I sew for many reasons—the pleasure, the satisfaction, the skills-building, the way it scratches an OCD itch. One of the biggest ones, though, if not the biggest, is to learn how to not just accept but also embrace my changing body. A body I've never felt at home in. A body I've never put much … Continue reading In Short(s)
OK, here it is: the second instalment of a two-part series of posts about irons. Riveting stuff, right? It's exciting to me, anyway. I long ago stopped pretending that this blog is anything but a vanity project through which to indulge my whims and interests in a semi-anonymous format; as you might have gathered from … Continue reading Ironing It Out
When I was ten or so, my mom sewed a solstice dress for me to wear to winter solstice rituals. (I won’t elaborate on the yearly event, but think “simulated birth canal.”) I still have that magnificent gown, which is in a purple 1990s celestial print that could be mistaken for nothing but a relic … Continue reading Curse of the Solstice Gown
The more time passes, and the more consistently secure I feel in where things have settled with my health and my daily rhythms, the more aware I’ve become of how different my life is now as compared to how it was when I published my first De Morbo Sacro post eons ago. Back then, epilepsy … Continue reading From DMS to … DMS
When my power chair and I hit 100, it felt like a significant milestone in the coming together of one soul and one motor. We'd bonded in those first 100 km, and I remember being sure that it was impossible for woman and machine to be any closer unless in a cyborg situation such as … Continue reading When 2 Become 1,000
Hell hath no fury like a woman with a full bladder and nowhere to empty it. Scrap that: hell hath no fury like a wheelchair-using woman waiting for someone to vacate the only accessible stall in a public washroom with plenty of unoccupied toilets. And can you blame her/them/me? It's hard enough to locate a … Continue reading Stalled
At the end of an especially frustrating day earlier this week, I found myself struggling to accept how little I’d accomplished. All afternoon, I’d flitted from one task to another, never able to spend more than fifteen minutes on any given thing before getting lost in the news or rolling to the kitchen for a … Continue reading (Un)burdened
I kind of hate the whole April Fool's Day thing. It left me on edge as a kid—would I wake up to find the classic plastic wrap over the toilet bowl, or would it be a booby-trapped-bedroom-door year?—and now, as an adult, I find little humour in the surge of joke-adjacent promotional emails that flood … Continue reading April, No Fool(ing)
Once again, Purple Day almost slipped by without my noticing it. I caught it in the nick of the time, though, and here's the blog post to prove it. This has become a pattern: every year for several in a row, I've only remembered just before or a little after the fact that I've failed … Continue reading I Almost Forgot It’s Purple Day, and I’m Totally Fine with That
I sat down at my sewing table a few Saturday mornings ago with two free hours to work on a skirt that was nearing completion. It was the home stretch—the satisfying yet infuriating stage of garment construction in which you can see everything coming together and are eager to get ’er done and try it … Continue reading Seam Screams
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 