Is This A Craft?

I think it qualifies as a craft

Pumpkin Spice lattes are back at Starbucks & fall is in the air! Yes, it’s going to be 98 degrees today, but leaves that turn brown & flutter to the ground due to extreme heat & drought still *fall* don’t they? You can still jump in a pile of them, even if the desiccated leaf crumbs stick to your sweaty body & you have to hose yourself off, which is fine because today is one of the days odd numbered houses are allowed to use a little bit of water in Los Angeles.

I allow myself to start anticipating autumn, oh, about the third week of July every year. And when I dream of autumn, my thoughts usually turn to two concepts, repeatedly.

1) Making things. There is just something about the slow approach of September that convinces me that I’m about to create a whole bunch of whimsical & amazing shit with my own two hands. I’m gonna get out my sewing machine & make dresses. I’m gonna simmer stews. I’m gonna think of an Ikea hack that is so innovative, Joanna Gaines is going to call me to congratulate me. Maybe it has to do with how much I loved going back to school in September? My summer childhoods were pretty lonely. My parents worked & I stayed home with my non-driving Nana. Even though children were relatively free range back in those days, I didn’t live in a neighborhood, there were no other kids & I never went to camp. We only took a couple vacations in my whole life. So, I slept in, I read a lot of my Nana’s cast-off Harlequin Romance novels (Surprisingly perverted, Nana!) & watched a lot of The Price Is Right until I got old enough to ride my bike many miles to civilization & hang out at another non-camping, non-vacationing friend’s house, watching The Price Is Right. Anyway, school was a return to seeing…anyone. I was even glad to see kids I didn’t like all that much. It was a return to structure & productivity. And, although we were on a budget that was tighter than Olivia Newton-John’s Bad Sandy pants in Grease, my mom always found some money to buy a Trapper Keeper, some pencils, new shoes & a few outfits. The outfits bring me to recurring concept number 2.

2) Fashion. I think my mom thought of school shopping in very utilitarian terms. To get through a school year, a kid needs, what, three pairs of pants? A sweater? Four shirts? Let’s grab some & get the fuck out of K-Mart! I, however, approached the curation of these items like I was assembling a capsule wardrobe that might be featured in an editorial in Sassy or Seventeen. I needed to stretch not just the limited amount of designated dollars we could spend, I also needed the items themselves to be so versatile they could be mixed & remixed into endless permutations of attempted grade school coolness. This was helped less often than it was hindered by the fact that I was big. 5 feet tall at the beginning of third grade before I even turned 8. I had to shop in the women’s department which sometimes, I convinced myself, lent a soupçon of sophistication to the looks I was going for. But that was delusional. All of my classmates were swinging across the monkey bars looking fresh in their crisp new rainbow boat necks while I had veteran teachers asking me where I found my corduroy culottes. But I tried!

I also viewed every new school year as an opportunity to present a new me. Whether it was sizzling myself in the sun with some juice from the ancient plastic squeezy lemon in our fridge drizzled in my hair, or agreeing to do a new diet my mom & my Nana were trying that involved copious amounts of canned salmon (Why did it have crunchy bits in it, tho?) I devoted a great deal of my sad summers trying to reinvent myself like a strip mall Madonna hoping that when I stepped through the doors of Crocker Elementary or B.F. Brown Middle, that heads would whip around & everyone would whisper, “Who IS she???”

I don’t think I ever caused quite the sensation I fantasized about. But every year, when fall rolls around, I find myself thinking about how I can add a little pizzazz to my look, like I’m Andie Walsh, from Pretty in Pink, all grown up & middle aged & finally able to admit that not only was the dress she Frankensteined for prom very ugly, she also ruined two dresses that were already pretty great in the process. I’m older & wiser & know that while our sartorial experiments can sometimes go terribly wrong, it doesn’t mean we should stop going for it anyway.

So that brings me to this post. Is this a craft? Hardly. Is it fashion? Barely! But my reinvention du jour is that I want to stop doing so much to my hair every day. Because I’m tired & my hair is tired. So, I want to save touching up the roots & blowing it out for occasions where it is worth it for anywhere from 70 to 150 pieces of my layered bleached bob to break off & tinkle down into my sink like the needles from Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. The solution seems simple. Cover it up! But with what shall I cover it, dear Liza, dear Liza? Bandanas & scarves don’t really work for me because I am missing the crucial shelf of the back of my skull that holds them in place. Headbands give me an instant migraine with the squeezing.

The obvious choice for me is the humble beret. It can be colorful or not. Its soft, mushy shape echoes the lines of my soft, mushy face. Blair Waldorf wore them, so they must be somewhat chic! (I’ll unpack why I take all my fashion cues from fictional pop culture teenagers at extreme ends of the economic spectrum at a later date, I suppose.) However, the problem with a lot of berets is, they don’t fit on my pumpkin head! I may have stopped growing at age 10 when I hit 5 foot 6, but I think my noggin continued her expansion journey for some time. So I decided to try this experiment on a beret & it worked. For me. (DISCLAIMER: The beret I first tried it on was a cheap one I got at a thrift store. It might work on a fancier beret, but I just don’t know. So, if you have a priceless beret that belonged to your French great grandmother who happened to be Coco Chanel & Coco’s head was teeny but yours is shaped like a jug & you can’t squeeze your head into her chapeau, but you would also just die if you destroyed it, I leave that dilemma in your hands & do not accept any responsibility for what you may or may not choose to do with it.)

The steps are simple.

1. Take your (inexpensive, non-precious) wool felted beret that does not fit your enormous head. Here are two!

2. Run the berets under cool water until they are soaking wet, then wring them out so they are not dripping.

3. Take a plate that is larger than the original diameter of your paltry beret & carefully stretch the beret over it. I have some nice non-breakable melamine plates that are 2” wider than these little berets, which will provide some decent breathing room for my brain when all is said & done. It seems important that you put the convex side of the plate toward the top of the beret, but I honestly don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, so it could work the other way & be perfectly fine. It also seems important that you make the plate centered inside the beret & that you’re cautious to not tear the wet felt. Seems like you should also smooth out any wrinkles or puckers in the fabric & try to make everything look as normal as possible considering you just shoved a dinner plate into a hat.

4. Dry

Mine dried overnight. Then I just carefully removed the plastic plates from inside & put those back in the cabinet for the next time somebody has a sandwich. The berets have grown from about 10” in diameter to 12”. They fit me perfectly & look a little less stupid on me now, in my opinion! And no, I’m not posting a picture of me wearing one. You’ll just have to wait until September when I’m ready to introduce the new beret-wearing me!

Ok, now I want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on fall? Fashion? Is there a half-assed craft you would like to share? Please do. I am eager to hear. I am so bored, you guys.

P.S. I know you want to make a Raspberry Beret joke for me. But I’ve already done it so you don’t have to. A Raspberry Beret, the kind you find in a second hand store. xoxo