My mother has lent this to me- The Yestermorrow Clothes Book: How To Remodel SecondHand clothes by Diana Funaro. Oh how I want to keep it. Great photos and superlovely reworking-of-vintage ideas. Only problem being that the clothes they are suggesting remaking are originally Victorian. I guess that is something else to be woeful about, the days when Victorian clothes were tossed into thrift shops to be made into heartbreakingly romantic 70s threads!

Looky here found it on Amazon… and on a smaller bookstore site.

we have all probably heard about this by now. but not only has a generation of new knitters and individuals like if i were rosemary woodhouse / Yarn Over Movement [Tara Lynn’s Flickr name / Tara Lynn’s MySpace store] and photographer Terry Richardson added sexyness, grit and reality to knitters previous gentle image, a group of entrepreneurial knitting nuns are in hiding after running up a debt of over a million dollars.

“Greece’s authoritative Kathimerini newspaper reported that the knitting business began to unravel when the nuns accrued massive debts after attending foreign fashion shows in a bid to keep up with the latest designs in woollen garments. They are then believed to have mortgaged the monastery of Kyrikos and Ioulittis to the hilt to pay off the debt.

With the banks demanding the money back, Greece’s holy synod says it is confronting one of its worst crises ever involving an order of nuns.”

i just have to say- bring it on sisters!

More at The Guardian.

You know when something opens your mind. Not prying it open, or slapping it with a wet fish [um ya]. More like eating a delicious meal and realizing, slowly while consuming, that you… had… no… idea… food could be this way. It could be a meal, a relationship, an idea about life. Ideas or truths that aren’t actually new but ignored or forgotten- the grace, lusciousness and soul replaced with cold logic, practicality and other boring cruel stuff. Well! Here’s a book by Lewis Hyde that isn’t a slap in the brain with a wet fish!

I’ll pass you now to D. Bannister’s Amazon review of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property-

“In many aspects this is an exceptional book. It not only discusses the history of gift in culture but through the work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound it discusses the gift in poetry and art as well. The book focuses on the importance of gift, the flow and movement of gift, and the impact that the modern market place has had on the circle of gift.

From the opening pages when Hyde amusingly discloses the premise of gift by juxtaposing the Indian Giver with White Man Keeper, the book progresses gift through community, folktale and art.

If you have ever been dismayed by the modern or postmodern. If you have ever wanted to make your money, cash out and leave the madness, you should read this book. Not only does it give you hope, it may rejuvenate your idea of community.”

To balance out this adulation, go to the book’s Amazon page and scroll down to Stan Eads’ less favourable but insightful review.

I think it’s worth a read.

so i think to myself… i am doing a good thing here. i am reselling clothes. i am making bags from thrifted fabrics. sounds environmentally conscious.

but what about all the transport? the fuel? do you know how many things i bought in nyc that i am now sending back to nyc? a lot.

i am trying to have a business model in line with my ethics. but how environmentally conscious can i be and still eat?

anyway, these are things i think about. and one of the reasons i am reading “Uncommon Carriers” by John McPhee. all about transport, transport, transport- trucks, ships, planes etc and the people who drive, steer, fly them. any book that goes into fetishistic detail about 18-wheelers and cowboy boot collections is a thing of beauty to me.

_{photo courtesy of bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com}