Tag Archives: Writing

How To Shop For Fabric

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Some time ago I talked the editor of my local chapter of the American Sewing Guild into letting me submit columns for the quarterly newsletter.

I named the column “Thread Tales.” (A cute sewing/writing pun, I thought.) For those of you who are not a member of the Austin chapter of the ASG, here is my upcoming column.

Thread Tales: How to Shop For Fabric

(1) Clean out the trunk of your car (or the back of the SUV or the hatchback, whichever is appropriate) so that you have room for your purchases.

(2) Load the fabric shop addresses and phone numbers into your smart phone or GPS.

(3) Start out with a full tank of gas and an empty bladder.

(4) Pick up your best fabric-shopping friend.

(5) Have an envelope with your cash in it for the shopping trip. It’s very important to stick to a budget.

(6) Have two credit cards with available balances to use after you spend all of your cash.

(7) Be ready with made up stories you will tell people in the checkout line as to what project you are buying the fabric for. Fabric does not need a project in order to be bought, but some people just don’t understand this concept. Pay no attention to them; they are amateurs.

(8) Buy fabric.

(9) Eat lunch and bring the bags of your new fabric into the restaurant so you and your friend can swoon over each other’s purchases even though you were right next to each other when you bought the fabric.

(10) Buy more fabric after lunch.

(11) Buy enough fabric so that you have enough to fill up your washing machine when you get home. There is nothing worse than coming home to a house with nothing that needs washing and not having enough new fabric to warrant using the washing machine. (We are, after all, very ecologically aware.) Under no circumstances should you accost your husband and say, “Take off all of your clothes!” He will get the wrong idea and you will not get to wash your fabric right away. Those of you who do not wash fabric before using it can skip this step.

(12) Add the new fabric to your collection. It is beautiful just sitting on the shelf.

(13) Schedule your next day to shop for fabric.

Lipogram, Revisited

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I first posted this entry on January 21,2011 on my old blog. For some reason I recently started thinking of writing another lipogram, this time maybe without the letter “s.” I’ll let you know when I’ve finished.
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A lipogram (not to be confused with liposuction) is a written piece that omits a certain letter or groups of letters on purpose.

One of the most famous examples is Gadsby (1939) by Ernest Vincent Wright. There is no letter “e” in this 50,000+ word novel. Georges Perec, from France, inspired by Mr. Wright, wrote La Disparition (1969). There is no “e” in the French version or the English translation. Mr. Perec also wrote Les Reverentes (1972) where “e” is the only vowel used.

Not too long ago, Plinky used this premise as a writing prompt. Our goal was a 100-word story without using an “e” anywhere. Here, then, is my “no e” story. Writing it wasn’t too hard. Getting it to flow well, that wasn’t so easy.

An illicit party, by and for dogs

Our living room had muddy paw prints on window sills, dog drool on all candy bowls and half-full cans of soda. It was just a big party trash can. Without human limitations, our two young Labradors, Dusty and Abby, had found a calling in organizing illicit galas for local animal individuals. How many dogs, now sporting an alias, had sat in our doorway as lookouts, to warn said party of our coming back?

Dusty had brought all my socks into our living room for a tug-of-war sporting affair, making him a star in a unanimous opinion of his dog buds. Cops driving by thought such loud barking was abnormal. By calling us back from our out-of-town trip, any additional partying was put on hold.

— fini —

My Most Frequent Reader

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Turns out that on some days I am my own most frequent blog reader. By accident, of course.

That’s because when I exit my blog, WordPress loads my home page with my current post and somehow that counts as a visit. Considering that when I’m in my writing and editing modes, I frequently remember ‘just one more thing’ a few minutes after I have logged off. I come back in, sit down at the computer, log back in, tinker with a few words and log back out.

The first time I suspected that it was me that was increasing my visit count was when I logged out and logged right back in within a few seconds. (Sometimes I think of that ‘one more thing’ immediately.) Hmmm, I thought, when I saw that my visit count had gone up by one in the few seconds I was logged off. Someone was reading my blog exactly at the time I was exiting or … maybe that was me? I tested it a few more times. Yes, indeed, that was me increasing my visit count. My home page doesn’t load each time I exit my blog and I can’t figure out the whys and the wherefores.

Just so you know, by the time I schedule this blog and exit, I will be up to 13 visits for the day. Lucky me!

Out with the old, in with the new

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Here it is, the end of 2011. I maintained two other blogs in 2011, It’s a long story (my other It’s a long story) and Perceptions. I kept up with the WordPress Postaday2011 challenge on Perceptions and Postaweek2011 challenge on It’s a long story. (I like the title “It’s a long story” so I’m keeping it for this blog.)

Blogging every day for a year on Perceptions and 3-4 times a week on It’s a long story was hard — really, really hard — but I made it. Just this week, WordPress sent out a challenge for the new year: blog everyday about one subject. They listed a handful of bloggers who were already doing that.

One subject? Really? For a year? At first I couldn’t think of any one thing that I could cover for that length of time. Then I did find something that I could write about every single day: dogs. We have six dogs and two 4-week old Labrador Retriever puppies. I can always write about dogs.

But dogs aren’t the only thing I want to write about and I don’t want to have this blog to be only about dogs. I could still do it, I suppose, on my other, other, other blog: Moon Dogs. (You can have as many free WordPress blogs as you want. Trust me on this.) I haven’t posted much to Moon Dogs, probably because I was too busy posting to It’s a long story and Perceptions.

Hey, I know! If I posted every day to Moon Dogs, I could keep this blog about other things. Wait, I’m having a déjà vu moment. That would mean I’d be maintaining two blogs, posting to one every single day while posting to the other one several times a week. Oops, been there done that in 2011.

I think I’ll pass on that challenge.