Roman shades progress; and gifted kids when they grow up.

It's next weekend, and the first Roman shade is done, including the installation. Here's the proof: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

I spent a lot of time stressing over the installation process: how to position the pulleys and cord lock device, whether I should have bought a wider mounting board, where to stick the darn thing on the wall, how hard it would be to mount it with the angle brackets with the shade attached, and on and on. Turned out it was not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. The shade is actually pretty light, weight-wise, so I was able to duck under it to get to the angle brackets. And I had cut the fabric so that screwing it to the top of the window frame was the perfect length, which bypassed my concerns about finding studs in the wall to screw into and/or installing wall anchors.

Getting the old shade down was also pretty easy. My old shades aren't mounted the normal way; instead there's a tab that clips them into the hanging bracket. I shoved a screwdriver into a slot in the tab and pushed it toward the window to release the clip, and poof, down came the blind.

In short, the process was easier than I expected it to be. And now that I know what I'm doing, more or less, the bedroom shade is going much faster. I forgot to get a photo of the office window before I took the old blind down, but here's a "before" shot of the bedroom window. I guess that 35 years ago, when the rooms were all varying shades of tan, these beige shades looked great. Not so much anymore. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

This window is large enough that I'm having to lay out the new shade on the bed to pin it. Tigs, of course, is helping. 

"Is comfy, Mama. What you mean, is going on the window?"
Lynne Cantwell 2026

This afternoon, I sewed on all the rings, attached the weight rod, and sewed the velcro to the top. Next step is stringing it all up to the to-be-assembled header board. The cords and hanging hardware may have to wait 'til next Saturday, but we'll see how the week goes.

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I really miss Jo-Ann Fabrics. Wikipedia says it began as a single fabric store in Cleveland in 1943, eventually growing to a national chain. But its fortunes rose and fell over the years with the popularity of sewing as a craft, and toward the end, it was diversifying its merchandise line to encompass other crafts and home decor items. Eventually, the whole thing shut down last year when the company couldn't find a buyer. Wikipedia says that Michaels bought the company's intellectual property and private labels. But with the exception of an expanded fabric department, I don't see much evidence of that, at least at our Santa Fe Michaels. And when I say "expanded", I mean their fabric inventory is maybe 15 percent of what Jo-Ann carried.

Multiple times during this process, I thought about how easy it would have been to gather everything I needed with a single trip to Jo-Ann: "Oh, I need thread to match the blue fabric; guess that's a trip to Michaels now. Oh, I need sew-on velcro by the yard; guess I'm buying multiple precut packs from Michaels instead. Oh, I need pulleys and a cord lock for each window; I bet Jo-Ann would have carried them -- they carried upholstery fabrics and notions -- but it looks like my choices now are either Amazon or random places on the internet I've never done business with before."

I realize I'm part of the problem. I quit sewing clothing decades ago, when fabric prices rose to the point where it was cheaper to buy ready-made clothing than make my own, despite the lure of wearing a one-of-a-kind garment created by my own hands. But sometimes, damn it, you want to avoid the overpriced, mass-produced stuff like "custom" Roman blinds and make something really custom. Small, independent fabric stores still exist, but it seems like most of them cater to quilters, with maybe some clothing fabrics on the side. That's not helpful for the kinds of things I'm interested in sewing these days.

I'll be done with this project in another week or so, and then I'm sure my sewing machine will go back to gathering dust in the closet. It's just a shame, that's all.

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If you're only here for the Roman shade saga, you can stop here. The rest is about smart kids when they grow up.

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There's an article in New Scientist this week about giftedness and how gifted kids turn out as adults. Alas, you have to subscribe to read the whole thing; I read it as part of my Apple News subscription (and btw, if you have an iPhone, Apple News is a terrific news aggregator and worth the monthly subscription fee). 

Kids who are labeled gifted have probably heard the derisive term, "early ripe, early rot". I sure did (from my brother, among others). But this article talks about studies that have tracked intellectually gifted kids into adulthood. The conclusion? 

