all among the nodding trees

I'm prepping for one sewing project with visions of other ones dancing in my head and hoo boy, I'm going to regret this, probably. It's been on my to-do list to find other ways of passing the time that don't involve spending 15+ hours a day plugged in to a computer, and hand-sewing is one way to do that, but with all the luck I've had in the past sewing big puffy shirts... woof. Lately there's been a ton of bullshit stress in my life, and I've been really burned-out, so being able to get excited about sewing is at least a nicer feeling than being in the complete pits about everything else.

Does anyone have recs for historical sewing books and/or blogs? I've got The Tudor Tailor and that one American Duchess 18th century dress-sewing book to go through, but I'm having a hard time finding blogs that aren't Gowns! Gowns! Gowns! 24/7. (Though gowns are amazing eye candy, so I'll also accept blogs in that vein.) I love the history of cosmetics and hairdressing, as well as all the funky layers that go into dressmaking, but I don't really wear much women's clothing and I'm not that comfortable in Full Fancy Lady Mode, so blogs and books that cover menswear and working-class people's clothing would also be rad.

And since perfume seems to be most of what I blog about here besides fic... I'd like to recommend the indie perfume oils of Seance Perfumes. I'm trying to widen my horizon beyond BPAL, and while For Strange Women has turned out too rich for my blood I've been wearing and adoring Seance's Spirit Trumpet as I go down a book spiral on 19th century spiritualism and mourning culture. Next up to try is Whisper Sisters scents, which look fantastic (I... uh... love resins too much) but will have to wait until the next time I get paid. What are you smelling? What are you window-shopping wistfully?

Podcast-wise, I've been enjoying the infectious disease podcast This Podcast Will Kill You a whole lot -- the name had my hackles up expecting something with a more faux-inflammatory tone, but the hosts are two grad students who love bibliographies and academic research and medical history and their approach to their subject matter is right up my alley. (I'd also love medical-history reading recs, jsyk.) I've been out of the movies-and-TV loop for a few weeks now due to technical difficulties (and, I mean... burnout) but I liked Jordan Peele's Us very much and I was pleasantly surprised by the 1995 HBO original movie Citizen X about the detection and identification of Soviet-era serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Books-wise I'm swamped with a bunch of shit but I will one day finish Northanger Abbey.

I've done a truly unreasonable amount of Yuletide writing (I mean... for me, please don't expect multiple 50k works of grandeur here) and I'm hyped to read what other people have written but I also need to not stress out about reveals, reveals bugs, whether I'm actually secretly a terrible writer and should flee humanity to live in a cave, etc. Pivoting to working on non-Yuletide stuff might make me feel better, but it's hard to switch gears. I'm thinking of backing up some of my DVD-commentary-type posts about writing from Tumblr ask memes on AO3, but I need to come up with the least obnoxious/tag-floody way of doing so and that's going to take some doing. It might end up involving posting here and then just linking on the relevant AO3 pages, but who knows if that will be any less annoying. I know DVD commentary-type meta is incredibly self-indulgent, but I love to talk about writing instead of writing, and I love to read about the behind-the-scenes stuff when other people write, so who cares.

(Scents update: still waiting for Yules to show up, bought a decant of AbdesSalaam Attar's Holy Water that ideally won't evaporate on me as quickly as the last one did. I didn't realize that that perfumer sells a tincture of ambergris, and I'm tempted, but also... shit costs money. Does anyone else think of the Tales from the Crypt episode Forever Ambergris when they're perfume-spiraling?)