You ever want to write something, but have no idea what to write, and life is just so busy that you can’t even get a moment to think on what you could be writing about? That’s been me for a bit. So instead of putting off the inevitable (because let’s face it, I always come back to my blog) I’ve decided to pretty much use my five minute pomodoro breaks to just brain dump. This may or may not become a series.
Work’s been crazy all year which hasn’t left much time for my usual hobbies and past times, but in spite of all that, 2023 has had some incredible moments so far.
Travel
I visited France (Paris) and Germany (Aachen and Koln) in March, which was absolutely a dream come true. I was in Europe for just under two weeks, with the bulk of the time being spent in Paris, and then I did two nights in Aachen with a day trip to Koln.
In Paris, my cousin was the perfect host and between the activities she found, as well as some things I discovered on my own, it was such a fun time. Some of the coolest things I did were the perfume tour and mini-workshop, an embroidery workshop/collective art piece in the middle of nowhere, the Dior museum tour, a walking tour of Montmartre, and I’m not sure I can remember the rest right now. Honestly, each of these things would require a blog post on its own to do it justice. And maybe I’ll do that at some point, but that point is not now.
I took the train from Paris to Aachen where my bestie met me and it was his turn for hosting duties. I’d already scoped out fabric stores in the town, so we visited those so I could purchase cloth for some DIY souvenirs. As much as it was a vacation, I still had to work so after showing me around town, I got some work in and then we met up with his friends for drinks that night. We went to Koln the next day so I could check out somewhere else and just roamed around and ate some food. Then the next day it was back to Paris.
I’m a bit of an old soul, so it took me a looong time to get on the tiktok train (gabsi77 if you care). But then I realised the reason I didn’t get into it before was because I hadn’t found my niche. And since, I’ve discovered the crafting/artsy side of tiktok I’m now 100% a convert. I’d contemplated doing a Day in the Life post there the other day, and then decided it was easier to write this blog post instead (yes I find writing copy way easier than letting an app create a 60 second video for me). Anyway, I might still post it over on tiktok, who knows, we’ll see.
I won a camera! Analog Club (@shopanalogclub on IG) is a Jamaican camera rescue and film revival project, and I entered a giveaway they had going and won. And it wasn’t until I was writing this that I realised that we don’t say “digital camera” anymore, because duh…it’s assumed that if you’re referring to a camera, it’s obviously digital. So I guess I should clarify (if it’s not obvious to you already) that I won an analogue camera. As in uses film and needs to be processed in a dark room kind of camera.
My dad was always into photography, so I kind of grew up with cameras around the place. First analogue, and then digital, but for me, my very first personally owned camera was a digital camera that I got back in 2004. I still remember very clearly, it was a Vivitar Vivicam 3705 with 3.3 megapixels (which was pretty decent back then).
And now that I have this one (Minolta X-300), I’m excited about my foray into film. I’ve only ever really shot with film once before. I took a photography course in uni and we had an assignment to purchase a disposable camera and then get the pictures developed. It was pretty great, and while I haven’t done any photography in a while, those are still some of my favourite photos to date.
I remember a friend once telling me that if I didn’t know the lyrics to a song, I could just mouth “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon” to the tune and no one would know. This was back when I used to do musical theatre and sometimes just hadn’t learnt the lyrics to the song yet. This is totally irrelevant to this post, but every time I think about this top, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.
When I saw the fabric at Pablo’s I fell in love and didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, but decided to buy a half yard anyway. So after sitting on it for a bit, I was like it’s the perfect print to do a fun, summery, off-the-shoulder top. And, as it happened, half a yard was the perfect amount of fabric for the top. There was barely anything left over, but I think it’ll be just enough to make a matching scrunchy, and a drink coaster, cause you know, we’re not letting anything go to waste.
