When I purchased a 50mm lens for my Nikon camera, it was a relatively inexpensive way to make my photos look more professional.

I had been using the lens that ships with the camera, a 35mm telephoto lens that can shoot a landscape and then zoom in to capture specific details. Its versatility was nice. However, photos with the 50mm lens looked so much more refined. It was perfect for very shallow depth of field effects, meaning that there was only a limited distance from the camera that would be in focus, creating a nice blurry background or foreground.

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For learning written music effectively and efficiently, there’s nothing better than backchaining.

However, its usefulness extends to many other areas, from training an animal to learning a sequence of dance moves.

Backchaining is so powerful that I want to show you exactly how it works. I’ve built a process around this basic technique that will allow you to learn easily — and possibly more rapidly than you ever have before. However, demonstrating this practice method using, say, a piano piece is a bit abstract for those who don’t read music fluently. So today, I’ll be showing you how to use my practice method to learn a piece of classic oratory: specifically, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

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I recently made my first pair of thrummed mittens.

Thrums are bits of unspun wool that are knitted into a garment to provide extra insulation in the form of a nice fluffy lining. It is unclear where this technique first developed — most sources point to the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, known over the centuries for its active fishing industry (and cold climate).

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When I knit my first hat, I used bamboo needles.

These were affordable and lightweight, and solved my early problem of stitches slipping off of the slick aluminum needles I had inherited from my grandmother.

But as I improved as a knitter, I found the bamboo needles to be a little slow and draggy. That’s when I tried nickel-plated needles, and that’s what I’ve been using ever since. That’s what gives me the “slicing into warm butter” feeling.

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When I bought sheets to outfit our tiny apartment, I just knew that they had to be 100% cotton.

I’m a snob when it comes to sheets, and a cotton/poly blend wasn’t going to do it for me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, like the princess of "The Princess and the Pea,” but cotton/poly blend sheets makes me feel like I’m sleeping in a plastic bag. So I walked down the aisle of the local Wal-Mart until I found a few 100% cotton sheet sets and picked one.

But over the next few months, I felt that something was off. These sheets just felt so flimsy. They were so soft that they always felt dirty, even when they were perfectly clean. I realized that even though the softness of sheets is often a selling point, I didn’t like soft sheets. I longed for the thick, cool, crisp sheets I had had has a child. Where were those?

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