Far from growing into troubled adults, many gifted individuals appear to flourish later in life. Long-term studies suggest they are more likely than average to achieve professional success and, contrary to popular stereotypes, often enjoy better mental health. Scientists are also starting to understand what makes gifted brains so exceptional, finding that they are better integrated and can process information more efficiently..."

And then it goes into the current debate over whether giftedness is just another form of neurodiversity, which I've already bitched about on this blog. Thankfully, for me at least, the authors of this article have found people to refute that argument:

Yet neurodivergence tends to describe neurodevelopmental conditions, which can create functional problems in everyday life, such as inattention, emotional dysregulation or hyperactivity. That doesn't seem to be the case for gifted children. "It is simply on the higher end in a spectrum of human intelligence," says Mimi Wellisch, a psychologist based in Australia who has published on gifted children extensively... Problems with behaviour "are unlikely to be a byproduct of giftedness," she says.

As for gifted-kids-as-adults, a 2020 study headed by David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, looked at the outcomes for 50-year-olds who were identified as mathematically gifted as kids, finding them to have a greater sense of well-being than non-gifted folks. In 2025, another team headed by Lubinski talked with 50-year-old former gifted kids, and "around half reported experiencing boredom and frustration in mixed-ability classes." And in terms of outcomes, Lubinski found in 2013, when comparing people who skipped a grade with those who didn't, 27 percent of kids who had skipped a grade later earned a Ph.D., compared with 15 percent of kids who hadn't. 

Lubinski says that based on his findings, the current fashion to remove educational supports specifically aimed at gifted kids in the name of treating everybody the same (so as to not make gifted kids feel pressured to achieve) is unfair, and could even be considered a form of prejudice. 

Which is pretty much what I said in my blog post last year.

The article also touches on complaints about the cultural problems regarding IQ tests and other methods being developed to identify gifted individuals, but this post has already gone on long enough. If you have any interest in the topic of giftedness, I recommend tracking down this article. It's a good one. And not just because it quotes researchers who agree with me.

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These moments of long-winded blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who doesn't have a Ph.D. but might get one someday. Who knows?

Things in progress.

So the big news today, of course, is the death of South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. A medical examiner's report released this evening says he died of a tear in his aorta, likely caused by atherosclerosis, but we'll know more when the report is finalized in a couple of weeks. 

Republicans still control the Senate, even with Graham gone, but the math will be a titch harder until his replacement is named. There are still questions lingering about the condition of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, too, including about a photo released by his office today that looks like a retread from several years ago. If it turns out the worst is true about him, the GOP will be holding onto Senate control by just one seat until their replacements come on board. 

Both McConnell and Graham knew that Trump would be bad news for the country if elected, but when push came to shove, neither one stepped up to block his crazy ideas from becoming law. That's not the legacy I'd want to have.

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Besides those news stories still in progress, I have not yet finished the Roman shades for my bedroom and office/craft room. Progress has been made: all the fabric for both is cut, and most of the sewing is done on the shade for the office/craft room. There's still a fair bit of work ahead on that shade, though, including all the hardware. I'd be farther along if I hadn't played hooky yesterday. But in my defense, I also went to the hardware store, bought the board for the hardware for both shades, and got the store to cut it to the lengths I need. 

I will not be doing a tutorial for this project; if you're after step-by-step directions, there are about a squintillion videos out there, some more useful than others. (I'm actually using one method for the office/craft room shade and a different one for the bedroom shade.)

If you've never bought any fabric from Spoonflower, I can tell you that it's different experience than going to the fabric store. First, there's no instant gratification; you put in your order and it takes them a week or two to print it on your preferred fabric and send it to you. Their selvedges are huge compared to fabric from a store, but the width of printed fabric they say you'll get is the size you get (I measured mine to be sure). And their order control system gave me a little thrill. 

Lynne Cantwell | July 2026

Both fabrics I received are excellent quality. The one in the photo above is a performance linen. The downside is that it's polyester, and it ravels like crazy. The lining fabric I bought (from a different online vendor) is also polyester, and it too ravels like crazy. That's making me ... crazy. Didn't seem to bother Tigs, though. 

Lynne Cantwell | July 2026

(Then he plopped his butt down on it and I had to chase him away. Then I stepped on his tail. Poor little guy.)

