Dee

For unattended long-form in a dark hall the camcorder still wins on the things that ruin recital footage: a proper servo zoom you can creep during a piece, built-in ND, XLR inputs, and relay recording across two cards so a card change is not a hole in the film. The smaller sensor gives you deep depth of field, which sounds like a downside until you are 30 metres back and a child steps forward and your fast prime hunts for focus. I shoot both and the mirrorless never leaves the bag for these.

Shirts specifically are the worst possible test case. Interfacing, buttons, a collar stand, eight hours of your life, competing against a category the shops sell at a loss to get you in the door. Try the same comparison with a bra, a coat or anything in your size that is normally only sold in a fit you hate.

Adding: a thin piece of water soluble stabiliser tacked behind the hole makes the fencing much easier on fine gauge, then it rinses away at the end.

Wash before you mend, not after. Wool relaxes and shifts in the wash and a mend done on unwashed fabric can end up puckered once everything settles. Hand wash cool, roll in a towel, dry flat, then repair.

Practical note on the commute constraint, since it is doing more work than people think. I tracked my own reading for a year and found that anything with chapters over about 15 pages had roughly double my abandonment rate, purely because I could never finish a chapter in one leg of the journey. Both of your favourites have short sections. Filter for that before you filter for genre and your finish rate will jump.

Almost certainly tension plus yarn weight. Darning yarn is often thicker than the sock yarn, and when you add a stiff woven grid on top of a stretchy knit, you get a rigid patch inside a flexible fabric, which is exactly what rubs. Two fixes that work together: use a finer yarn, ideally a single strand of sock yarn or embroidery floss split down to two strands, and leave your rows visibly slack so the weave sits at the same tension as the knit around it. It looks messier off the foot and feels like nothing on it.

Do a test one and put your finger inside. If the patch resists bending over your knuckle, it's too tight for a heel.

Buy the old house if you want the old house. Do not buy it as an investment with a spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet will be wrong and the house will still be worth it or not for entirely different reasons.

I used to leave bags on the counter to come down before the fridge because I did not want to warm the fridge up, which is exactly the wrong instinct and I only stopped when I read up on it properly. Nothing bad happened to me, but I have no way of knowing that, which is the point. Ice bath is ten minutes of faff and removes the whole question.

And press each seam as you go rather than at the end. A garment that has been pressed at every stage fits differently from one pressed once at the finish, which sounds like folklore and is not.

Waiting for plaster to dry before decorating is exactly the sort of thing that never appears on screen and is weeks of my life.

Whatever you pick, wash and dry the jeans the way she will before you measure. Four inches is a lot to cut off a denim that might still shrink half an inch.

A little firmer is normal and it does soften, mostly over the first two or three washes as the fibres bloom and settle. What isn't normal is a patch that won't bend with the fabric. The test is to drape the area over your fist: if the mend curves with everything else, leave it alone, it'll be fine. If it stays flat like a coin while the fabric bends around it, it's too dense and it will wear a hole right at the boundary within a season.

Good catch. Extending now is ten minutes, doing it after the halo blows out is a much bigger repair.