i have another unwearable skirt to add to my collection. this time, i followed a free pattern with good reviews from a reputable patternmaker, and thought i was actually doing quite well until i inserted the waistband, which was the second-to-last step! what a waste of time! i still can’t see where i went wrong so i’m chalking it up to poor pattern grading…

the fabric i used was an old duvet cover, so it’s no great loss, but i really liked the pattern and worked very hard on it… ||lI.‸.) oh well, i’m not going to give up just yet, i will attempt the Henrietta from Spaghetti Western Sewing when i next have a bit of free time, and only in the event of a third failure will i be tossing my sewing machine out the window.

reading updates!!! since my last post, i have finished both Leaving the Atocha Station and Giovanni’s Room. (i can’t stop thinking about the 1970s film adaptation of the latter that never came into fruition despite both Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro being linked to fairly prominent roles at the time… we were ROBBED!!!)

i am now reading 10:04 (another Ben Lerner) and The Doll’s Alphabet, a collection of short horror stories from Camilla Grudova, who is quickly becoming one of my new faves (especially since she introduced me to Lovejoy). i highly recommend “Waxy” from the collection, which is available to read online here [content warning for SA].

speaking of horror, tom and i finally watched Skinamarink this past weekend and we both loved it (solid 4 stars from us both). this review i read in Caesura by C. Philip Mills is fabulous.

lastly, i really enjoyed Ella Dorn’s “Total Theory of Lana Del Rey”. this is the kind of pop music journalism that i get giddy over. the quote from this piece that piqued my interest when it came up on my Substack feed is as follows:

Lana is a Spenglerian pop star. She gets earthier and more interesting as time goes on, but her actual body of work runs through history like a codebreaking cypher. Its reference points are not letters of the alphabet but five decades of the 20th century; 30s-40s-50s-60s-70s…

i immediately subscribed after breathlessly reading the entire article out loud to tom.

we leave for germany very early on friday morning to attend a friend’s wedding this weekend so i expect i’ll have something a bit more exciting to write about in my next post! ta ta for now!