Improving Commuting

As a follow up to yesterday, I just want to say that having a thing I look forward to that I can only do on the bus is working out brilliantly as a device for making commuting less miserable and it was totally worth buying the Kindle Fire to make it happen.  If you want to try for yourself, I recommend getting the 16gb, the 8gb could barely hold three HD episodes. I also recommend an anti-glare screen, because its glare is awful and the screen picks up fingerprints like woah.

The next recommendation is a little weirder.  I bike to the bus, which means I’m in biking clothes and have to maneuver my bike onto the cow catcher.  This makes waiting for the bus a little tricky- anything I have in my hands will have to be put away really quickly so I can rack my bike and get on, but I have no pockets.  And for reasons that may not be entirely rational, the time it takes to unsling my backpack and put a toy away makes me really stressed out.  But if I don’t use a toy the time at the bus stop is wasted, and that’s stressful too.  What I wanted was a way to make the whole of commuting feel either productive or like an indulgence.

So I made myself a shirt, out of two shirts and some fabric glue.

Steps:

1. Place desired toy on shirt, cut patch around it.  Leave space for depth.
2. Put fabric glue on single edge of patch and apply to surviving shirt.
3. Lock cat in other room.
4. Reapply patch to surviving shirt.  Once you have it aligned, apply glue to other two edges and apply (you leave the top open so it’s a pocket).  Remember to apply it less than completely flat, so the pocket will have depth.
5. I don’t know if this is a property of the fabric glue, my shirt, or this project in general, but some of the glue filtered down such that the base shirt was glued to itself and the patch ran free.  If you catch this early enough you can separate and try again.

This shirt is not aesthetically pleasing and is weirdly stiff where I overapplied fabric glue, but it gets the job done.