Perspective gained

With the national debt at over $62,000 per capita (not including interest), it seems obvious to me that we are in for one flavor of austerity or another in the future. Well, then...let's get back to the basics:

Water.

Food.

Clothing.

Shelter.

I've noticed something interesting in Proverbs 31:  the idealized "Proverbs 31 woman" does a lot of work with textiles, and clearly has built up a lot of skill in the fiber arts.

I think there are a couple of reasons for that.  The first is that the basics of sewing, weaving, knitting, crochet, embroidery, and so on can be done with very little investment in tools, and a moderate investment in materials. It just takes a lot of time to learn the skills, and to practice and use them.  Whereas growing food requires land and seeds, and possibly animals.  Knowledge and skill are also required, but living things do want to live and grow, which is a big help.

Water and shelter are more stable things--either you have a source of water, or you don't, and if you've built your house well, it will probably stand for years.

In recent years, the price of basic clothing has come very far down.  All you have to do is ignore the fact that much of it is made of plastic, and assembled by basically slave labor.  And then it's hauled across the world in big ships running on fossil fuels.

When the debt party ends, that's the end of it...one way or another. So I see some wisdom in learning how to create my own textiles, even though economically it doesn't make any sense at the moment.

More sewing

More mending.  Trying to finish up an embroidery project that I've been working on for almost twelve years.  Trying to figure out the next step in a sewing project that's been stalled for a month.  Testing a baby clothes hanger to see if it'll work to support a wall hanging.

Plus I got an idea for a quilt:  a quilt made of squares based on the color schemes that I've been thinking about for years for the rooms of my someday-maybe "forever house".  I have some smaller pieces of fabric that I've been wanting to use in a project.

Finally, some sewing

I was able to get some sewing done after getting the garden harvest stored:

1.  Mending:  Several items of family clothing received minor or moderate repairs.

2.  Clothing:  I finally got around to sewing one of the skirts I had planned to make for my "Wardrobe in a Week" sewing sprint in the spring. After it was sewn, I overdyed it, and the color turned out well.
Notable for this project was that the fabric shower curtain I was using for fabric wasn't quite large enough to cut all of the skirt pieces out whole, so I had to do some careful piecing and pattern matching to get all the fabric I needed. It adds a subtle but interesting custom detail to the finished skirt. (I did a flat seam by overlapping the pieces by an inch, and then sewing two lines of zigzag stitches down the overlapped part. The exposed raw edge has frayed down to the stitching, making a short fringe.)

3.  Curtains:  I was given several yards of cotton upholstery-weight velvet, and curtains seemed like the best place to use it; I have been thinking about how to bootstrap my way into a somewhat more mature style of decorating. I sewed up a set of curtains from the fabric, put them up, and then realized that the stiffness of the material made them almost impossible to open. And when they were closed, they were overwhelming the room. I took them down, and cut half of them in half lengthwise, stabilizing the cut edges with a quick zigzag stitch. Then I put them back up, and made some quick curtain ties from selvedge edges that were left over.  Now they make a style statement, but not too much of one.

4.  High chair cover:  Months ago, I threw out the cover to the high chair; I had gotten tired of it, and it had seen more than a decade of use anyway. I finally began putting together some bits and pieces of someone's abandoned wall hanging project from the 90's, and have a basic cover sewn together now. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go in finishing it nicely.