Honestly, this was the simplest top to make. It’s basically just a bunch of rectangles, some hemming, and then stitching it all together with the elastic. Sewing in the elastic is probably the most difficult part, but it’s also a great way to practice and I’ve definitely got better at sewing elastic in quarters. An easier way would be to do a casing and just run the elasting through, which would give it a slightly different look, but nothing that would take away from the cuteness of the top.
It’s breezy, it’s cute, and the way this Jamaican summer is looking to be hot hot hot, that’s all I’m about.
Lemme upgrade ya! It was Beyonce level attitude I was bringing to this dress makeover project, because I was determined to make it work for me. Last December, a friend had given me a dress from the H&M x Desmond and Dempsey 2020 collection, and I fell in love with the print. Unfortunately, when I tried it on, it didn’t quite fit, and the excess fabric coupled with the long balloon sleeves were a bit overwhelming on my frame. And so it hung, all forlorn, in my closet for months while I tried to figure out what to do with it.
How it started…
Then an idea came to me, but I wasn’t really sure if I had the skills to execute it, so I kept it in a holding area inside my head and kind of mulled it over for a while. My sewing skills are pretty basic and I only have access to my mum’s sewing machine when I visit the family in the country, so not much opportunity to practice. My sewing portfolio (if you can even call it that) includes a monokini I made for a party two years ago, a few masks since the pandemic, and the odd mending job.
Then, over Easter I made a dress (I’ll do a post on that some other time) and that kind of gave me the push I needed to finally tackle this one. It was a whole journey! One that involved removing sleeves, and using that fabric to create armhole bands (that ended up being a disaster) and pockets, and then creating new armholes with bias tape, taking in the dress to actually fit and inserting pockets. In my head I thought this might take a day, in reality it took three days, working on and off. Thank God for Putus, because without her I don’t know what I’d have done. You can check out my thread on Twitter for the nitty-gritty, blow-by-blow recap.
Now, while I’ve long loved H&M’s stuff, I’d never heard of Desmond and Dempsey. So it wasn’t until I was writing this post and started looking things up that I scoped them out. Marie Claire did an article on it, and of course, Desmond and Dempsey and H&M had their own stories on the collab. After checking out the entire collection, I was in love, it’s light, airy, breezy, tropical and totally my vibe. Which made me even happier that my finished product (I think) stayed true to the feel of the partnership.
*I received this ARC as part of the Hear Our Voices Book Tours*
If you’re Jamaican, “yuh cawna daak”, is a refrain you might hear from your parents when they’re strongly recommending (ie low-key threatening) you to do something in your best interest or else. In Desmond Hall’s world, Frankie has done everything right, except for having the misfortune to be born in a rural community plagued by gang violence.
Your Corner Dark was an engrossing story of a Jamaican youth facing limited options and endless challenges as he seeks to overcome the circumstances of his birth. In Jamaica, you often get told that education is your way out. A way out of poverty and into middle class life, a way out of middle class life and into the uptown, or even a way out of Jamaica.
For most of his life, Frankie has managed to stay out of trouble, pushing himself as his mother pushed and encouraged him, keeping his head in his books with the knowledge that getting a good education is his only ticket out; and just as he’s managed to secure that golden ticket in the form of a scholarship to the university of his dreams, things take a turn for the worst. His father gets shot and now Frankie is on his own and has to make decisions no child should ever be faced with.
While I was completely taken with the story, as a Jamaican there were a few things I had issues with (which you can probably tell when you check out the Q&A with the author below. Aside from it being the typical ghetto youth narrative, I felt that there was some gratuitous pandering to a North American audience when there could have been a middle ground of commonality instead. From the perspective of an #OwnVoice review, those were my main issues, but for any non-Jamaican reading I don’t think they’d notice and it wouldn’t ruin the story, but they also wouldn’t have the most authentic impression of Jamaica.
One on One with Desmond Hall
Thanks to the Hear Our Voices team and Simon & Schuster for giving me a chance to review the book and interview the author, Desmond Hall.
Desmond Hall
GM: How old were you when you left Jamaica?
