Style: How to Fix a Hole in a Cashmere Sweater

While our boots straighten themselves up in the closet, anxiously awaiting to traipse and frolic in the chill of fall, our cashmere tends to come out beaten and defeated from wily critters that take a bite from the most inconvenient places. It makes me sad.

Here's a cashmere sweater I got for $1 at the thrift store. I figured I could darn the hole, but as I looked closer I got a better inspiration: Patch it. In a cool way.

So I ransacked my fabric bag and found the remains of a T-shirt I'd recycled as a dress for a friend's baby. Then I found an image of a bird silhoutte I liked online, and to make it the right size, just copied it to a Word document and expanded it. Then I cut it out and traced around it on the T-shirt fabric, and sewed it on with black thread.

Sad for me but happily for someone else, it turns out this sweater is a little TOO complimentary to my bustline, so I will end up passing it along.

Send in your stories and pictures of [clothing] salvation and we'll feature them on 40licious!

I liked the bird so much he lives on my window now.

DIY Wedding

As I've said about a million times on this blog, when you're doing something right, the universe greases your wheels. But what about when you hamfist it? The universe basically throws gobs of bleh at you and makes you start over, refresh. Step away. Reevaluate. And you can't have clarity until that clarity wants to wash over you like a blast from a fire hydrant in the summer on West 82nd Street in Manhattan in 1978, when you wore running shorts and tube socks and Stan Smiths and a shirt with maybe a rainbow on it.

We're figuring out how to have the most meaningful wedding we can. What we need, what we don't. One of my best girlfriends is a wedding photographer by trade, so that's a no-brainer. Steve's on it with the music, and has been the perfect partner in helping with joint brainstorming and intuitively leaving alone the decisions I want to own. Which bodes well for our lives together. We are all set with the place and the wine and maybe even the officiant. I've spotlighted about 15 women in my life who will walk me down the aisle, led by my mother. Friends are giving me hints about scoring the deal on the dress, or do I just want to wear theirs? Those seem like the easy parts.

Perusing invitations, however, is a labyrinthine exercise. I'm a writer. Paper and words and ink and how it reads and how one remembers is important. I went through a maze of paper and fonts and wording on the Internet, each selection leading to a slightly different variation ... more casual. More formal. More Christian. More Hippie. And finally, I found The One. And it's letterpress and charming and in our colors (dark teal, dove gray and white) and $800. For some paper with ink on it.

So I very liberally borrow the idea I like -- a dove on a trellis with some fleur de lis thrown in -- and we pour over fonts together, as if we are deciding our last meal, or the name of our child, or a move to the Wyoming mountains. And finally we plunk down $24 for our wedding font and I play and play and play for nights on end to get it just right. And then I have the design in mind all perfect. And the paper I want to use sucks and gets all mangled in my printer. And my trips to Michael's and Staples result in a bag full of stickers and card stock and bits of ribbon and a Martha Stewart Fleur de Lis hole punch, and 100 blank invitation cards.

And I make a mess of my invitation. It is no longer beautiful to me. The font we have chosen now looks so amateur. Might as well use comic sans. My print looks gaudy and my paper looks plain. Is the bird tacky? Is the whole thing a bit too "Very Hungry Caterpillar"?

My very sweet neighbors arrived on my doorstep yesterday, 8-year-old Kaya with a basket of mandarins and a piece of baklava, her architect dad trailing along. They are a little listless, I think, as Mom is traveling India for a month gathering food stories. They have sort of adopted us. Or maybe we have adopted them. Sanjiv, who is also a Pisces, picks up on my design plight and offers to help out.

So I will put everything away for two days. And try to see the possibility that my new talented friend sees. And maybe we'll make something beautiful.

The Art of Compromise

I very much loved my solid oak, dovetail-crafted antique dresser, which I'd moved around from cabin to house to apartment since the early 1990s. I had to give it up as my fiance and I negotiated his move into my smallish two-bedroom apartment. I got to keep my couch and loveseat while his went to a quick and savvy Craigslist buyer. In return, practicality reigned and he brought over his much bigger dresser that we'd share. >>> Read more over at Emineo Domus

Unplugged

My friends and I have been hiking on the weekends. Monster hikes. We see waterfalls and meadows and clover fields and tide pools. We bring dogs and babies and more friends. We leave phones and iPods and makeup somewhere else.

It reminds me of Jane Austen novels, in which the party always takes a long walk in the country after breakfast, or before supper, or before all hell breaks loose due to a missing letter or an mis-overheard conversation.

