kitten, $3.50
Year: Late 50s/early 60s? pattern; thrifted/possibly vintage fabric
Notions: Buckle $0.75, buttons $0.50 (both from stash, but still tagged)
Time to complete: 12 hours maybe?
Sewing soundtrack: The Chantels
First worn: Just for photos--but I’ll wear it for Easter
Wear again: Oh, yes.
Total cost: $4.75