DH: It’s complicated. I left Jamaica for the U.S. three times before I was 11, and I was sent back to live with relatives in Jamaica, twice. I sort of became a “barrel child,” a term coined by a Jamaican psychologist for children who are separated from their parents for mostly economic reasons.
GM: Where in Jamaica did you grow up?
DH: I lived in three different areas: two districts in St. James parish (Montego Bay area). I also lived in Kingston, the capital.
GM: When I first read the blurb, I felt that portraying gang-life/violence in Jamaica was a bit clichéd. What would you say to someone else with those thoughts?
DH: Gang culture is a fact of life in not just in Kingston, but now in Montego Bay, an area where gangs didn’t hold sway until lately. This is a startling development, so much so that the government has passed several state-of-emergency declarations over the last couple of years. Soldiers have been dispatched to go door-to-door to look for gang members and confiscate weapons.
It’s also important to note that YOUR CORNER DARK is about a lot more than gang-life/violence. When people have read YOUR CORNER DARK they’ve appreciated the deep dive it’s taken into tough topics like, police brutality, colorism, election violence, what it means to be a “man” and teen depression. When you think about it, these are all topics that are very relevant to life in the States. YOUR CORNER DARK is a specific Jamaican story but it’s also a universal story.
Also, my editor and I went to great extremes to make sure none of the violence was gratuitous. The action serves the story.
GM: What would you say to counter the opinion that Jamaica is all gangs, guns and violence?
DH: Many readers probably don’t know this, but Jamaica was the main force in the United Nations human rights diplomacy of the 1960s and was THE negotiator when it came to pushing the agenda for human rights internationally.
When I was a boy the Jamaican economy was booming. In fact, it took two American dollars to buy one Jamaican dollar. It was only in the late 70’s when a perfect storm of factors came together that the Jamaican economy took a huge hit. Since that time Jamaica has been in a debt trap where they’ve repaid billions more than they’ve borrowed. Worse, the country has been put under austerity measures that have limited the government’s ability to invest in transportation, education, and health care. This has put Jamaica in a long-term financial crisis that has been one of the driving factors in the rise of crime.
But, if you go to Jamaica now you will encounter some of the kindest, most resourceful people you will ever meet.
GM: I felt like some of the references were Americanised unnecessarily. There was an instance where “Elementary school” was mentioned (I think primary as a descriptor works for explaining that it’s a foundational/lower level of education), and there was reference of chipmunks and squirrels. I was utterly engrossed in the story, but every time I read something like that it jarred for me. Why not use more local/universal references?
DH: Oh, you should have seen the first draft. It was painful when my beta readers had quizzical looks all over their faces, wondering whether or not to tell me they didn’t understand what was going on. They wanted to be polite, which was understandable. But after having in-depth conversations with those readers the truth came out. Even referencing the patwah as patwah was confusing to them. They knew the reference as patois. Of course, every Caribbean reader would understand patwah, and even get a warm “back home” feeling from it.
So, I had to go through dozens of iterations, and lots of trial-and error to find the proper amount of Jamaicaness. And yes, if I were writing specifically for Caribbean readers the balance would be different.
GM: I really enjoyed the picture you painted of Frankie’s community, was this inspired by anywhere in particular?
DH: Given the subject matter, I took great pains to make sure the specific areas, names, and actions were not identifiable. I guess it’s the old disclaimer that used to run at the start of crime stories: “The names and places have been changed to protect the innocent.”
GM: What was your inspiration for the story? Was it personal, or did you just think it a story that needed to be told about life in Jamaica?
DH: When I was a boy in Jamaica, my parents, and a lot of my relatives went to bed with the doors open to catch the night breeze. Now, Jamaica is a country with 389 criminal gangs, 250 of which are thought to be active, and everywhere you go you see steel grills in front of windows and doors. This transformation is heartbreaking, and I just had to write about it. Another “inspiration” was that one of my uncles was murdered in a gang-related incident. This caused a lot of trauma in my family. Writing Your Corner Dark was a way of working that out.
by Gabbie 