We group in twos and threes, and converge together. We are quiet and chatty and raucous. We thank God that we are not Pioneers Making Their Way Across the Country for a Better Life and that in two hours we'll be showered, feet up, watching the latest Netflix offering.

In my life I've spent so much time making dinner for people, meeting them out, planning big elaborate occasions because I want to see them and have the chance to chat, to get in deep, to reconnect. The 40licious realization is that you don't need to have an excuse to see your near and dear ones, or to get to know someone new a little better. You just need to go out together and fill your heads with nature and the sound of rushing water, buzzing bugs and silence under sky. And walk.

How much?

How much is in a bowl of money?

With the quarters removed for laundry, not counting foreign coins?

Well, that would be $82.58, thank you very much. Which, I have decided, can only go toward completely frivolous and decadent pursuits. Especially those involving rum.

Predictions for 2009

Everyone is all about cheap chic, even those of us rare few who still go to an office 50 hours a week. We are becoming more conscious as a society about our consumption. We're trying to get by on less, we are trying to make simple lives, we are trying to retreat from the shrine of shopping malls. With this in mind, here are my predictions for 2009:

1. More people will learn to sew, knit and generally embrace the domestic arts. It's not about "buying a new one" any more, it will be more about fixing the old one, or making it new and cool with a few stitches here and there. Dudes, too.
2. People will see the insides of each others' homes. I've never been a big one for group dinners at restaurants -- there is, invariably, someone who feels cheated when it's time to pay the bill, and the wine markup is so inexcusable that I can't help but do the math in my head ("This sip will cost me $2.87"). The economic downturn won't keep people apart from each other, but parties will move from restaurants to potlucks and dinners at home. Which are more fun, plus, you can break out the astrology books and the Tarot cards at the end.
3. The stock market will have a healthy bounce by June, beyond all reason except that most people will stop being afraid and start bargain hunting, as they are in the rest of their lives.
4. Libraries will bustle; Nancy Pearl will eclipse Brittany Spears as national pop icon.
5. Scientists will make a definitive link between our environment and why so many women in their late 30s-early 40s are miscarrying.
6. People will pooh-pooh bottled water and riot in the streets when they learn that their tap water isn't up to decent standards.
7. Christmas will become more about soul-stuffing than stocking-stuffing, and stuff in general.
8. Companies that rip off consumers with exorbitant prices for cosmetics, cereal, milk, gas, etc will be exposed. Consumers will revolt with a vengeance as they realize they've been exploited, and they can do with a lot less than they'd originally thought.

I'm very excited about 2009 so far. I am oddly, madly, crazy in love with the world and America, despite our crass materialism, our fall from compassion and grace, our bleak outlook.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen

Cheap Chic! Body Lotion!

My fave bloggers are all about living on the cheap these days; to wit: Bake Like a Ninja and Half-Assed Kitchen. They also happen to be hilarious and lovely people, too.

I work with a sassy and charitable and funny woman named Katie. Over lunch the other day, we lamented that our high-power friends who ALWAYS make money are scratching around for work. Our sort-of employed creative type friends (the class to which I usually belong) are having a REALLY tough time of it. What we realized that in this time of roller-coaster economics, we're kind of like bonds. We're not in the sexy or exciting job. We tell people we work at the power company and they're all, like, "eh." But what we traded for is stability, and the good feeling we get when we can take our friends who need it the most to lunch.

Which leads me to a new feature on 40licious called "Cheap Chic!" with a cost-cutting measure so that you can still live your fabulous glam life, but without spending a lot of dough. Today's entry: Body Lotion!

Body Lotion!
Assemble all the creamy lotiony stuff people have given you over the past couple years that you never quite took to, or products that you bought for your face but didn't work out. Now empty them into a large measuring cup, and whisk them around for a while. Add some olive oil, drop by drop, to increase viscosity. Then add a drop of essential oil or two, or maybe some vanilla extract, and put it all back in the most decent bottle you have from the bunch, maybe with a new label. Voila! New life for old lotion! More space on the shelves! No perfectly good stuff in the landfill! No having to hassle with the overly made up woman in a lab coat at Macy's!

DUDES: You can also use this as a thoughtful, homemade gift for your lady. She won't even notice her stuff is missing. HOWEVER: MAKE SURE that you are not using her Creme de la Mer or similar expensive face cream that she relies on every morning to make her feel human. Your gesture will backfire and you will feel bad, and then she will feel bad because she knows you were trying to do something nice, but damn, that stuff costs $119 at the Duty Free place and, well, just never mind. Thank you, honey.