This season, everyone we know had or currently has a form of walking pneumonia. It is exhausting and isolating, and for those with little kids or immune compromised, fucking scary.

So my kids and I started making activity bags for dear friends who have been in the thick of it- a ziploc filled with beads, peppermint hot chocolate kit, stickers- as a way to say, we miss you, we care, and here’s a tiny delight.

My daughter and I then decided to make miniature notebooks to add- covers cut from gingerbread kit boxes and decorated with washi tape. My friend told me that her daughter brought the notebook with her that night when she had to be admitted to the hospital.

Tiny objects make me feel safe. Objects made by hand makes me feel loved in a way that is different from anything else, even something stapled together and made out of recycled trash.

Now I am in the thick of it. I’ve had pneumonia for five days, and not the walking kind. So what do you do when you are stuck in the house with limited energy? May I suggest: making tiny things, preferably out of trash.

I gathered up old planners I never used, cut them to roughly A6 size and chose fun covers to match, then poked holes into the spine with a poky thing I bought for this purpose but you can use a thumb tack, and stitched those suckers up, and felt pretty smug and good for a few minutes.

And one of the covers had its own secret pocket. What will I put in this pocket? A tiny fortune, a sticker of a cat taking a bath, guitar chords, a wish. Sometimes it’s just nice knowing a pocket is there, even if you don’t intend to fill it. (Paraphrasing a movie trailer joke that cracked me up: why the fuck do baby clothes have pockets? What are they going to put in there?)

I am so tired of being house bound. But even in this state I am finding ways to nudge open what feels like a closed space, with scissors and thread, making pockets of astonishment, no matter how brief, or tiny.

I followed Jen Hewett’s tutorial: https://jenhewett.com/2009/06/how-to-make-a-hand-stitched-notebook/

Pockets- on making interior space