Onecraftywriter’s Weblog

Today, I noticed that my dear college friend Ryan Scammell had posted a new radio segment (I guess I’ll call it that?). Scammell, as he’s fondly called by all who knew him at Northwestern, has always been the most adept of storytellers, whether he’s working in film or radio, whether he’s talking about his heartbreak or the time he dressed up in a banana suit. He worked for NPR for a while, and some of the films he made in college were just breathtaking—both visually and dramatically. I can’t say enough about this guy’s skills, from writing to directing, and these “audio polaroids” (his words) that he produces are just another example of how he manages to translate his easygoing demeanor into something that just sings. There is certainly an art to being a storyteller; it involves a sort of choreographed abandon, if you will. There are times that craft comes into play, when sequence matters; but there are others when a voice across the slow, blue airwaves is all we need.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this art of storytelling. It started when I began a non-fiction piece about my father’s side of the family—my grandma, my dad, and my three aunts and uncles—who sit around the dinner table on Thanksgiving or Christmas and regale everyone with silly tales of their past or present. They all have that storytelling instinct, the one I didn’t inherit. Somehow, my dad and his brothers and sister can make anything funny, even to those who weren’t there. The piece I was writing about this, appropriately enough, didn’t really work. It’s about 1000 words deep and resting on my hard drive, likely to not be resurrected.

Strangely enough, in deciding to scrap that essay, I started writing another one about Scammell, about his art, and about how we thrived off each other one summer in our early twenties. It was as if, all the way from Brooklyn, he heard my fingers on the keyboard and produced his piece, which alludes to the same time. Oh, and that music in the background, at the end? It’s Thomas Tallis, a composer I introduced him to. I’m just slightly proud—that I gave him something, that he liked it.

This afternoon, I took a break from doing the reading for my Travel Literature class to focus on sewing. I tend to move back and forth between schoolwork and craftwork, using one as a reprieve for the other. I returned to the jeans that I’d started adding a fabric hem to last week and—nor can I believe it—I finished them. Both legs are now complete. They have their imperfections, but that’s one thing I’m beginning to learn from crafting: that I have to put aside my perfectionism if I ever want to get anything done. And so, in that spirit, one project completed:

I spent the better part of Sunday in the letterpress shop, making notecards that I’ll (fingers crossed) sell at the flea market next month. I wasn’t quite sure where to start, given that I want these to be a bit personal—notecards and envelopes with initials, so that they’ll seem customized. But this is hard to do without actually knowing who will buy these, not to mention what their names will be. So I did what any strategizing, calculated person would do: I guessed. Mostly, I just picked the letters that I liked best.

Progress, so far.

So I’m hoping that Mary, Kim, and Evelyn come to the market. (If not, my friends with M, K, and E names can look forward to a present in the mail . . .) I’ll be making more of the general “hello” cards, as well, and some thank-you notes of sort. But I think this is a pretty good start.

Watching ink dry.

I love how these “K” ones came out: textured, but clear.

I suppose the subtitle for this post should be “or . . . what happens when you hem your jeans too short and need to fix them.” A couple of months ago, I bought a pair of Salt Works jeans at a local boutique, and though I loved the fit, they were way too long. I tried wearing them a couple of times, but even with my tallest boots on, the hems dragged on the ground and—an inevitability in the rainy Oregon winter—got soaking wet. In a hurry to wear them one day, I cut off the bottoms and thought I’d give them a quick hem. Well, turns out I was too hasty and didn’t follow my father’s old idiom: “Measure twice, cut once.”

So in an attempt to reconcile the situation, I decided to sew a new, decorative hem around the bottom. I sketched up this pattern on a piece of scrap paper: