Craft Rage

Swimsuit Issues

2011-07-04T13:53:00.002-06:00

I've mentioned before that I'm a plus sized woman - I'm currently hovering somewhere between 22 and 24, and am slowly losing weight (another story altogether).

Last fall, at the end of the season, I was fortunate enough to find a bin of swimsuit separates in all kinds of colors and sizes, some that went together, and some that didn't, all for three dollars each piece. The only catch is, the tops are all sort of ugly, and the bottoms are all shaped vaguely like granny panties.

Now, I get the physics of stuffing my fat rump into giant granny panties, but I have to say, I'm not fond of the look. It's not like I go to the beach to pick up guys, but a girl wants to be able to PRETEND that they still look great in a swimsuit. Thus, all my swimsuits have little skirts attached, to hide my tush, and make it so that I can pretend that the tops of my thighs don't touch.

Thus, my latest project is re-vamping all the swimsuit bottoms and tops. On the bottoms, I'll be adding simple little skirts, and for some of the tops, I'll either be adding a bit of length via a coordinating swimsuit fabric, or else I'll be revamping all the tops altogether.

The reason my last couple of posts have been light on pictures is because I've been having some laziness issues, whereupon the pictures are either still on my camera when I go to write posts, or else I've taken the time to download them to my computer, but I'm at a different computer when I go to post.

Yesterday, I solved this issue by splurging on a couple of Eye-fi cards, so that as I take the pictures, they'll automatically upload to my picture server on my network, as well as to Picasa. Next post, I'll actually have things to show you!

Two Dog Night

2011-05-25T08:49:00.000-06:00

So, last post, I mentioned that I'd found a skirt pattern from what looks like the mid to late 40's and that I was going to try making it.

I made some pretty good progress, though lacking instructions, I'm having some trouble with figuring out how the pockets fit together. Unfortunately, the skirt is far too small for me, so even if it's a success, I'll still have nothing to show for it, except some pictures.

Even more unfortunately, one of the dogs got sick, and has been going through the cycle of poop/eat poop/vomit partly digested poop. This is apparently because they changed the formula of the puppy food he was on, so I need to find some old bags of food to mix with the new food. I called the pet store and they have what I need, so the problem will be solved later today, but still...

But wait, ONE of the dogs? Last time I blogged regularly, we had only one dog, Pepper. Now, we also have Comet, AKA our little Christmas Miracle, AKA the Accidental Dog, AKA the Poo Eater.

How did this happen? Well, we got in the truck to go to see my husband's family for Christmas, and about ten minutes into the trip, we were like "What the heck is that smell?" Turns out, it was Pepper. Like the old saying says, you never know how stinky your dog is until you put it in the truck with you. If that's not an actual old saying, it should be.

Anyway, as we drove, I called a groomer in the city we expected to be passing through in a couple of hours, and asked if they could do a rush job on a dog wash. They said sure, bring her in. It was, no word of a lie, a place called Vinny's House of Pets. If Tony Soprano had a cousin who liked kitties, this is the kind of place he'd own.

Anyway, they took Pepper in for a bath, and The Hotness and I decided to wander around the store while we waited. Big mistake. We went down the aisle with the cages, and I was all "Um, let's not look, okay?" and the Hotness was all "Oooh, look, a puppy!"

Long story short, the guy told us that the puppy was a rescue, and that we could have him for free if we bought a bag of puppy food. I went to sit in the truck to protest the idea of getting a second dog, and also to hide my "I want that puppy" face, and The Hotness came out with the dog, stuck it in my arms, and off we went.

Before this, I don't think he'd ever set foot on the ground outdoors. The first time I put him down in the snow to pee, he looked at me like "seriously, lady, what the heck is this white stuff?"

There was much puppy-related Christmas drama (unsurprising) but the end result is that I secretly love this dog. He's stupid looking, and really needy, but OMG, I just want to stick him in my shirt and carry him around with his head poking out of the headhole, so we're cheek to cheek, 24/7.

Building a mystery

2011-05-14T08:21:00.000-06:00

I'm going through the process of de-stashing, and I've started by selling off as many of my vintage patterns as I can. Some of them are going in my Etsy store, others will end up in lots on eBay; one way or another, I'm getting rid of the old, ~~to make way for the new~~ to make room for me to sew.

One thing about going through your vintage pattern stash, sometimes, as you go through the envelopes, you find some interesting surprises. For example, as I was going through the envelope for this pattern;

I came across the pieces for this pattern;

I don't have the instruction sheet, just enough pattern pieces to make the front, back, and pockets. I'm not sure why, but I feel compelled to see if I can make this skirt from the pieces I have.

This is likely a fool's errand, but whatever gets me into my sewing room is fine by me!

A personal epiphany

2011-05-11T08:43:00.002-06:00

I have to admit; my new coverlock 3.0 was an impulse buy.

You may be asking yourself, what kind of dork impulse-buys a six hundred dollar sewing machine? I know I certainly asked myself that question quite a bit as I loaded the box into my trunk.

As I installed my shiny new serger, I had an epiphany of sorts. I'm not who I thought I was!

I've always considered myself a fly by the seat of my pants kind of person, and this extends to my 'crafting' such as it is. I like to figure things out for myself, or just wing it, far better than I like looking at patterns and reading instruction sheets.

Admittedly, this is a huge contributing factor to the phenomenon I like to call the "crap sieve", but after 37 years of working with the crap sieve, I'm more or less immune to the effects. That sort of last-minute lack of planning just kind of works for me in my personal life, though it can be a little frustrating to those around me.

Still, as I manhandled my new serger downstairs and into my sewing room, I remember clearly thinking "There, NOW I can get some sewing done!" Apparently, in the dark cave that is my mind, I've had this sense that there's no point even trying to sew knit garments if I don't have a serger that will do a proper finish. I didn't even know I felt this way until I brought home my Pfaff. If someone had said "hey, why aren't you doing much sewing?" I would have given a dozen different answers, none of which included "I don't feel like I don't have the right equipment."

This is the epiphany that I had; apparently, I'm a crafting snob.

In all other aspects of my life, I'm content to make do, to be slapdash, to cobble together a solution to overcome whatever obstacles are in front of me. But when it comes to my creative side, I don't feel comfortable even trying if I don't have the right gear.

Goodness knows, I've got a terrible lack of skill, but still, I DO have the ability to sew a zig-zag stitch, which is really all you need to knock together simple knit garments. Most of my sewing machines actually come with several nice stretch stitches, PLUS, I've got a perfectly good 4-thread serger.

I'm very exasperated with myself, but also, I'm feeling very good about getting started. Now if only I could get the new dog to stop pooping next to my sewing room, I could go sew something!

Back in the game

2011-05-11T08:28:00.001-06:00

It's been a difficult two years; several deaths in the family, some serious illness (not my own), and a lot of other family stuff has kept me from sewing. But with the advent of spring, and with most of the bad stuff behind me, I'm starting to feel it. "It." My sewing mojo, back and in full swing.

To celebrate its return, I went ahead and bought myself this;

Oh, Mr. P, let's make a knit dress together!

My very own Pfaff coverlock 3.0.

I'm proud to say that during my hiatus, I didn't buy so much as a single scrap of fabric, though I really wanted to; more than once, I found myself in a fabric store, fingering fabric and thinking about the possibilities. I'm know for certain that I'm not the only sewist out there who feels a real sense of comfort from their stash, but I may be the only one with a 600 metre stash, who has yet to complete even one single wearable garment.

Well, that's untrue; I did make myself a knit top three years ago, which I still wear. It has unfinished edges, and I have to wear it backwards because I cut the front too low, and when I wear it the right way, my bra shows.

It's time to up my game. Here's to me making a shirt I can wear the right way around! Wish me luck!

I'm a married lady!

2009-09-03T11:15:00.001-06:00

My last post was Feb 25 of this year, and I was all "I'm back, and I'm going to post every single day!"

On May 22nd, I had an epiphany. My wedding date was August 15th, and I had NOTHING done. NOTHING.

Now granted, The Hotness and I were aiming for a small, backyard ceremony, with very few guests, but when May 22nd rolled around and I realized that I had NO plans at all, I figured it was time to get rolling.

If you're still out there, Dear Reader, stay tuned; I'll be back with photos and embarrassing stories shortly!

Packed full of whimsy

2009-02-25T08:16:00.003-06:00

Okay, I said I was baaaaack, but I know it appears otherwise. In reality, I am more back than you think. Worst grammar ever, but just play along with me, here.

Since I cleaned up my craft/sewing room, I've been going like a madwoman. I've made a pair of shorts, a necklace/bracelet/earrings combo, and am halfway through a reversible dress that I'm making without the benefit of a pattern, but rather from a picture in my head.

I've hauled out my papermaking supplies, my corsetmaking supplies, and my scrapbooking supplies, did a little bit of preliminary work on each, and then stacked them neatly so that when I'm ready to do a few more minutes, I can easily get to what I need.

I've been learning how to use my new camera, teaching myself how to really understand the whole f-stop thing. Seriously; I can do complex corporate bookkeeping, but for some reason, I can't figure out how to take a properly focused picture, even though my camera has a higher IQ than I do.

In short, I've been on a roll, creatively, and have found it difficult to stop and take a breath so that I can write about it.

Stay tuned; tonight I'll post some pictures!

I'm Ba-aa-aa-ck!

2009-02-18T17:41:00.004-06:00

This blog isn't ALL about my crafts, but honestly, when I don't have the opportunity to be creative, I find it really hard to blog about ANYTHING. Since Christmas, my mojo has been missing, not because I haven't been feeling creative, but because my craft room / sewing room has been looking like this;

I wish I could explain how this happened, but I just can't. Well, except I can explain the dog and cat food; we bought bags larger than our storage containers, so what the heck; excess pet food obviously belongs in Rachelle's craft room, right? Thanks, Hotness. :P Unfortunately, I can't really blame him for anything else in there.

As the picture says, that was the room on Saturday morning. On Sunday afternoon (yes, a full day and a half later!!), this is what it looks like;

I noticed a couple of things while I was cleaning out my sewing room. First, I have a nasty habit of buying a minimum of 8 metres of every fabric I purchase. I'm not sure why this is; I'm a large woman, but other than my wedding dress, nothing I make for myself REQUIRES 8m of fabric. I'm not complaining or anything; the extra fabric gives me a bit of wiggle room when I'm working on a project; at least I know I won't run out of anything.

Second, I noticed that my sewing room chair, a full-sized manager's office chair, is completely inappropriate for sewing. Not only is it oversized for the room, but the huge armrests are ALWAYS in the way. So for now, I'm on a folding chair, which is proving to be surprisingly comfortable, and I've been sewing like a fiend for the past few days! I made Pepper a new dog bed for her crate, as well as a pair of shorts for our upcoming trip to Mexico. I'll show those in my next post.

Third, I noticed that I need to keep better track of the Christmas gifts I buy; as I excavated the room, I came up with a few gifts for The Hotness, which I'd purchased, forgotten, and then piled stuff on top of. I should have told him they were Valentines Day gifts, but I'm just not a very good liar.

Holy Macaroni!

2009-01-28T08:15:00.002-06:00

Karen, from Sewing By The Seat of My Pants, has nominated me for a Kreativ Blogger Award, and I'm both excited and kind of embarrassed.

Excited because this is my first award, and embarrassed because I've been a bit lax in my posting.

It's a little like being chosen, say, Miss USA, but then having the camera and spotlight turn on you just as you're reaching into your dress to adjust your cleavage.

At any rate, thanks so much, Karen, for your continued faith in my ability to NOT sew my fingers together!

Part of this award, as you know, is nominating five others. I have a large number of blogs in my Google Reader list, all of which you can see on the right hand side of my page. I'm exceptionally pleased to be able to pass this award along!

Camilla, from CamillaKnits, because she makes ME want to knit, even though I'm perfectly terrible at it. Plus, I yearn to shop at Clementines!

Kristin, from Quiltilicious, because her quilts are amazing, but her sewing studio purely takes my breath away!

Barbara, from MoxieTonic, because I love her style. And that Flamingo dress!

Gigi, from Behind The Seams, because I can't stop staring at her gorgeous knit dresses.

And finally, Erin, from A Dress A Day, for many, many reasons, but mostly because of the Darth Vader Duro.

Thanks for the nomination, Karen!

Oh dog, my dog

2009-01-08T08:17:00.004-06:00

For your viewing pleasure, I'm presenting an art installation which I like to call "Thirty Seconds Alone With The Dog."

The pair on the top were The Hotness' brand new, $200.00 fancy glasses, which he spent an hour and forty minutes picking out.

The pair on the bottom were my brand new, $8.00 cheapo glasses from Zenni Optical, which I learned about on Cidell's blog ages ago, but only worked up the courage to try recently.

Though officially We Are Not Pleased about the chewing, I'm actually secretly relieved about the green Zenni pair; they were very comfortable, but the colors looked HORRIBLE on me, and let's face it, now I ~~get~~ have to order more glasses, and really, what's the point of only ordering one pair? Might as well get three or four!

I currently have six or seven pairs from Zenni, including two pairs of prescription sunglasses, and I'm not entirely certain that I've spent more than $100.00 yet.

I heart cheap glasses. Thanks for the great shopping tip, Cidell!

Sick Day

2009-01-07T11:24:00.007-06:00

Ugh.

I love a good sick day, but I surely do hate actually being sick.

So, we had a bit of family drama yesterday; Pepper, The Hotness, and I, came home from work in the city. The Hotness went to my office to google something, while I stayed in the kitchen and started dinner. After a few minutes, Dinger came running into the kitchen with Pepper hot on his heels, and when I looked down, I was startled to see Dinger covered in blood.

I didn't get a picture, but I'm ashamed to admit that my second instinct was to run and get my camera. My first instinct, however, was a bit more noble; I "rescued" Dinger from the awful dog.

Two things you must know; one is that Pepper is Dinger's best friend. They spend hours playing and napping together. The other is that Dinger has grown from the emaciated kitten he was when I picked him up,

into some kind of hybrid between a cat, a rabbit, and a badger. He's a rumbly, purring, fluffy, solid mass of claws and teeth.

He's not large in size, but his mass has grown so much that I wonder if he might not collapse in on himself and create a black hole which will suck all the other animals into it. If I suddenly disappear from the blogosphere, you may assume that Dinger's belly has reached critical mass, and our whole house has been sucked off the map. Picking him up is very much like picking up a furry, squirming bowling ball, and not just a little five-pin ball, but a hefty, fuzzy, 10-pin ball.

Anyway, my point is that Dinger can take care of himself, and he and Pepper really get along. So much that sometimes I wonder what their offspring would look like. It's disturbing.

Back to the story; Dinger, covered in blood.

I've typed out the whole story twice now, but both times, it was just a bunch of blah blah blah, so long story short, nobody was hurt; Pepper lost her first tooth, and then went and licked Dinger.

The Hotness immediately took Pepper off to give her a bubble bath and lots of tummy rubs, and I sat down with Dinger and wiped the blood off his fur, while the other cats looked on with envy in their eyes, so I ended up wiping EVERYONE down with warm, damp paper towels, and dinner was an hour late. The end.

Except it wasn't really the end. Neither The Hotness nor I will admit it, but we are both looking for that lost tooth. Since I'm having a sick day, I think perhaps I'll go and have another look. Wish me luck!

Ad now I hab a code

2009-01-06T08:10:00.007-06:00

The Hotness has become The Hot Male Version Of Typhoid Mary, and has succeeded in infecting me with a vicious sinus cold.

It occurs to me that describing my symptoms might be oversharing just a little, so I'll spare you that, at least, but honestly, how can one human body manufacture this much slime?

At any rate, I'm back to work (and have I mentioned that I love my job? I have? Well, good!). I'm working like a crazy person, and I also still haven't unpacked all of our combined Christmas presents, so all the other wonderful stuff I planned to blog about is still in suitcases.

I will say, though, that The Hotness did an exceptionally good job with his Christmas shopping this year; he always does pretty well, but this year he actually got creative with my list and bought according to themes, instead of just what was on my list.

Normally, he Christmas shops for me by hounding me for a Christmas list for two months, and when I finally give it to him, he gives it back to me and tells me to write down where to find everything on the list, and how much it all is. When I've done the research, I give him the list back and he goes shopping. The accountant in me LOVES this, because I know he's paying the best possible prices, but I have to admit, it's not terribly romantic.

This year, I gave him just the list of items and told him to be creative, and darned if he didn't do that! I asked for a new set of pots and pans, and he came across with the stainless steel Rachel Ray set, AND a couple of matching non-stick pans and a dutch oven type thingie, and some matching utensils, AND the Big Orange Cookbook.

I'm a HUGE fan of Rachel Ray as a chef; I love watching 30 Minute Meals, and I've actually tried many of her 30 minute recipes, though honestly, it only takes 30 minutes if you know exactly what you're doing, and if your kitchen is clean to start off with. :)

On the other hand, I'd rather poke at my eyeballs with a sharp stick than watch her talk show. Seriously. I'm not sure why.

For those of you out there who might be laughing about the possible lack of romance in asking for pots and pans for Christmas, you have to understand how much I love to cook, and how difficult it is to cook a decent meal with what I had before.

My entire kitchen set consisted of one HUGE stock pot, sized to fit both a turkey carcass AND two small children, the Ikea KAVALKAD set of three pots, priced at $9.99, the largest of which was the perfect size for a cereal bowl on a hungry morning, and a pink non-stick frying pan I bought at Wal-Mart two years ago.

Now that I have pots big enough to make soup, I've been doing so with a vengance; baked potato soup, chicken lemon rice soup, and a few of my other favorites. I'd post some pictures but my kitchen is actually too messy to photograph right now, but as soon as I get that sorted out, I'll do that. And I can do that because in addition to my other as-yet-unmentioned gifts, The Hotness also bought me a new camera.

And not JUST a new camera, but a Canon EOS 450D / Digital Rebel XSi!!!!! Eeeeee!

I cannot even express my joy; I've always been interested in photography, and while I've loved my point-and shoot cameras, I've always secretly yearned for a really good camera with a couple of lens options. This baby will do everything I could possibly want, once I finally learn to use it.

Now if only my house was clean enough to take pictures in! Maybe if I ask Mrs. G, she'll let me borrow one of her husbands to come over and whip my home into shape!!

Happy New Year

2009-01-01T22:10:00.006-06:00

It's been an incredibly busy Christmas season, but we came through it rather well, and all of us (the cats, the dog, The Hotness, and myself) got spoiled quite rotten.

The last month or so has been a pretty bad one for blogging. Most of this is because The Hotness is home a lot these days, and it's hard to maintain a "secret" blog when he's around, because he's wicked curious. I guess there's no real reason for me to keep it a "secret" - it's not like I ever say anything on the blog that would make him feel exposed or disappointed; heck, y'all don't even know his name!

Still, I don't know - I don't have a circle of girlfriends or anything like that, so this kind of feels like my social outlet.

Wow. Pathetic, party of one!

At any rate, starting this week, I'll be back to my normal three or four posts a week; I'd love to promise daily posts, but a dirty lie is no way to start the new year!

I have all sorts of great gifts I'll probably mention in upcoming posts, but my favorite was actually one I gave to The Hotness.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, The Hotness got a dog a few months back. The dog, whose name was up in the air for a few weeks and is now named Pepper, is going to be a bird dog when she grows up, or so The Hotness believes.

Since she still can't figure out what the word duck means, I worry that he's setting his sights a little high, but who knows!

At any rate, one of the gifts I bought him for Christmas is the Retreiv-R-Trainer, which is a thingy that launches bird-shaped or vaguely bird-esque dummies into the air so that you can train your dog to hear the gunshot and look for the falling bird. It looks like this;

So essentially, you slide a fake duck on the silver part, then pull down at the bottom and let go, and it fires a blank 22 shell. The gas expansion fires the fake duck way up in to the air, and the dog is supposed to see it fall and go after it.

Pepper does not understand this. She hears the shot, and doesn't flinch or bark or anything, but she just CANNOT connect the idea that if a shot is fired, a duck will fall from the sky.

Anyway, my kind Brother In Law actually picked this up for me at a gun dog shop in Manitoba, and wrapped it and brought it to the cabin for family Christmas. During the shopping phase, he and I had this brief email exchange;

BIL:
I got this launcher. The guy at SIR recommended it. He has one. You can get all kinds of other attachments for it, including one that you can use to brace against your leg so that when you shoot, it doesn't hurt your hand.

Me:
YOU ARE MY FREAKING HERO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is AWESOME, and PERFECT! Thank you so much, BIL - I REALLY appreciate all the work you did tracking this down!!! The Hotness is going to be over the moon!

BIL (a few days later):
I found the attachment for the launcher, the one you can use to shoot off your leg.

Clearly, he is referring to his earlier email. I, however, did NOT put two and two together.

This is the response I sent.

Me: Hmm. I think The Hotness needs both his legs. Maybe we won't get the leg-shooting-off attachment for a few years.

Oy with the Vey, already!

2008-12-17T07:50:00.004-06:00

My life is moving along at a somewhat ridiculous pace, and my blogging has suffered as a result. In the end, it's probably ME who suffers, because blogging is a nice outlet for me.

At any rate, this is a catch-up post; read at your own peril (as in, if you fall asleep on your keyboard and wake up with a J imprinted on your forehead, I take no responsibility!).

The Job

Hoo doggies, do I love my newest job. Many moons ago, I posted that I'd left my employer to start my own business. I did this, and with enough success that I was still bringing home about the same amount of money as when I was working for The Man, or in my case, The Terrible Woman Who Had A Troubled Relationship With The Truth, And Wanted Me To Lie To The Auditor.

Anyway, a few months back, I went from being pretty busy to being run right off my feet, when I accepted a part-time position at a local non-profit. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say it's both challenging AND rewarding, and even though I was hesitant to work for someone other than myself, I'm exceptionally happy to go to work in the morning.

The Dog

Her name is Pepper. I love her to bits and want to nom her floppy ears, but I also secretly want to clean her teeth with The Hotness' toothbrush, because seriously, at 1:00AM, when his dog starts to whine to go out, I KNOW he can hear her, but he'll just lay there quietly, waiting for ME to get out of bed and let her out, and that's making me a bit resentful and passive-aggressive - he's had nothing but breakfast food for supper for, like two weeks. Bacon soothes my savage breast.

At any rate, she's ridiculously cute, but also REALLY stupid. I bought her a stuffed duck the first day that we got her, and from the very first night, I've been training her that This Is Your Duck, and to Go Get The Duck. She's probably heard both The Hotness and I say "Duck, Duck, Go Get The Duck!" about nine thousand times since we got the thing, but she still doesn't connect the word "duck" with the stuffed toy.

Her manners are improving, though; she's pretty much housebroken unless The Hotness totally misses it. Like last night, when I was working in my office and he was playing Socom on the Playstation, and she peed on the couch two feet away from him because he got all wrapped up in his game and forgot to let her out.

Also, the hidden cost of owning Pepper is tallying up fast.

The Hotness' brand new glasses: $200.00
The Hotness' brand new cell phone: $600.00
The Hotness' replacement cell phone: $150.00 (repair bill)
The Hotness' fancy Playstation charging cable: $49.99
The living room coffee table: $189.00

She also has found an accomplice in Dinger The Deaf Wonder Cat. The two of them are remarkably good friends, and somehow or other, though Pepper isn't smart enough to Go Get The Duck, she has found some way to instruct Dinger to climb onto the kitchen table and kitchen counters, and knock things off so that she, Pepper, can drag them throughout the house and chew them up. We did a sweep to make sure that anything small enough to actually be swallowed was out of their reach, but even if she doesn't manage to swallow something totally inappropriate, I see a huge dental bill in my future.

The Wedding

Last night, I had my first wedding dream/nightmare. I dreamed that it was a week to my wedding, and I was just starting the planning, and that I was too fat to fit into my dress, so I had to sew a new one from scratch. I was sitting at my sewing machine with my BlackBerry taped to my head, sewing and weeping while I used voice dial to call caterers and beg for perogies. I woke up with a wicked facial twitch, and have decided that it's time to pull out that stupid wedding book and start making some actual plans.

Christmas Shopping

Ha. This is an easy one. My family doesn't do a gift exchange; I stuff money in envelopes and take each of my nieces for a shopping trip to spend it, because they're teenage girls and say what you want, but teenage girls, no matter how kind and sweet and wonderful, would rather have cash.

The Hotness' family, on the other hand, has a complex set of Christmas rules, the clearest of which involves the mandatory spending of $50.00 plus tax on each person. When we were just a bunch of couples, this was kind of fair, but now that each of his brothers has two children, it's gotten pretty expensive. After the first year, I begged out, and told The Hotness that he is solely and completely responsible for selecting gifts for his family, and monitoring the spending, and the whole nine yards.

I won't even pick things up for him anymore, because two years ago, he made a huge fuss over making sure that we got a copy of this one kid's movie, so he called me long distance and made me stay on the phone with him while I got in my car, went to the video store, located and purchased a copy of the movie.

Then on Christmas day, he was shocked and disappointed to "discover" that I had purchased the movie "without telling him", because he ALSO bought a copy, and obviously I was the crazy one. He had no recollection of the phone call, and I had to bust out a copy of my cell phone bill to convince him that there'd even BEEN a 45 minute long distance cell phone call. And even after seeing the bill, he was pretty sure we'd talked about something else, even though I also produced the receipt that showed that the time and date of the purchase was the same as the date and time of the call.

Sooo.... with one thing and another, I only have one person to buy for; The Hotness himself. And I'm all finished, except for a few stocking stuffers.

Sewing

Yeah, if I've had no time to blog, I've had no time to sew.

A couple weeks ago, I made a creditable attempt at making Pepper a dog bed. There's a big fluffy pillow in her crate, so I figured I'd sew a simple oversized pillowcase for it, and around three sides, I'd attach a hollow tube with some fluffy fill in it so she could lean against it; she's kind of a leaner.

Unfortunately, I sewed the pillowcase completely shut, and sewed the tube wrong sides together and with the ends sewn shut, so that when I tried to turn it right side out... Well, imagine turning a sock inside out, sewing the top shut, and then trying to turn it back the right way.

The worst part was that just in the split second that I realized that I'd made a couple of mistakes, The Hotness poked his head in and asked how it was going. I'm a very poor liar, so he's STILL laughing at me, and it's been three weeks.

Since the mishap with the dog bed, I've avoided my sewing room as though there's a hungry giant in there. Don't get me wrong, I'm YEARNING to go in there and make things happen, but this is the wrong time of year for me to get all involved in a project, only to leave it behind when we go away for Christmas.

I've run out of both things to say and time to say them. Next post, I'll share some pictures of some of my more notable knitting failures.

Is this thing on?

2008-12-12T07:50:00.003-06:00

I'm here, but BOY, am I tired!

A real post will be up soon, with pictures! Tomorrow, at the latest, I swear!

A short one

2008-11-12T18:25:00.005-06:00

In our beginning, there was The Hotness. And The Hotness said "Let there be cats." And the cats said "Meow," and life was good.

And time passed, and the wheel of time turned, and The Hotness spoke again, and said "Let there be dog." And the dog said "I like to chew electrical cords," and life was messy, but also very good.

And between the new dog and a new job, I am overwhelmed. I've been sewing a little, and hope to have something to show for it soon, but mostly, I am trying to find time to sleep and clean my extraordinarily messy house.

My new job is for a church-based non-profit that runs affordable housing in a nearby city. I LOVE it. I've worked for non-profit organizations before, but this is something completely different; this place has soul, and is chock-full of unpretentious goodness.

Not the kind of goodness that feels forced and a little grating, but just solid, homely, "Hey, Rachelle, have these shoes on your first day of work!" goodness.

No kidding, my very first day, my office mate was playing Cinderella with a pair of lovely little brown leather kitten heels, trying to find someone whose feet fit them; her sister is a costume designer, and these were bought for a play but never worn. They magically fit my feet, and now I have a part-time job I love, AND some wicked cute shoes!

At any rate, more posts to follow; the ball-skirt is done, as is most of the drop-waisted skirt. I have only to finish the mock-up of the corset, and then I can post pictures of me trying everything on.

For now, this will have to hold you. This is what I found on the living room couch while The Hotness was "watching football".

Kind of lost

2008-11-04T07:06:00.003-06:00

I have all the pieces cut out for two test dresses, but I just can't seem to get it together. Mentally, I mean.

Several times this weekend, I sat in my sewing room, looking at all the carefully folded stacks of pieces, in two colors of taffeta, and got intimidated.

I don't know why it just happened now. Why NOW? The hard part is over. Granted, I made it up as I went along, but all the seams are measured and double-measured, and will match up fine; all I need to do is sew everything together and try it on, and make adjustments if necessary.

I know that part of it is the fact that I can't keep my needle from railroading my taffeta like crazy. I can't seem to find microtex needles in any of the local sewing stores, although I have one more to check this afternoon.

These are only test dresses, and I really shouldn't spend so much time worrying about a defect that nobody will ever see, but still; if I can't keep THIS taffeta from railroading, what's to say I'm going to be able to keep the fabric of my ACTUAL dress from doing the same? Part of this whole test thing is not only to test the pattern pieces, but also my equipment.

Gah! I'm not really a person who spends a great deal of time being full of angst and worry, so it's really frustrating to look at those two partly-finished garments and be unable to force myself to proceed. I actually sat at my sewing machine for TWO HOURS on Sunday, and didn't sew a stitch. I walked away and made lunch, then returned and sat for ANOTHER hour before I finally picked up a pair of dress pants that needed to be let down, and did that instead.

Sometimes I feel better after a good rant. Hopefully, this was it. Thanks for listening. Or whatever.

My very first "Dogs On Thursday"

2008-10-30T06:52:00.004-06:00

The Hotness is SMITTEN.

She who once was nameless, has now been tentatively named "Misty". As a silver-factored lab, apparently there's a possibility that when she grows up, her guard coat will grow some silver hairs.

I'm not sure if naming a dog based on a possibility of what she might look like in a few months is the best idea, but Misty is an easy name to say, and sounds different enough from all of the cat names so as not to cause confusion.

All the animals are getting along surprisingly well; Dinger, the deaf kitten, has been a real ice breaker. He's either not smart enough to be scared, or else nearly ~~being eaten by coyotes~~ starving to death has made him largely immune to regular fear. So, they've pretty much been best buds since Misty walked in the door.

She's hard to photograph, because she doesn't sit still very long.

She spent the day at work with The Hotness yesterday, which is where she is today, and where she'll probably be during the week for the rest of her doggy life, or at least until it gets cold. Apparently his employer has a fairly open "bring your dog to work" policy, which I think is pretty great, since I'm now working ALL OF THE TIME, and can't be home during the day to care for her.

All day with The Hotness. Lucky dog!

We did it on purpose

2008-10-29T07:02:00.004-06:00

This wasn't an accident. Or a whim.

The Hotness has talked about it for six and a half years. He's dreamed about it. He's spent countless hours looking at dog breed websites, making lists about what kind of dog he might want to get, what personality traits are important, what kind of activities he might want to do with a dog.

So we didn't just wake up yesterday morning and say "Let's go get a dog." But that's what we did.

Meet She Who Remains Nameless.

She's a registered, purebred, silver-factored black lab. She spent the night snoring peacefully in The Hotness' arms. I spent the night wide awake, nosed and clawed and purred at by four slightly put-out cats who couldn't figure out why this interloper was taking up their spot on the other side of the bed.

A week, gone

2008-10-27T08:17:00.003-06:00

This past week has been a bit of a mess; last Tuesday, I flew out to visit my Mom, mostly to see her new place, which is great, but also, to do some exploratory wedding shopping.

I live near a good-sized city, but it has very few wedding shops, and those that are here all carry the same dresses, the same invitations, all that stuff. So I figured that if Mom and I did a surgical strike on the phone book in Edmonton, we'd be able to spend a few days filling out some of the vague ideas floating around in my head.

She has a bunch of extra vacation days she needs to burn off before Jan 1, so she took Wednesday and Thursday off to drive me around and give me her motherly input, which I greatly appreciated. Her taste and mine differ greatly (GREATLY) when it comes to fashion, so a couple years ago, when I showed her a few dresses I liked, she was kind of horrified, and said that she thought they looked like draperies that just fell off the rods.

Apparently two years of mulling it over has given her a slightly different opinion, because at every wedding store we went into, she pointed to that same style of dress and exclaimed how wonderful it looked.

At any rate, in all our searching, we did NOT find anything but garden variety a-line dresses, which I found pretty disappointing. And on top of it, we also found some incredibly poor service, which kind of put us both off.

On the other hand, I found a store in Edmonton that sells the most amazing bridal lace, and in fact, if some other woman hadn't beaten me to it, I probably would have left the store with a bunch of gold re-embroidered lace priced at $139.00 per metre. That would have made it my largest ever impulse-buy, so it's probably for the best that the woman bought the last eight metres for her own dress. At least now I know where to go when the time comes for the real dress.

Before I went on my trip, I bought The Hotness the newest version of Socom, a game for Playstation 3, which I find difficult to explain. Essentially, it's an online babysitting service for adult males. He can entertain himself for hours, and I can clean the house, or sew, or set the house ablaze and dance around it dressed like a clown; he won't notice until the TV starts to burn. The thing is, it's also kind of fun to watch, so I didn't actually get anything done this weekend, but I think I'm over the initial shiny newness of the game, and am ready to start taking advantage of the free time!

I realize that all this wedding talk isn't very entertaining. Hence, I will be piecing together the test skirt tonight, and should be posting pictures tomorrow. Wish me luck!

More vintage patterns

2008-10-20T07:29:00.004-06:00

You'd think after all the patterns I've dragged home from garage sales, I'd start to get a bit ho-hum about the whole experience. Apparently, not so much. I had to restrain myself from doing the happy dance on some lady's lawn when I found a box of vintage patterns.

The lady sewed for herself, her three daughters, and all her friends, so there are patterns in a variety of sizes, right from size 10 teen to size 23 1/2 woman. Most are from the 50's and early 60's. There are a few from the '70's, which really isn't my favorite style period, but for the most part, they're still patterns I think are interesting, and a few are actually items I'd sew for myself, which I don't often say about '70's styles.

Here are a few of my favorites;

I'm starting to think it's time to do another giveaway, because once again, my collection has now overflowed the two dressers I bought solely for the purpose of storing it. Stay tuned!

A bit of wedding planning.

2008-10-15T06:31:00.000-06:00

I suck at making plans. Especially party plans. This runs in my family; I swear, it's not just me.

For example, my mom was dead set on throwing me a Sweet 16 party. Even though the previous 15 birthday parties had been poorly attended, because my birthday is in August, and there's generally nobody around, my mom really, really wanted to give me this experience.

She rented a hall, did real invitations and sent them out, and organized pizza for 50. 20 people showed up; eight of my friends, and twelve of their PARENTS. Nothing says "party down" like a bunch of parents.

Still, I loved that not-party, because the friends who DID attend were actually great friends, people I totally loved, and all of them saw the humor in sitting in a huge empty hall, eating cold pizza with their parents watching. We still laugh about that night, and I think my mom might still have some of the leftover pizza in the freezer.

Anyway, ever since that day, I've always had an intense fear of party-planning. What if nobody shows up? What if the food arrives cold? What if everyone's parents are there, so everybody is too shy to dance? What if everyone goes home at 8:00pm?

Thus, I resist being a hostess, but apparently, since I can't talk The Hotness into eloping, I have no choice on this one.

In order to help me plan a successful wedding, I've purchased and discarded 5 (FIVE!) different wedding planner organizer thingies. I hate organizers. I hate having to carry one little book with me everywhere I go. I hate my handwriting, mostly because I hate writing by hand - why can't I just beam my thoughts onto a piece of paper? Why has nobody invented a microchip for my brain that will do this?

I hate being touched by strangers, and people in wedding boutiques? They want to hold my hands and stare at my ring, and hug me, and squeal with congratulations. And put their fingers in the bodice of the dress I'm trying on, and muck around with my hair to show me what it would look like with a veil. It makes me jumpy and flinchy and twitchy. Gah! I appreciate their kind wishes and their desire to help, but I also wish they'd keep their dirty paws to themselves.

That said, I love The Hotness to tiny little bits, and can barely wait to get ~~knocked up and start gestating his zygote~~ married.

I've now located one of the organizers I "lost" last year, and have started actually using it, even though it feels awkward to do so. Of the five planners, this is the one with the most manageable checklist; honestly, I don't need a list that gives me a separate place to note whether or not my flower girl has gone to the bathroom right before the ceremony.

Thus far, we haven't finalized our guest list, which we need to know in order to figure out our venue. We wanted to get married at home, in our own backyard, but since we no longer have any sort of grass, or fence, or anything like that, it seems like this might not work, so we'll have to seek another location. There's a lovely little United church in our town; I need to speak with the pastor to see if he'll do the honors, and there's a hall in town that will do nicely, even though it does look just like a school gym. Who cares - it's covered, so if it rains, all will be well.

The food is up in the air; we're not fancy, though, so it's likely to be pretty basic, hearty fare - again, we need to know how many people we need to feed before we can finalize this.

The dresses are in motion, as are all the accessories; my mom's making my veil and headpiece, has given me her pearls, and is making my bridal party's bouquets and boutonnieres.

The decor will depend a little bit on the venue, but again, my mom is the creative director, and will help put together the centerpieces and favors. The Hotness and I still haven't decided on what kind of favors, mostly because we haven't finished our guest list; if it's just close friends and family, which is what we both want, we'll probably spend a bit more on favors than if we end up inviting everyone and their cousin.

The colors for my wedding decor are pretty flexible. The groomsmen will be wearing outfits similar to this, but probably without the jacket, depending on the weather;

We may not end up going with Mossy Oak Breakup, which is what the vest in the picture is made of; we might go with something a little warmer, like Mossy Oak Obsession, or Realtree Hardwood Green.

Please note; my wedding theme is not "Hunting", it is "Whatever Works". The Hotness and his family are avid hunters. I feel the need to add that they're not sport hunters, who hunt from vehicles and/or kill things for the sake of killing them, but rather, subsistence hunters who eat what they kill, and waste as little as possible. I'm not sure why I felt I should add that; I'm assuming it's Sarah Palin's fault - that whole helicopter hunting thing just freaks me out.

Anyway, the vests are something all the groomsmen will feel comfortable in, and instead of ties, they'll be wearing duck calls around their necks. Since the vests have a fairly broad colorway, I figure what the heck - why tie myself down to one or two colors; instead, I'm going wild.

Our regular wedding stuff will be fairly neutral; I plan to try to make the paper for my actual invitations (which I'll post about - I've made paper before with varying degrees of success). If my paper-making fails, we'll be going with plain off-white or cream cardstock for invitations and ribbons and such, but as far as flowers go, well, instead of making arrangements with a florist, I'll be planting a flower garden, focusing on green, gold, russet, and (for variety and for the Minnesota Vikings) shades of purple.

Essentially, my decorating plan is that whatever flowers live until August 15th will be in my centerpieces and decorations. The night before the wedding, we'll be stuffing flowers in whatever vases I have on hand, and that'll be it.

If the worst should happen, and I find myself unable to grow anything, well, we'll make a last-minute trip to the grocery store and buy whatever's there. I just don't care enough about flowers to spend a few thousand dollars on them. I fully support brides who agonize over their decisions and haggle with their husbands-to-be over the flower budget, and cry themselves to sleep when they find out that the flower they have their heart set on isn't in season, and will have to be flown from South Africa and will cost $60.00 a bloom. For me, though - well, meh. As long as they don't appear diseased, I'll be happy.

We don't have anyone to perform the office of flower girl, but The Hotness has a whole slew of nephews, so we'll probably have those trooping down the aisle, ostensibly doing the pee-pee dance all the way down, because I neglected to use the right organizer. If all goes well, they'll make some sort of amusing commotion as we exchange our vows, so that the audience can have a good laugh, and we can end on a high note before heading off to the reception. Please, boys, anything but diarrhea.

There's more, but suddenly, I feel the need to go and work on my guest list. And find that other organizer.

I ate the turkey. All of the turkey.

2008-10-14T08:56:00.002-06:00

I didn't get any blogging OR sewing done this Thanksgiving weekend, because my Mom made a surprise visit.

She and her boyfriend live about six hours west of here, but she popped up on Thursday, with the idea of cooking a big turkey dinner on Sunday. Now, since The Hotness loves turkey more than life itself, and the only turkey I make these days generally gets cooked in the microwave, this was great news! We took a trip to the grocery store, picked up what we needed, and headed back home.

As an aside, my Mom is a man-magnet. Wherever we go, whatever we're doing, someone ALWAYS tries to pick up my mom. And not only, like, dirty bums, either, but good-looking, well-dressed, age-appropriate men. Currently, she's attracting Silver Foxes, which is what I call hot old dudes - I personally wouldn't necessarily want to see them with their shirt off, but they have a certain je ne sais quois. Like Richard Gere or Tim Gunn. This has happened for as long as I can remember, and happens pretty much any time we go out in public.

So just like the Days Of Yore (aka my childhood), I stood by, shifting from foot to foot, sighing loudly and rolling my eyes while the Silver Fox asked my Mom's advice on what size turkey a single man should cook, how a single man should cook it, whether a single man should make stuffing, and if so, what kind.

He asked her to help him pick out a turkey, which she did, then asked him where to find ingredients to stuff it with, which she did, before finally seeing where this was going, and excusing herself with a grin and a wave, leaving him perfectly charmed. I know "perfectly charmed" when I see it, because it's the same expression The Hotness gets when he's outside feeding the birds, and manages to entice one of them to land on his finger and look at him sideways for a moment before flitting away.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the turkey. It was awesome, and now it's all gone! Except for the two pounds of turkey I have to package up and freeze. I love my FoodSaver. You know, there's really not a lot to say about a turkey dinner. I didn't realize that before I started this post. Sorry to have taken up your time!

If it helps, while we were waiting for the bird to unthaw, Mom and I also did a bit of wedding planning, which I'll post about tomorrow.

Hey, can I get your opinion?

I was thinking of buying everyone their bridesmaid dress, and taking them for a manicure/spa day, the day before the wedding, instead of doing the traditional bridesmaid gift. I've received such gifts in the past, and honestly, though I love the picture frames and bracelets, and other odds and ends I've personally gotten, I'm 35, and so is my whole group of bridesmaids; none of us needs another picture frame or glittery piece of color-matched wedding jewelery. Is it tacky to replace the traditional bridesmaid gift by paying for the dress and the spa day, or is this a perfectly acceptable replacement?

No 'Poo Alteration

2008-10-07T11:31:00.007-06:00

As I wrote a few weeks ago, in early September, I tried jumping on the no 'poo bandwagon. I've had my ups and downs, and have decided to pause and take a new approach.

Let me be totally clear; I think this no 'poo thing is AWESOME. I'm not quitting altogether.

In the past month, I've saved about, well, only about $20.00 on shampoo and conditioner, since I'm such a cheapskate, but it's more than the money. I'm not exactly the greenest human being in the world, but I really, really liked to pretend that when I washed my hair without shampoo and conditioner, I was saving a fish. Or a dolphin. Yeah, who DOESN'T want to save a dolphin! I'm sure I saved no more than an amoeba or two, but still, it was kind of a nice feeling.

Unfortunately, until we get a water softener, I have to radically adapt my no 'poo methodology. My town has exceptionally hard water. I mean, it's so hard that I have to CLR the shower head once a month. The Hotness has to drain and clean the hot water tank completely every three months or so, or the hot water slows to a tiny trickle.

My water glasses, once a pretty crystal clear, are all covered in a chalky white substance that makes them all look like slightly dirty etched glass. When I boil tapwater, it turns white, and when left to sit, a scum forms and sits on top of the water, and a layer of sediment that sinks to the bottom.

The message boards all said that no 'poo was difficult if you have very hard water, and boy, were they right. Hard water makes rinsing very difficult, and also leaves gunk in your hair so that it never feels completely dry, like you washed it in wax or something. I rinsed a few times with distilled water from our drinking water jug, and had much better results, but honestly, I'm too cheap to buy water to wash my hair with. It just doesn't seem practical.

At this current time, here are the recipes and methods I'm using, and which I'll return to after the water softener installation.

no 'poo mix

This is my shampoo replacement.

1 heaping tablespoon of baking soda (also known as BS)
two cups of water

I mixed the BS and the water in an empty, well-rinsed shampoo bottle, and left it in my shower. When I'm ready to use it, I just give the bottle a good shake to make sure that the BS isn't all sitting on the bottom.

Okay, a few things a person should know before starting. BS is alkaline, which means it has a high Ph. From what I can discern (and I may be wrong) the Ph of BS is a bit over 8. It's a very, very mild caustic agent, but it IS a caustic agent. Even so, unless you're allergic to it, I can't see how baking soda might hurt a person. Still, one of it's properties appears to be that it encourages the removal of water from things. Since your hair is made up of all sorts of things that I'm not chemically advanced enough to tell you about, but also water, I assume that this means that if I'm going to use a BS mix, I'm not going to dilly-dally and fart around while I'm using it. Just because it isn't going to HURT me doesn't mean it's going to be kind to my hair.

Also, BS is meant to be used only on your scalp and roots, not on the rest of your hair. I don't know about you, but my roots are actually ATTACHED to the rest of my hair, and barring the erection of an armed barricade on each individual strand, it's kinda hard to keep the mix out of the rest of your hair. I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about this, since my goal was to keep the BS solution in my hair for the smallest amount of time possible. A lot of folks seems to think that leaving it on longer is a good idea, but given it's water removal properties, that just wasn't the way I personally decided to go.

Now that you know, here's my application method. All I do is put the bottle next to my scalp and tilt my head back, and squirt so that I can feel the room-temperature water run down my scalp. When I feel like I've saturated my scalp, I put the bottle down and use my fingers to really scrub and scritch the stuff through, all over, from the nape of my neck to the top of my head, and down the sides, working quickly but being thorough. It doesn't feel gritty or nasty, so it kind of feels like I'm not accomplishing anything, but like George Michaels says, ya gotta have faith. I'm not sure that quoting George Michaels will encourage any of you, but whatev.

As soon as I'm done, I rinse with the HOTTEST water I can stand - this seems to melt the excess oil at my roots, so while I'm rinsing out the BS, excess oil is going with it. While I'm rinsing, I really use my fingertips to scrub and massage my scalp, to try to speed up the process. This feels really good, and now I know why cats like to have their heads scratched.

From what I've read, tons of folks just stop right here, finish their shower, and continue on with their day and then complain that their scalp is irritated or their tips are dry. Remembering my high school chemistry, (I loved my teacher, he was the ultimate absent-minded professor, and prone to inappropriate tangents) I recall that BS is alkali, and I personally can't see how leaving even trace amounts of an alkali mixture on my scalp will do me any good. The best way to tone down a mild alkali is by neutralizing it with a mild acid. So I continue on with an acid rinse because I don't want to have an irritated scalp or dry tips - I'm just sayin'!

acid rinse

The acid rinse is pretty flexible. Most folks suggest apple cider vinegar (also known as ACV), but I had really bad results with it, probably because the hard water didn't rinse it out well. The texture and shine of my hair was excellent, and it worked shockingly well as a detangler, but the smell was very, very strong.

If I were a superhero, my name would have been SaladHead.

Some other alternatives are lemon juice, lime juice, white vinegar, etc. Some folks use apple or orange juice, and while I can see myself trying apple juice in the future, I personally think that using orange juice would leave you with really sticky hair, because of all the sugar. Have you ever wiped a partially-dried orange juice spill off the counter? Blech.

My current recipe is as follows;

2 tablespoons of lime juice
2 cups of very strongly brewed green tea
1/2 a shooter of vodka. I drank the other half in a Ceasar. It was good.

The lime juice is my acid, the green tea is for fun - you could easily use plain water, and the vodka is for preservation. I probably don't need it, but when I made my mix, I meant to put in some honey, but decided not to.

I have this in an old contact lens solution bottle, which is perfect; the tip is a tiny little pinhole, which makes it easy to direct the flow. When I start using BS again, I'll totally use one of these bottles for both the BS mix AND the acid mix.

My method for applying the acid mix is simple. I apply this stuff starting at the scalp. Once my scalp is saturated, I kind of squish it down the rest of my hair, and squirt more wherever it's needed. Then I put my bottle down and use both hands to kind of squish my hair around so that the acid mix is everywhere. I strongly advise you NOT to get too jiggy with this rinsing step. Any tangles you put in at this point will just make you want to pull a Britney in an hour, when you try to comb your hair. The acid mix works as a very effective detangler, but don't make extra work for yourself by getting all enthusiastic. Just squeeze it through. To finish, I rinse again, once more with the HOTTEST water I can stand.

My Magic Secret (which actually isn't really a secret, but DOES work like magic) is that when I finish rinsing, I turn down the hot water, and rinse with the COLDEST water I can stand. It doesn't have to be 100% cold, but the colder, the better. This apparently closes the cuticles or punishes you for past sins or something, but whatever the science behind it, rinsing with cold water at the end made my hair shinier.

My Revised No 'Poo Plan until we get the softener is to go with very watered down shampoo and my regular acid mix, less one tablespoon of acid, for a rinse. Since I've been no 'poo for a few days short of a month, my roots aren't greasy at all, though the rest of my hair feels waxy from the hard water. So rather than go back to regular amounts of shampoo and conditioner, I'll use very watered down conditioner about once a week, and use very watered down baby shampoo.

Actually, I'll be using up my no-tears cat shampoo, but don't judge - it's not like it's made OF cats. After that, we'll see.

My Hero

2008-10-04T16:32:00.002-06:00

I've mentioned The Hotness before, right? My fiance, my ball and chain, the guy who makes those great handmade birthday cards?

Well, The Hotness is my hero. He's kind of like MacGuyver and Johnny Depp and Homer Simpson, all folded up into a neat little package.

Today, I rediscovered a facet of him that I see all the time, but never really take note of; his ability to communicate with absolutely anyone. Animal, child, adult, he can make himself understood, and he can AMUSE whoever he's communicating with.

We're lucky/unlucky enough to live near a city in western Canada with a very strong economy. Thus, our unemployment rates are very low, and many employers have worked with the federal government to bring short-term contract workers from other countries. Our city has large contingents of Ukrainian, Philippino, and Mexican workers, from all trades and walks of life. The Hotness happens to work for a company that's recently brought in some fellows from Mexico.

There are a large number of restrictions and rules on bringing in workers from out of the country, but the company The Hotness works for takes the position that a worker is a worker, regardless of where he or she is from, so the guys they bring in from Mexico make the same wage as the guys they hire locally. They get the same hourly rate, the same benefits, the same everything, which is pretty great.

What they're NOT required to do is hire guys who speak a lot of English, which you would think would be a problem. Not for The Hotness.

When the Mexicans got here back in May, he knew four words of Spanish. He knew how to say hello, goodbye, nap, and beer. These are the words he learned on our vacation to Mexico this past spring, which is probably obvious just by the words themselves.

He now knows about twenty words of Spanish. To the above repertoire, he's added;
"one" - the number of coffees he must order per man,
"two" - the number of donuts he must order each man,
"bathroom" - where the coffee will take them eventually,
"girl" - so he can point out the hot chick in the next car
"hot mama" - his name for me, like the feminine version of The Hotness

As well, they've taught him the slang terms for male and female genitalia, but he doesn't say those around me.

At any rate, The Hotness took me and two of his crew for lunch this afternoon, and with these few words, and an absolutely stunning ability to make up sign language as he goes along, he communicated effectively enough that he kept me and the two Mexican guys laughing all through the meal.

If they allowed Canadians to participate in The Amazing Race, The Hotness and I would totally win; I can read a map, and he can communicate with anyone.

Help! What needle should I be using?

2008-10-02T07:40:00.004-06:00

I've been tacking together the taffeta version of my wedding dress muslin, but have run into a problem that's driving me NUTS.

I bought Microfibre needles and Microtex needles, and have tried both, but no matter what I do, I'm getting some pretty serious railroading in my taffeta. Since The Hotness has the camera at work today, I had to borrow a picture from the internet to explain what I mean, in case "railroaded" isn't the correct term.

See how the stitches have created little pulls in the fabric? I understand WHY this is happening, but I don't know what to do to fix it. I've tried ball-point needles, sharps, skinny ones, fat ones, and nothing is working.

Can anyone tell me what the right kind/size of needle to use to machine-sew taffeta?

It's a medium-weight polyester taffeta, prewashed and with a very soft hand.

I know it's just a muslin, so I'm not terribly worried about fixing the problem on THIS garment, but the fabric for my actual dress may end up being taffeta, so...please save me from a nervous breakdown!

Bride vs Groom Dance-off

2008-09-29T17:58:00.003-06:00

I wonder if I could talk The Hotness into doing this at our wedding. The first 45 seconds looks pretty generic, but as you can see, it rapidly turns into something else indeed!

This is the best thing I've seen on the internet today!

I can't even show you pictures

2008-09-29T09:19:00.004-06:00

Remember Boobah, the cat with the head wound, and who also lost part of his tail to an unfortunate wind-related accident?

Well, since then, the original head wound has healed, and he's given himself a new one on the other side of his head. Also, last week, the vet amputated part of his tail, because...well, I don't remember what the actual term was, but essentially, he had a teeny fraction of exposed bone at the tip of his tail, and rather than healing around it, his flesh was just creeping upwards, so they had to lop off about a half-inch of tail and pull the remaining flesh down around it and stitch it.

Poor, miserable cat. He's in a supersized head-cone, which The Hotness and I refer to as his "helmet". Unfortunately, we've begun referring to the entire cat that way, as in, "Where's The Helmet?" "Oh, he's crashed out on top of the washing machine." I say again, poor, miserable cat.

I started my corset for my wedding dress, I cleaned the house from top to bottom, baked two loaves of bread from scratch, (my first time EVER), and caught up on the laundry.

And I didn't take pictures of anything at all.

Anyway, I'm off to wash Boobah's face, since he can't do it himself. Poor, miserable cat.

P.S.

This story reinforces my desire to make my own wedding dresses, rather than be at the mercy of the folks at wedding boutiques.

P.P.S

I lied - maybe ONE picture.

No 'Poo Update

2008-09-25T06:53:00.003-06:00

I recently finished listening to two books by Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing and Seize the Night. I enjoyed both audiobooks very much, but really, the only reason I'm telling you this is so that I can accurately describe what's happening to my hair.

In the books, a DNA-altering retrovirus has escaped the lab. People who are infected are Becoming...becoming what, nobody knows, but they are Becoming someone else, possibly someTHING else.

My hair is Becoming.

Day 1 to day 5 were...pretty bad. Partly because I didn't really know what I was doing, so I was using way too much of everything. On the positive side, everything was from my baking cupboard, so at least I was edible the entire time. On the negative side, I spent a great deal of time trying to pretend that the vinegar smell was NOT emanating from my head. It takes a lot more effort to avoid head-sniffers than you might imagine.

Day 6 to day 8 were...well, they were also pretty bad. I reformulated my "shampoo" and "conditioner", so I no longer smelled like salad, but my hair looked and felt pretty awful. Imagine greasy, static-y straw.

On days 9 and 10, I wanted to pull a full-on Britney, and shave my head right to the skin.

On day 11, I started to feel like, if I didn't shampoo my hair, I was going to have a psychotic break. I took a shower, washed with my hair with my baking soda solution, rinsed with my vinegar/green tea/vodka solution, and then stood in the shower, rocking back and forth, hands outstretched to the shampoo bottle.

I made a compromise with myself; I decided that if I could find a bottle in the shower that didn't have the dreaded 'cones (dimethicone) in it, I'd use it. As an aside, did you know that pretty much all conditioners and many shampoos have silicone in them? I did not. I mean, it's not like I assumed that shampoo was made of magical fairy dust, in non-sweatshop fairy factories, where elves sang as they did the bottling, but I didn't think it contained a derivative of the product I used to seal the edges of my bathtub. Who knew?

Anyway, owing to the fact that I have longish, slightly shampoo and conditioner resistant hair, I have a lot of different bottles hanging out everywhere, because I've tried EVERYTHING. I found a shampoo with no 'cones, and for a few seconds, I just stood there, staring at the bottle in my hand, feeling like an addict who's come face to face with her addiction. After a quick argument with myself (which I did aloud, the pro side in my own voice, the con side done in the voice of Stimpy) I turned my head upside down, put the tiniest little dab of shampoo in my hands, and worked it through the ends of my hair, careful not to touch my scalp.

I shudder to report that the rinse water came out black.

Black.

At first, I thought it was dirt, and I can't even describe how grossed out I was. Somehow, I managed to fight the urge to curl up in a ball in the bottom of the shower, moaning "Unclean, unclean, UNCLEAN!", along with the urge to re-wash my hair and dump the no 'poo experiment once and for all.

I finished rinsing, then crawled out of the shower to towel off and pour myself a drink. As I passed the mirror, I noticed that something was different, but I wasn't ready to look too closely. When I combed it out, I finally realized why my rinse water was so dark.

About six months ago, I colored my naturally dark brown hair a very, very dark brown, nearly black. When I dye my hair, I never do an all-over job, because I'm not very good at maintenance, so any treatment that leaves me with the potential for different colored roots is NOT my friend. Instead of doing the all-over head thing, I tend to comb new color through in streaks, starting at random points a few inches from the root, so while I never end up with a shocking new hair color, I also never have visible roots, so it all works out.

Well, after ten days of being washed with baking soda, which is moderately caustic, and rinsed with apple cider vinegar, which is moderately acidic, the little bit of shampoo I used finished the task of stripping out nearly all of the remaining color, which is why the water was black. It also got rid of the last of the vinegar smell, and left my hair feeling soft and shiny, and all-round excellent.

Days 12 to 18 haven't been as bad as the first days; my hair is completely scent-free, and is surprisingly voluminous, and appears to be developing a bit of a wave, which is really exciting. It no longer feels greasy and lank, but it's gotten kind of frizzy, which is a problem I've never, ever had before. Ever. While I'm enjoying the novelty of it, I can see that it's going to get annoying very quickly.

In short, I'm glad I didn't shave it all off, but honestly, I'm not sure that the gladness will last.

My hair is Becoming. I just hope it's Becoming something I won't want to set on fire.

No rest for the wicked

2008-09-23T11:52:00.005-06:00

I recently cleaned my office out and rearranged all the furniture, so that the cats would have more access to the window, without having to knock paperwork off my desk to do so.

When I rearranged everything, I noticed that there was a kind of tunnel between the wall and the back of the boxes I had stacked in the closet. I don't know why, but I reached my hand back there, and was horrified to put my hand on a thick mat of cat hair.

After a bit of dry-heaving, (when I first reached back there, it felt a lot like I was touching a dead animal), I moved the boxes, got the vacuum and cleaned up the hair, then rearranged the closet so that I could put a cat bed down there; they can still hide out, but I'll be able to keep it a little less hairy. It's since been named The Cat Hole, because... well, because The Hotness and I like to name things.

Since Boobah's been so under the weather, he's been hanging out in the cat hole a lot lately, probably because he can prop his cone on the side of the bed and find a good sleeping position.

Unfortunately, it appears that this is no longer going to be a peaceful retreat for him; he went and laid down about half an hour ago, and when I returned to my office after making coffee and tidying up the kitchen, I found him laying on the bottom of a cat pile, with what I imagine to be a resigned look on his face.

Poor little conehead.

Skirt B Mock-Up

2008-09-22T17:40:00.008-06:00

I'd better sleep lightly tonight, because if cats are vengeful creatures, Boobah and Dinger are probably going to make their move tonight. They'll need the cover of darkness, though; I'm fat, but I move pretty fast when I'm scared.

I made an appointment to bring everyone but Smooshy to the vet - Bonzo and Dinger need checkups, and Boobah has...well, he has ongoing tail and head problems.

When the time came, Bonzo managed to hide so completely that I ended up leaving without her, and just took Boobah and Dinger to the vet. Unfortunately, when I was trying to load them into their cat carrier, the door came off, and I was forced to improvise a cat carrier.

Nothing screams white trash like walking into a veterinary office with a laundry basket full of cats with their harnesses tied together with string. Luckily my vets and their assistants have wonderful senses of humor!

There were shots all around, vaccinations and whatnot, and we got some pain medication for Boobah - I hate to medicate my animals, but I'm not willing to leave them hurting just to save the skin on my hands. And arms. And neck. Bygones.

On the way home I stopped and picked up a couple of extra-special cat massaging combs, and gave Boobah the royal treatment when we got home - poor dude has been in his collar for a week, now. Hopefully the shot he got will clear up any problems, and give him a bit of relief.

Along with that, I managed to get a bit of sewing done. I did a lot of staring at this skirt over the weekend, so that I could figure out what to do to make a similar skirt of my own.

After much staring, I made a paper model. I do this with pretty much everything I make, because I'm pattern challenged. Stupid lines everywhere. Don't cut here, do cut here, try not to cut off your fingertips, ha ha, you cut yourself! Stupid patterns. Yeah, yeah, a poor craftsman blames his tools. I hear you. :)

Anyway, since I'm pattern challenged, I tend to be less intimidated by just sketching out what I think the pieces should look like. I just use regular notepaper, sketch my pieces in miniature, then tape them together to see how the pieces fit. Everything ends up Barbie-sized, but at least I can tell if I'm on the right track.

Sometimes, I take my mini-pattern pieces and cut them out of my test fabric, to see if they hang properly; I did this with these pieces, and if I had a Barbie, she'd have a cute little blue taffeta fit-and-flare skirt to wear. Unfortunately, my Barbie and Ken dolls had an accident when I was 12, shortly after my mom rented The Fly.

Somehow, Barbie ended up with Ken's head and left arm, and a right leg made of twigs, and Ken ended up with Barbie's left arm and right leg, and a head made out of cheese. Then my dog ate his head. And the steering wheel out of the Barbie Corvette. Which is okay, since neither Barbie nor Ken could work the pedals anymore.

Anyway, back to the skirt. Since it seemed like I WAS on the right track, I cut out my four pieces, and this is what I ended up with;

I did a bit of retouching for color, because in real life, the bottom of the skirt is the same brown you see in the photo, but the top of the skirt is a bright, screaming teal color, so it's a bit distracting.

The skirt definitely needs some crinoline, and maybe a little bit less fullness, but I'm comfortable with the general shape. Once I get the crinoline under it, I can tweak the fullness as necessary. Also, I cut the skirt too long on purpose; I wasn't sure how much room to leave for the crinoline, so I figured that if I left a lot of extra fabric, I'd be able to figure out my hem length once the underskirt is sorted out.

I put in an invisible zipper so that I could test the size of my darts - the ones on the front are fine, but one of the back darts is pretty crooked, which is why the fabric is pulling on the left side. Oopsie! Once I have that worked out, and the hem length worked out, I'll be able to mark everything up, take the pieces apart, and I'll have pattern pieces with which to cut my real dress fabric.

Then I'll be working on the corset top. At least I only need to do one of those, not two, since the corset will actually be the same regardless of the skirt design I go for.

Next time, I'll show you the mock-up for the ballgown skirt. It was 20 minutes well spent!

My favorite commercial

2008-09-19T18:08:00.002-06:00

I'm just a little bit in love with Mr. Bill. Also, his gym experiences and mine are remarkably similar!

Cat In A Box

2008-09-18T06:50:00.000-06:00

Just figured I'd give you a quick update on the deaf kitten.

The name Dinger seems to be sticking, but he isn't very responsive to it, since, you know, he's deaf and all. Still, he's learned that when all the cats leap up and run to the kitchen at once, it means someone's opening a can of cat food - what else does he really need to know?

The Hotness and I went out and spent a stupid amount of time and money purchasing just the right cat toys, only to come home and find Dinger playing in a discarded box.

I bought a bunch of belting supplies at a garage sale on the weekend, and immediately emptied my new treasures into the drawer I keep belting supplies in, and tossed the box in my craft room garbage can. I guess Dinger fished it out and dragged it into the hallway, because when I got home from work yesterday, this is where I found him sleeping;

My No 'Poo Experiment

2008-09-17T07:45:00.000-06:00

A couple of months ago, I started hearing and reading about no-poo adherents; people who don't use shampoo to wash their hair. I'm not sure where exactly I started seeing this (someone's blog, I'm sure), but I've decided to see if no 'poo will work for me.

I've always had long, straight, hair, fairly fine, but lots of it, and I've never been much for primping, so most of the time, I have it back in a ponytail and up in a clip. This is because when I wear my hair down, I look like I've got a bad case of helmet head - my hair just clings to my scalp and lays there, clean and shiny and limp.

I've used cheap shampoo and expensive shampoo, and I've got to tell you, I've never noticed enough of a difference in my own hair to make ANY shampoo worth $26.00 for a 16 oz bottle.

What I'm wondering, though, is if ditching shampoo altogether might give me different results.

For now, I'm mixing about two teaspoons of baking soda with just enough water to make a paste, enthusiastically rubbing it into my head (scalp only), and then letting it sit for a slow count of thirty. A good rinse to remove the baking soda, and then I pour a mixture of 3 parts apple cider vinegar, seven parts water over my hair, everywhere but the scalp, wait about a minute, then rinse.

I started last week, and I had a bit of a rough start - the first time, I rinsed with straight apple cider vinegar, which did NOT rinse out well. It worked very effectively as a cat-repellent, though, so I may just do it again when I need a good night's sleep. So far, I'm really surprised that the vinegar rinse works as well as it does to detangle my hair. REALLY surprised, since my hair tangles fairly easily, and is normally kind of a pain to work with.

The first little while is supposed to have a pretty high "ick" factor, and yes, my hair is very icky right now, after one week. It's heavy and limp, and feels like greasy straw. It also smells vaguely like salad dressing (my last rinse was still 50% vinegar, 50% water - my mistake), which is making me hungry.

On the other hand, it looks very shiny and very thick, and has a very slight wave to it. A lot of people claim that their normally straight hair regains a natural wave after a while on no 'poo, which would be pretty exciting for me, personally, since I've never actually HAD wavy hair.

Apparently there are a couple of ways to do it; one is to stop shampooing, cold turkey, which is what I've done. Since your scalp is used to having to produce a LOT of oil to keep up with the speed at which you strip it out with shampoo, when you cut out the shampoo, your scalp just goes along, merrily producing excess oil for awhile, until it realizes the extra isn't needed.

The other, and probably more sensible route, is to start by watering down your shampoo a bit each time you wash, until what's left in your shampoo bottle is pretty much nothing but water. It takes more time, but it seems to me that your scalp would handle the change a little better if it were a gradual change.

Since I went with the hard way, I'm going to stick with it and see how it goes. If it works, I'll post before and after pictures. If it doesn't, I'll let you know!

September Resolution: FAIL

2008-09-16T06:42:00.003-06:00

About two weeks ago, I made a September resolution to keep my house clean enough that unexpected guests could swing by any time, and I wouldn't have to resort to a frenzy of ~~shoving dirty dishes in the oven and discarded clothing behind the sofa~~ last-minute cleaning, or else allow them to go home wondering why there was a bra-strap hanging out of the drawer in the sofa table.

Week one went very well. Week two was a little less than perfect, but not horrible. Week three is going to be a disaster, even though it's only Tuesday.

I blame it on sewing. And cats. And everything but my own laziness. I've been in my sewing room since this weekend, so while the laundry remains caught up (only because the washer and dryer are RIGHT THERE, and I needed to pre-wash some fabric anyway), the rest of the house looks...kinda shabby. I'd take pictures to show you, but if The Hotness were to ever find my blog and see that I've posted pictures of my mess, he might actually give me an old-fashioned shunning.

Since I didn't get any housekeeping done, (other than the dishes, which I did a very half-assed job of) I completed the first draft for both Big Dress skirts last night, just by pinning them to Clarice and adjusting, re-adjusting, and re-pinning. Tonight I'll sew them together and try them on - pictures to follow.

Muslin frenzy

2008-09-15T06:41:00.005-06:00

Now that I'm back on track, I feel almost a frenzy to get a couple of muslins turned out, to try them on.

In an effort to locate all my materials, I came across some fabric I didn't remember I had - does that ever happen to you? I have my stash pretty neatly organized, but all my taffeta is on it's original bolts, and all together on one shelf. I'd forgotten, however, that two of my seven colors weren't on bolts at all, but just folded bolt-width and tucked up there. When I pulled it down, wedged between the purple/gold and the red/black, I found...can you believe it... silver/gold.
Honestly, I have no recollection of buying this fabric at all; if I was one bit crazier, I'd think that fairies brought it to me. After all my hemming and hawing over color, NOW I find the fabric of my dreams, in my own stash!

Well, except that it's too small a piece; only 4 metres (4.4yds) of 60" fabric; it's just big enough for the fit-and-flare dress. Oh well, another project, maybe.

In other news, I actually HAVE a skirt pattern to match the ballgown skirt; it's this vintage Butterick pattern, B8017 with the same inverted pleats; I don't have the whole pattern scanned in, but this has been featured as one of my sidebar ladies, the images along the left side of my blog.

The placement of the pleats is a little off, but I think I like the idea of having a centre pleat, instead of the flat centre in the sample dress; it would give me a chance to tuck a bit of embroidery or something in that pleat, for interest.

Alternatively, the pattern will at least give me pattern pieces in the right shape, to start with; I can always tweak the pleat location once I've cut out the pieces.

And last but not least, I have a similar pattern for the fit-and-flare dress; it's Vogue 8828. I picked up this pattern in April or so, because I loved that silhouette even then, but really, this pattern isn't quite right. Again, I like the corset top, but the flare on this dress starts at about knee length, which is too mermaid-y for me; I prefer the flare to start around the upper thigh, instead.

At any rate, again, at least I have an idea how the pattern pieces should look; I made a few attempts yesterday, and while I ended up with the right general shape, the pattern pieces were small and pieced together to make the flare, rather than having the dramatic, seamless look that I was hoping for. Plus it was too short. And done in a green striped polyester fabric that I'm afraid to take pictures of, for fear that the memory card in my camera will melt in protest at the ugliness it's forced to witness. Still, I hope to knock off another try tonight; when I do, I'll take pictures!

Have a great day, y'all!

Back On Track (I think)

2008-09-13T08:38:00.005-06:00

Okay.

Yesterday, I went and tried on a couple more wedding dresses. With the idea that I wasn't going to just randomly try stuff on, I tried on two silhouettes I'd previously thought were my favorites, decided I wasn't really much of a fan, and left.

This doesn't sound like a successful outing, but in fact, it was exactly what I needed.

Since the beginning, I've had this dress stuck in my head;

Specifically, I LOVE the color, I liked the pickups in the skirt, and the fact that it's got a corset top. I don't like the bodice shown in the picture, but basically, this is the overall look I've had in my head.

Lately, I've been getting more of this vibe;

I like that the more simple skirt, but dislike the crossed/ruched bust detail.

I had originally looked at a couple of halter patterns, specifically these ones;

I still love them from the bustline down, but the simple fact is that halter style dresses aren't flattering on me.

Again, part of my choice rests with what color I decide to go with, and also whether I've made up my mind about lace or no lace.

I've finally settled on gold. Just gold. All gold, all the time. Because as Marjie said, I've written about it over and over; why am I second-guessing myself?

Plans for the Small Dress are complete. It will be beaded lace over a gold stretch satin, and will be the same dress you've already seen, although I will likely either add sleeves, or make a small lace shrug to go over top.

The Big Dress will be one of two silhouettes.

It will either be shaped like this;

(Image from Google Images)

or like this:

(Image from Google Images)

Whichever silhouette I land on, I think I might have the fabric for the dress in my stash already!

The first dress, the ball gown, might be made with two layers of fabric; an ivory crinkle burnout chiffon over a light, shimmery gold chiffon. The top picture is a little dark; the bottom picture shows the two fabrics layered, and is pretty much what I see in real life.

For the second dress, the fit-and-flare, I'm not sure whether this same fabric would work. If not, I still have about 12 yards of off-white crinkle taffeta. I'm going to cut a few swatches and attempt to tea-stain it into a dark ivory color. If that doesn't work, I'll just use it as it is, and bead the heck out of it until it turns gold. :)

Either way, at least I'm only making two muslins now, not ten. I've come a long way in two days. Thank goodness. And thank YOU, for your comments!

Big Dress Avoidance Rant

2008-09-11T17:13:00.005-06:00

I've been working on the muslin for The Big Dress, and honestly, I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels.

I've draped and re-draped the bodice, but no matter what I do, I can't shake the feeling that it's too soon to be making a muslin. This probably explains why I posted about the tragic love affair between my dress dummy and my vacuum cleaner - I am slowly going crazy.

As I work on the muslin, the clear picture I have in my head (of the dress I thought I wanted) keeps changing, and it's driving me mad. It's not that I've forgotten what it looks like, it's just that the picture keeps changing, now, and nothing is sticking, so every time I try to adapt my muslin to the picture, by the time I'm finished, it no longer matches the new picture in my mind.

I have a number of photos I've been using for inspiration, ones that I've gotten from bridal shows, magazines, and websites, and honestly, the dresses I LOVE are all so different that I'm completely stuck. I've been to bridal salons and tried on a number of styles, and while I'm not egotistical enough to say that they all look fabulous on me, they at least, for the most part, all look just fine.

I've tried on about 60 dresses over the past two years (we've been engaged since August 2006), but I've never had that "this is the one" feeling, because it's always been in my heart to make my own dress.

The closest I've come to that feeling was when I tried on the muslin for The Small Dress. That muslin is NOT finished to a high standard (or barely any standard), but it IS the overall correct look and feel; it's simple and comfortable, but with the correct fabric, and the judicious use of sparkly beads, it will become something a little more formal. Admittedly, the picture in that post does make me look like a bit of a bridge troll, but that's due more to the fact that I'm the least photogenic human being on earth than to any failing of the dress itself.

Anyway, I've been watching a lot of Say Yes To The Dress on TLC, reading my nine thousand bridal magazines, and looking at an endless number of dresses online, but while I'm sure it's hurting my ability to make a firm decision, I honestly don't think that quitting is an option at this point.

I think the biggest thing thats hurting me that I can't decide on a color.

I prefer silver over gold, but gold looks better on me. I love dresses in non-traditional colors like red and blue, but I find that if you're not really careful, you end up looking less like a bride and more like a prom queen, which is not a BAD thing, but it's not what I personally want from my Big Dress.

The groomsmen are going to be wearing vests like this one, which is a hunting camo pattern, but there's no way on earth I'm wearing a blaze orange dress, or a camo wedding dress.

Because...yikes. A slender girl could pull it off, but a woman my size would look like the most comfortable sofa in the hunting lodge.

I do have a rather large amount of chocolate brown taffeta with a slight gold sheen to it, which would work perfectly, if I can talk myself into a brown wedding dress. But in ALL of the pictures in my head, my dress is a light color; gold, silver, light bronze, (are you noticing the metallic theme, here?) or taupe, but never navy or brown or red.

The only firm decision I've made is that I won't wear a white or cream dress, partly because white makes me look really washed-out, and partly because I am that kid in the Tide commercial who just can't keep her clothes clean. I'm the Pigpen of the white clothing world. And, of course, pink is out.

I don't know what to do. I already asked if we could elope, and got the big N O. The Hotness is all "Buy a dress, I don't care what it costs" but the idea of making my own dress was never about saving money, so that's not the answer.

At this point, I'm tempted to make ten dresses, and then just pick the one I like best on my wedding day. *sigh* Or maybe I'll just join Mrs. G's Woman's Colony and leave The Hotness to tend the cats and pine for me.

Curiosity

2008-09-11T06:38:00.003-06:00

I bought something yesterday, just because it was that certain shade of green that says "old stuff". I have no idea why I do this. I suppose that, if I MUST have a stupid habit, at least it's not smoking, or crack, or both.

I didn't know what it was when I bought it, and when I googled it, I couldn't figure it out, either.

Anyone out there know what this is?

Stupid Dummy

2008-09-10T05:00:00.002-06:00

My dress dummy, Clarice, is being a jerk.

I know exactly what's wrong with her, but frankly, I don't care.

It's not appropriate for ME to bring MY personal problems to work, so honestly, I don't understand why it's okay for her.

I know it can be hard to break up with someone, but everyone could see that the vacuum cleaner was just using her for...well... you know. What do all vacuum cleaners want, you know??!! I mean, really, what more can you expect! He sucks up cat dander for a living. He's not exactly the Prince of Wales. Or Colin Firth, who is much hotter than the Prince of Wales.

And anyway, the point is, he's gone now. Gone to be with the cat tree in the living room.

I know, I know. It's hard, knowing that he's just out there, living his life with someone else, but what are you going to do, lay around doing nothing all day? You need to sort yourself out, get over him. I've seen the way the shelf looks at you, like it can see right through your cover and into your plastic innards. That has to make you feel good, even if the shelf isn't quite your type. All I ask is that you don't toy with him.

What's that? You've got a tough life? Yes, yes, anyone can reel off the litany of problems in your life, Clarice.

You're fat. Hey, so am I! You should be glad that at least you've still got a waist, like I am!

You're headless. Well, that does kind of suck, but it's not like you ever had a head before, so that can hardly be an issue now. And no, your lack of a head is NOT what made the vacuum cleaner break up with you, because, hello? The cat tree has no head, either.

You have no arms. Again, suckfest. I get it. But again, the cat tree is in the same boat. And so is that guy from the One video. The point is, we all have to work with the gifts we are given. You have the skinniest leg I have EVER seen! And it's adjustable! How cool is that?! If you want to be tall, you get to be tall. If you want to try short on for size, well, no problem! Although, Clarice, honey, to be honest, short isn't a good look for you. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

Life is about making lemonade out of lemons, and that kind of crap. Not that you'd want to make lemonade out of crap, because then it wouldn't be lemonade, it would be crapade, and who would drink it. You get my point, though. Make the best of what you've got! See the positive!

Just because you FEEL like your life is over doesn't mean it IS over.

Suck it up, Clarice.

Pull up your right boob, and for crying out loud, tuck that sock back up your backside - I need it to make the back of my dress hang right!

When you're miserable, I'm miserable. I'm making my WEDDING DRESS MUSLIN, here, I can't afford to be miserable. Chip in and do YOUR part, why don't you!

P.S.

If you HAD arms, I would make you do the ironing, so really, your lack of limbs is kind of a plus for you.

P.P.S.

I want my green shirt back.

A Personal Cake Wreck

2008-09-09T06:27:00.005-06:00

Okay, so it's either really sweet, or really creepy, but The Hotness and I don't exchange purchased greeting cards. You know, birthday cards, valentine's day, etc.

Instead, we exchange handmade cards, which are ostensibly made by the cats. Paw-made cards, as it were.

You may gag on the sweetness now.

Are you finished yet? Good.

So anyway, this started after we'd been together for just over a year. The Hotness is an incredibly hard worker, and though he makes a concerted effort to be home for special days, sometimes his work doesn't leave him enough time to shop.

Plus, when we first got together, we decided to exchange one piece of information about our ex that drove us mad. He said that if we made it to the point where marriage was an option, I was not, under any circumstances, allowed to take my engagement ring back to the store and exchange it for something else without at least warning him. I told him that I wasn't really a fan of purchased cards, and that honestly, I'd be perfectly comfortable with a hug instead. You see, my ex, for every single occasion, be it birthday, Christmas, whatever, would take me to Wal-Mart, stand me in the greeting card aisle, pick out a card, hand it to me, and say "There's your card. Read it and let's get out of here."

I'll pause for your laughter.

So anyway, as you might imagine, I developed a slight dislike for greeting cards.

For the first few special occasions, The Hotness gave me a purchased card, and I liked them, because I know he spent time actually picking them out - his family is VERY big into greeting cards for every occasion.

Then, he had to work on Mother's Day, and since I have no actual children, I didn't think anything of it. But that night, about a half hour after he got home, he presented me with the ugliest, most awesome card I've ever gotten, badly misspelled and partly shredded, but with pictures "drawn" by the "cats". I love using "air quotes" but it doesn't have the same effect on my blog as in person, where I get to use my fingers. Anyway, I LOVED that card, and still have it packed away.

Then, for my birthday that year, I got another handmade card, also "made" by the "cats", but also including a fairly fresh hairball. So fresh that it was still wet when it was placed in the card, and I had to pry the card open. I laughed for three days. What the hell, I'm STILL laughing!

From that point forward, all we ever exchanged were handmade cards, signed by whatever animals we have on hand. I give you exhibit A - pictures of my birthday card from back in August.

Normally, he's just plain better at this than I am.

Last May, however, I made an extra effort, and gave him a cake "decorated" by the "cats". Please picture the air quotes in your head.

He's a huge Minnesota Vikings fan, so I went online and found this picture of their helmet.

With this picture I made this;

Are you ready for it?

Keep scrolling - I want it to be a surprise!

One more little scroll! And don't forget, you can click on it to see it in all it's 1000px glory!

TA DA!

He was so happy and proud of me, he nearly cried.

Crooked Legs

2008-09-08T06:49:00.005-06:00

My mom and her boyfriend decided to get one last motorcycle ride in before the snow flies, so they took their last week of holidays to go camping and fishing, and stopped by to visit for a couple of nights here.

My mom is awesome. Of course, she's my mom, so I have to say that, but really, she IS pretty great. She's really go-with-the-flow, and very non-judgmental, which is good, because it means she eats my cooking without complaint, and doesn't care if I NEVER dust under the TV.

My mom blames herself for the fact that I'm clumsy, though she herself is incredibly graceful, and up until a few years ago, was winning dance competitions all over western Canada and the US.

When I told her about falling off my deck, and showed her my still-swollen ankle (yes, three months later, it's still swollen and painful, but that's another story) she sighed heavily and shook her head.

Mom: "It's all my fault."

Me: "Wha...?"

Mom: "Me and your dad. We should have broken your legs when we had a chance."

Me: "WHA...?"

Mom: "I just couldn't do it to you - you were so little. And cute."

Me: "What. Are. You. Talking. About?!"

Mom: (nonchalantly) "Oh, you were born with crooked legs."

Me: "Crooked...legs?"

Mom: "Oh yes, REALLY crooked. The doctors wanted to break them and splint them right after you were born, but your dad and I just couldn't do it to you."

Me: "Crooked? How crooked?"

Mom: "Oh, like this, kind of." (she draws a sketch on the table with her finger that resembles frogs legs - in at the knees, out at the feet) "But you were so little - we just couldn't do it." "But I guess if we had, you probably wouldn't have fallen off your deck."

Me: "Or out of the back of the truck. Or off the dance floor. Or at 7-11. Or at prom. Or in the parking lot. Or off the swing set. Or..."

"Mom: "Yes, yes. See, it's all my fault! And your dads!"

Now I have an official excuse for being a klutz! It's my mom's fault! I wonder if that will cover me for sewing through my fingernail this weekend. Maybe my arms are crooked, too!

In any case, I'll leave you with this:

Simplicity 1447, size 18, bust 36. I LOVE this dress.

I couldn't wear it, of course, because my legs are crooked, so I'll end up selling it, but what I really love is this cover art.

The lady in the blue dress is obviously the clear winner of a fairly scathing verbal exchange between herself and the lady in red. But nobody who wears a red dress is going to take the humiliation kindly. Her little red clutch purse contains a tiny vial of something that mixes very well with a vodka martini, and her next words will be "I'm sorry, you're right. May I get you a drink?"

Moron

2008-09-06T15:38:00.000-06:00

This is probably going to be the first and last post I make from my brand new BlackBerry pearl. Holy cow, texting takes forever on this thing!

Anyway, as I was getting ready to leave the house this morning, I went to throw the load of laundry into the dryer, I noticed a strange lump in the pocket of the pants I washed last night. Turned out to be my old Motorola Razer.

I guess that's why you're supposed to check the pockets first.

Oh well, I needed a new phone anyway.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Window Seat

2008-09-06T07:48:00.009-06:00

Well, I'm a little hesitant to show pictures of this, since it's hardly a triumph of skill, but at least it's finished!

As you can see, this is the cushion for the new window seat for the cats.

It's not lumpy because my sewing skills suck, but because I made and used covered buttons to tuft it. The ties for the buttons actually extend right through to the bottom of the cushion, and are used to tie the cushion to the stainless steel wire shelf below it. So really, my tufting skills suck. Plus, in my defense, I was trying to tie it while three cats were climbing my back to get onto it.

I had a hard time getting this picture cat-free. Within ten seconds of me putting it up, Smooshy was on it, making this face;

I don't know if that's a grin, or a promise to carve out my liver while I sleep, but either way, it doesn't photograph well.

Thirty seconds later, it looked like this;

And shortly after that, it looked like this.

As you can see, it's made with the Peony Garden fabric I am so crazy about, and it still makes me happy every time I look at it. I'm not sure how I'll feel about it once it's covered with cat hair, but I guess we'll see. The fabric is essentially a washable cover - when the thing needs some attention, I just untie the ribbon ties underneath, slide off the covered buttons, and then remove the fabric like a pillowcase. Yay!

Oh yeah, and a gratuitous kitten shot;

Bad Car Day

2008-09-05T17:55:00.002-06:00

A lady I work with, Jessie, got a new car about a month ago, and since then, every time we go for lunch, she drives.

The reason for this is twofold; one, she's in love with her car (I can't blame her) and two, I am a horrible, horrible, garbage magnet. Or rather, my car is. I personally am not a garbage magnet, because that would be gross.

I drive an old Cavalier Z24. I like to make sure I always add in the "Z24" because it makes the car sound really fast and stylish, when in reality, it's just a '94 Cavalier with a lame little spoiler attached to the trunk.

Anyway, questions of speed and coolness aside, I can't seem to keep the thing clear of junk - I'm not sure how it happens, but I've cleaned it out four times so far this summer, and it's STILL crammed with gas receipts and coffee cups, though I religiously throw them away every time I get a new coffee.