The other fabric I purchased is a cotton sateen, which should have been easier to manage than those slippery polyesters, except it's 116 inches wide. Cutting all of this stuff has been an adventure -- my dining room table is round and only 42 inches wide. I had to spend a lot of time shifting the fabric and the cutting mat and the fabric and the cutting mat and... I kept thinking how nice it would be to have one of those ginormous work tables that I saw in one how-to video. Just lay it all out flat and cut it, boom, done. Alas.

Once all the fabric was cut, I had to iron it. I usually don't bother with ironing fabric when I sew. I know you're supposed to, but you're also supposed to wash it before you cut it, and you're supposed to iron all your seams flat, and I don't do any of that stuff, either. But I was convinced by one of the tutorials that said if you don't get those creases out now, you'll be seeing them every time you look at your shade once it's done. So there I was, slaving over a steam iron in my 80-degree dining room. 

I used to laugh at my mother for spending summer afternoons sweating over a hot iron to press her sheets and dish towels. Dish towels, for godsakes! Ever since then, I've said that if God wanted us to iron, She wouldn't have invented permanent press. I'm sure that today both She and my mother were laughing at me.

Anyway, the fun continued as I played bobbin thread chicken on the last bit of sewing before dinner. This game is similar to yarn chicken, where you're sweating the amount of yarn you have left compared to the amount of knitting you still have to do -- although with the bobbin thread version, running out too soon usually comes as a surprise. Today, though, I finished with inches to spare!

Lynne Cantwell | July 2026

The next step is to attach the dowel rods to the shade, then turn the thing right-side-out and hem it, then attach the rings and the pull cord and sew velcro at the top and... yeah. It's a long way from being done. Maybe next weekend. 

Then I get to make the other shade.

And *then* I get to figure out how to get the old shades off the windows. Wish me luck!

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These moments of bloggy craftiness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. It's summer! Do something fun!

Marking the 250th; mainstream Democrats' nerves; and my reading challenge is done.

Lester120 | Deposit Photos

It's the day after the 4th of July, and even though most of the big stuff is over, the weekend lingers on. So happy Independence Day, y'all, and happy 250th to the USA. 

A lot of Americans don't feel like there's much to celebrate on this anniversary of our nation's birth, especially given the shitshow that Trump has made of the nationwide celebration. I remember the bicentennial in 1976; Watergate was not long behind us (Nixon resigned in '74), and it seemed like our political system was healthy and had stood up to the rule of law. It felt like we could go on, like we could continue striving for that more perfect union the Founding Fathers talked about.

Today, not so much.

But: I'm not a huge follower of astrology, but I've happened upon several astrological forecasts of late that indicate we are heading for some kind of upheaval, likely this month. But I have a sense that there's already an upheaval ongoing, and it has to do with the success of democratic socialist candidates during this primary season.

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I can tell you this much: the moderate Democrats who have kept a lock on their party for years (into their dotage, in many cases) are freaking out. A few days ago, Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic wrote a piece about how "Marxist-Leninist organizers" have been infiltrating the Democratic Socialists of America since Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential candidacy and are poised to take over the organization. He says the DSA has begun supporting "militant anti-Zionism" and is otherwise aligning itself with communist organizations. And he compares the use of "Democratic" in DSA to authoritarian regimes around the world that use the same word. Pretty scary stuff. (The Atlantic has a stiff paywall -- a subscription is $89 a year, which is why I dropped mine several years ago. I'm accessing the article via Apple News.)

The Atlantic, despite its reputation as liberal-leaning, went with this piece at the same time that conservative columnists at the Washington Post and headline writers at the Wall Street Journal are either dropping "democratic" from references to democratic socialist candidates altogether or being wibbly-wobbly about it: sometimes they refer to them as "democratic socialists" and sometimes as just "socialists", as if the two terms are synonymous. Which they're not.

(Chait, by the way, is reportedly a progressive, but he's also Jewish, which might explain why he's sensitive about the whole Zionism thing.)

The founding editor of the DSA's Jacobin magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara, published a response to Chait's piece, which you can read here. (There's no paywall, but you'll have to give up your email address to read it.) The gist of it is that Chait is misreading the DSA's history, that it's a big tent that allows people who hold a lot of leftist viewpoints to join, and that there's a through-line from the DSA's founding to its stances today that Chait is misreading.

We're also in an atmosphere where Trump, at Mount Rushmore Friday, conflated democratic socialism with communism and claimed America is under attack: "You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both."

I mean, one expects that out of Trump, who lies all the time. And conservatives have equated socialism with communism in their diatribes for generations; it's a short step for them to rope in democratic socialism and equate that with communism, too. But that Democrats are working so blatantly to discredit the DSA is new.

Here's my view: The Democrats in positions of power really like it there, and they will do anything to stay. They have been biding their time since Trump 2.0 began, telling us they have no power in Congress right now so they can't do anything to rein him in, thereby hoping to encourage a groundswell of blue votes that would win them control of at least one house of Congress, and ideally both, this year. 

The groundswell has built, all right, but it's not the one they wanted. People on the left are sick of Trump's self-dealing and other shenanigans, and they're sick of Democrats' mealy-mouthed responses to it all. They want fresh faces with fresh ideas. So they're voting for younger candidates who espouse democratic socialist views, even as those candidates run as Democrats.

It's not happening everywhere; some democratic socialist candidates are losing their primaries. But it's clear that the successes they've had are scaring the pants off the Democratic leadership. And New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani's successes for the little guy are only making it worse. His speech on the eve of Independence Day has received a fair bit of news coverage.

Some commentators see democratic socialism as the left's equivalent of MAGA. It's true that MAGA started as a collection of disgruntled far-right voters who, juiced by Fox News, coalesced around Trump's candidacy. Democratic socialism is attracting disgruntled far-left voters, and in that sense, I guess, they're similar.

Could democratic socialists take over the Democratic Party the way MAGA has taken over the GOP? It won't happen this year. But by 2028? If they find a candidate with something near to Trump's charisma, I think it could happen. I'm not seeing anyone who's that much of a rising star yet; Mamdani is a naturalized citizen, so he can't be president. But a lot can happen in two years.

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Oh! I nearly forgot. I finished reading Underground Airlines. I pretty much gave the background for the story last week, so I'll just say a couple of things. First, it turns out that I could have used it as my book set in Indiana; a bunch of the action happens in Indianapolis. Second, it's a terrific read. Third, I get why it attracted the criticism that it did: here's a white author writing about the Black experience. But I think it was pretty sensitively handled, and anyway, c'mon, it's alternate history. The Black experience in the world of the novel can be different than what's happening in the real world today. That's the beauty of speculative fiction: imagining how things might be different.

I haven't sent in my results yet, but it's on my to-do list. Maybe I'll get a sticker or something. I'll let you know.

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These moments of bloggy prognostication have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy barbecue leftovers!

Summer reading progress and a new crafty project.

I said I would post about my IU Summer Reading Challenge progress last Sunday, but I lied. I went out of town last weekend, and the preceding week got away from me. So that's what's on tap for this post. 

By skipping last week, I also missed out on mentioning that here in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice was last Sunday. So blessed Litha and happy solstice to everyone! 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

From here on out, the days will get warmer, but the amount of daylight will be decreasing a little bit each day. (The news is better for folks down under, of course; last Sunday was their shortest day of the year.)

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Reading Challenge news: In our last episode, I reported on the first two books I had finished. Since then, I have read three more:

• For a book set in Indiana, I picked Annie's Quilt, the first book in the Amish Quilts of Indiana series, by Sarah Price. It's a romance, which is fairly far out of my typical wheelhouse, but I liked it. Annie is a young Amish woman who lives in Shipshewana, IN, in the northeastern part of the state near the Michigan border. Her life revolves around church, friends, family, chores on the family's dairy farm, and her job at a fabric shop in town. She dreams of marrying a fine Amish man who's not a farmer because she knows how much hard work is involved in farming and she wants to keep her job in town. You can guess where this is going: a handsome young man, a cousin of one of her friends, comes to town; they fall in love; she thinks he's aiming for a trade; it turns out he's a farmer (oh no!); but it all comes right in the end. I found it well-written and an easy read.
• For a travel memoir, I waffled. I started with Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon on a friend's recommendation, but found it too slow paced for me right now. (I might be a little anxious to get this challenge over with.) So I fell back on my original goal of a travel memoir written by a woman and picked Let's Not Play Small: A Memoir of Divorce, Healing, and Reinvention Through Solo Travel by Dawn Ritter Fischer. And I had problems with it. For starters, I'm not the right audience for this book; the author describes it as a "book to inspire women to travel solo. An invitation to step into the unknown and uncover the extraordinary within themselves. A summons to absorb the life lessons and embrace the self-discovery that arrives when we dare to do the uncommon." Unfortunately, this mission statement doesn't show up until page 272. I've already done a fair bit of solo travel, including some international trips, although I haven't chucked it all and gone full-tilt nomad as she has, so her exhortations to not "play small" throughout had me sighing in resignation. Also, the book could use better editing, including cropping out her repeated use of "little did I know" foreshadowing. Full disclosure: I skipped the bonus section with tips for the nomad life. When she actually wrote about her travel experiences, it was a decent read, but otherwise the book wasn't for me.
• For a slow-burn romance, I read This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, the pseudonym of a husband-and-wife team. This is a terrific book, y'all. It's a portal fantasy. A woman named Maggie is yanked out of our world and dumped in the world of an unfinished fantasy trilogy, the first two books of which she has read and re-read to the point of being able to quote large chunks of them from memory. She immediately knows where in the story she has arrived, and she's able to rise in society by "prophesying" what's going to happen next. Of course she gets involved with a duke in disguise; eventually she figures out who he really is, and then you get into the typical "I'm super attracted to you but you lied to me so I can't love you except I do" slow-burn dance. But it's all very well done. This is the first of Andrews' books that I've read; apparently there are Easter eggs galore for their fans. It's also the first book in a series, and I'm already jonesing for the next one. (Here's hoping they don't leave the series unfinished...)

Since my goal to complete the challenge was six books, I only have to read one more. It needs to be a book that I meant to read last summer -- which I'm translating as "anything sitting unread on my Kindle that I didn't buy this year". I'm still mulling over that choice. But the winner may be Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, published in 2016. I recently saw it mentioned on some listicle or other, and it turns out it's been sitting on my Kindle for who knows how long. (Amazon knows how long; I bought it at the tail end of 2016.) The genre is alternative US history. The premise is that President Lincoln was assassinated before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War never occurred, and slavery is still legal in four Southern states. It got a lot of praise when it was released, as well as some criticism because the author is white and is describing Black experiences. I'll let you know what I think.

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Besides traveling and reading more than I have in several years, I've also hatched a plan for a new craft project. 

I have finally admitted to myself that the window shades in the bedroom and office/craft room drive me crazy. They are honeycomb shades, but not the nicer kind; the shade material feels kind of like cardboard, and the giant metal strip at the bottom bangs loudly against the window frame in a breeze. They do open at the top and bottom (which I didn't discover until about a month ago), but honestly it's not a feature that's a dealbreaker for me (evidenced by the fact that I didn't discover they could do it until about a month ago). 

Nice honeycomb shades are spendy, as I learned when I replaced the blinds on the fabulous wall o' windows last year. I thought maybe I would prefer Roman blinds for these rooms instead; if nothing else, there would be less hardware to clank against the window. Of course my windows are not a standard size, so they would have to be custom. So I did a little looking around online. Even at sale prices, custom Roman blinds are almost as spendy as honeycomb shades.

But they're just big fabric rectangles and some dowel rods, I thought. How hard would it be to make them?

Long story short: we are going to find out. 

I've already ordered all the fabric. For the office/craft room, I'm getting a William Morris willow print in a performance linen that will match the Ruggable rug I use as a chair pad at my desk. For the bedroom, I'm going with a midnight blue swirl pattern in a sateen finish. The lining fabric is also on the way, as is the hardware for pulling the shades up. And I've been looking at videos for assembly directions. (I've been laughing at the ones where they're drawing lines on the fabric and cutting the pieces out with scissors. Have these people never heard of rotary cutters?)

Anyway, stay tuned.

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These moments of reading and crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!