Yesterday I finally did some basic cleaning, just enough to clear some room on the front seat. And this afternoon at lunch, I insisted on either giving Jessie gas money, or taking over half of the driving duty, because it doesn't seem fair to always be booting around town in HER car. After a brief argument, which I might have ended by threatening to sing "I'm Henry The Eighth I Am" at the top of my lungs for the rest of the afternoon, and demonstrating a couple of verses in the parking lot, she finally got into my car and we took off for lunch.

I should add; nobody ever rides in my car. The Hotness has a company pickup truck that we use for the odd trip to town, and we have his old pickup truck for everything else, but my car is usually too messy to ride in. And it's not cool enough for The Hotness to be seen in. But mostly, it's just the mess. Essentially, this constant lack of witnesses allows CrazyRachelle to behave quite poorly towards other drivers.

Anyway, Jessie and I are driving along, planning a strategic hit on the buffet, when some lady with big hair pulls into the busy street, right out in front of me, slams on her brakes, then pulls out a map. A MAP! IN THE MIDDLE OF A BUSY STREET!

CrazyRachelle surfaced instantly. Without thought, I slammed on the brakes, screamed "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, JACKASS?" out my open window, and laid on the horn.

Almost immediately, I realized that I wasn't alone in the car, and I looked over at Jessie, to see if her head had exploded. To my utter amazement, she's sitting there looking at her fingernails, wondering if she should change her polish color, completely unfazed by our near-but-not-really-near death experience. I'm all "OMG, I'm so sorry!" and she's all "WTF are you talking about?" and "Who cares?"

CrazyRachelle has finally found a wingman!

Unfortunately, it appears that CrazyRachelle might be going off the road for awhile; I went to a few garage sales on my way home this afternoon, and after the last one, I started to smell something strange coming from the vents. Kind of an...electrical smell. I turned onto the road that leads to the highway, and suddenly there were great clouds of greasy blue smoke billowing out of the vents, smelling vaguely like burned dog-crap (yes, I know what that smells like - another post, I'll tell you about it.)

Apparently, the sewing I planned to do this weekend has been replaced by dismantling my dash and seeing if I can find the cause of the smoke.

I wonder if I didn't subconsciously mess with my car so that I could engage in more Big Dress Avoidance, a term I learned from Brooke, who is also making herself two wedding dresses.

Oh well, at least it's leftovers tonight, so I don't have to cook dinner, and can run to my sewing room right now and finish the window seat for the cats. Now that IS Big Dress Avoidance at its best.

I made a September Resolution

2008-09-03T07:36:00.009-06:00

I suck at making resolutions.

In fact, I don't think I've made any since 1996, the year I decided to be less of an introvert, and ended up tipsy in my buddy's back yard, cutting down his trees with his equally tipsy wife. Oh, we had a TON of fun, but my buddy wasn't exactly thrilled that we'd been at his power tools while partway through our third bottle of wine. In any case, I fulfilled my resolution, but not necessarily in the right way, so I stopped making them.

However, since more than a decade has gone by, I feel like maybe it's time to try again.

My September resolution is to keep my house clean enough that if people were to suddenly stop by, they would not sit silently in my living room and judge me. At least, not my housekeeping.

My personal theory of housekeeping is this; if it doesn't stink, and it's clean underneath, it doesn't matter what's on top. Which is to say, I love to kill germs, and I clean under my fridge and stove religiously, but hey, if dishes sit in the sink, whatever! Clothes all over the floor - whatever! General untidiness - no smell, no tell!

It drives The Hotness mad, because he's a kind of neat freak - I say "a kind of neat freak" on purpose - his idea of clean is exactly the reverse of mine - as long as it LOOKS tidy, it must be clean, which means that surface clean is all that matters. (insert shudder of horror here. O! the bacteria!).

Still, we've managed to find a more or less happy medium, in which I spend more time keeping the kitchen counters clear, and he ignores the dishes in the sink.

Honestly, though, since I started to work from home more, I've become more aware of how annoying my general clutter is. So I've decided to fulfill The Hotness' greatest wish, which is to have a house that looks as clean as it smells, at all times.

For the month of September, at least. I make no promises about October.

As part of my cleanup, I decided to work my way across the house, from my office and sewing room, all the way to our bedroom on the other side of the house. The basement belongs to The Hotness - it's the Man Zone, so if he wants it clean, he has to do it himself, other than cat litter, which makes him gag and complain loudly about how hard he works all day long, just to have to come home to clean cat litter. He's lucky he's got a nice tush.

The sewing room was almost done, but now the office is as clean as it's going to get, and I've made myself yet another cat-related project. I can't help but think I'm trying to evade doing the muslin for The Big Dress.

Anyway, half of my desk used to sit directly under the massive window in my office. The window overlooks The Hotness' bird tree, which makes all the cats salivate. Here's a shot of about half of The Hotness' bird friends, taken this past winter. The other half is a bunch of yellow and orange finches, which apparently don't like to eat at the same time as these sparrows.

In any case, as you can imagine, a window that looks directly onto such a scene ends up being quite the cat-magnet.

So, when I moved my office around, I moved my desk away from the window, and put a shelf underneath it. It's a stainless steel wire affair, and not very comfortable for kitty feet, so I'm going to make a cushion for it. As you can see, the towel isn't really doing the trick. And it's ugly.

Off to my sewing room!

P.S. If you can't put your finger on exactly what's different on my blog today, I changed the image of the woman on the bottom left of the page. It used to be a line drawing of a lady in a blue dress with red flowers, and it's now the envelope art from a vintage pattern in my collection, B8017. I love changin' stuff!

I Heart LA & TX

2008-09-02T06:48:00.003-06:00

I'm not the praying kind. I support others who find solace or hope in prayer, but my own relationship with God is a little more loosey-goosey. That said, I prayed my ass off this weekend, as I watched Gustav roll in, and then roll by. I'm a landlocked Canadian, but my heart was in NO these past few days.

I'd meant to spend the weekend updating my Etsy store, working on the muslin for The Big Dress, and generally goofing off. As it turned out, I did a lot of goofing off, but not the sewing related kind.

The Hotness took his first weekend off since March. I'm not kidding; with the exception of a quick camping trip with his family back at the beginning of July, The Hotness hasn't taken a single day completely off since March. To celebrate his at-home-ness (yeah, I made it up, but Erin from A Dress A Day said it's okay) we rented some games and movies, and just hung out.

Except secretly, while we were hanging out, I was making surreptitious trips to my computer to see if there were any updates on Gustav.

My interest is kind of personal. See, back in June of 1995, an opportunity arose for me to buy a ridiculously cheap plane ticket from Edmonton, Alberta to Houston, TX. Without giving it a great deal of thought, I simply bought the tickets, and hoped I'd be able to get the time off work.

At the time, I was in the military, and I had some extra leave time accumulated. I calculated that if I didn't take any more, I'd have just enough so that I could take a good portion of December off. By the time December finally rolled around, I had a freshly-broken heart and only a vague idea of what I would do during my trip.

I drove down the Gulf coast to Brownsville, via Corpus Christie and Kingsville NAS. I was raised on the Pacific coast, so I was used to sea air and lush greenery in the middle of winter, but I was unprepared for the difference in the quality of the sunlight, which made the crops look greener, and the water, bluer.

After a day in Brownsville, I swung up to Laredo, then over to San Antonio, and I have to tell you, in all the days I spent in Texas, I didn't encounter a single unfriendly face. Plus, I ate like it was going out of style; Texas beef, BBQ, seafood, Tex-Mex, you name it, I ate it.

Originally, I'd planned on spending the entire time in Texas, but partway through the trip, I heard the song "Calling Baton Rouge" while eating dinner in some mom and pop restaurant, and decided to go check it out, and maybe hit New Orleans.

I left early the next morning, spent a couple of hours wandering around Baton Rouge, then hopped in the car and headed to NO. By the time I hit that little stretch of I10 that runs along the edge of the Ponchartrain, I was fizzing with excitement.

I've never met a more friendly group of people than those who helped me try to break into my rental car in the Shoney's parking lot that first night. No word of a lie, about 20 people gathered around my car, cheering me on, offering to give the coat hanger a tug for me. Including two NOPD officers who were called in because of the large crowd, and ended up also being unable to break into that infernal car.

In the end, a group of six young folks (my age at the time, I guess, early 20's)came outside and cheerily insisted that I eat dinner with them while one of the girls called her sister, who happened to be a locksmith. I explained that I couldn't eat dinner, because I'd locked my keys in the trunk with my purse. They laughed at me and led me inside, while the NOPD officers broke up the rest of the crowd and went on their way. That group of six fed me until I was ready to burst, and when the girl's sister finally arrived and freed my purse and keys, nobody would take a dime, or even to allow me to chip in for the massive dinner we'd consumed.

The next morning, I got up early and went straight to the French Quarter, where I ate beignets and drank strong, black coffee at the Cafe Du Monde, then, struck out to take pictures and see what I could see, and in three days, I managed to see an awful lot.

Then, it was back to Texas, with three pounds of fudge in my car from a place in the Riverwalk mall, which I intended to bring home to share with family, but which never even made it into the state of Texas before being consumed.

I came back from that trip tired, sick with the flu (and probably an overdose of fudge), and convinced that I'd see the Gulf Coast again, and soon. Somehow, though, I never made it back.

The long and short of it is, I fell in love with Texas and Louisiana, and I was incredibly upset when Katrina hit. Along with millions of others, I watched with horror as pictures of places I visited flashed on the screen, filled with churning waters.

It broke my heart to think of the group of six, and those NOPD officers who'd been so kind to me 10 years before, and all those wonderful Texans I'd met along the Gulf Coast.

I hope they made it through Katrina, and I'm very glad that Gustav treated New Orleans a little more gently.

Yet another new look

2008-08-29T17:52:00.005-06:00

Every three months or so, I get bored with looking at the same old blog. I've been purple, brown, pink, blue, and green, so I decided it was time to go with plain old white, but with editable elements.

I stumbled across this template at www.suckmylolly.com, which has a number of really great templates, many with a distinctly vintage feel. Yes, the name sounds vaguely dirty, but then, so was Bettie Page, and who doesn't love HER?

Anyway, this is actually a two-column template, but I added a third column so that I could house my Blogher ads without having them cut off. I couldn't see the cut off bits on my home computer, so when I was in town today, I stopped by a friend's place and checked my blog on her regular 19" monitor. Yikes!

My monitor here at home is a 22" widescreen, so I honestly had no idea what my blog looked like to someone with a regular ratio monitor; those of you whose eyes I've been hurting, please accept my sincere apologies for all the strange overlapping my old layout did. I loved the colors and the design, but it certainly wasn't made with smaller monitors in mind.

At any rate, now that I have this template, I think I'll be able to satisfy my need for change by simply changing the picture on the left, maybe by using artwork from some of my vintage patterns!

I'm going to go get dinner in the oven, and then get to work on my next quickie project; Dinger's collar is HUGE and bulky;

see? I've decided to disassemble it and use the metal bits on a new, more lightweight collar, which I've decided to make myself. I wonder if it's safe to use sequins on a cat collar? Would sequins emasculate my cat? I mean, it's not like he's going to have his boy-bits for much longer anyway, so what the hell, right?

Who knew?

2008-08-27T19:09:00.014-06:00

Did you know that Butterick released the Walkaway Dress in an updated version? Looks like it was in the late '70's or early '80's. Same basic look, much slimmer skirt! I had no idea!

I found it uncut, factory folded, but in the wrong darned size, so it'll end up in my Etsy store this weekend, I guess.

UPDATE: I didn't realize what I a prize I'd found until I started to get emails about this pattern shortly after I posted this picture. Since I'm a huge fan of all the folks who inquired, either by email or by comment, I was wrought with fear and guilt over having to make a decision. Lacking any ability to make a decision (it's Indecision Thursday, to be followed shortly by Wishy-Washy Friday and immediately preceded by Waffling Wednesday) I decided to feed everyone into the Randomizer, and the big winner is Jenny from Chronically Uncool, who not only sent the message/comment with the earliest timestamp this morning, but who came up first on the Randomizer.

My vintage pattern collection keeps growing, even though I keep trying to weed it out.

For every ten patterns I buy, there are seven I like, but maybe only one that I think I'll ever make for myself. The other three are usually what I call "soulless" - they're really generic looking '70's & '80's patterns, or anything that looks like Mrs. Roper would wear it.

Still, style is subjective, and essentially, 90% of my vintage pattern collection is stuff I'll never make or wear. Thus, my Etsy store, which I've been neglecting pretty badly. Over the next week or so, I want to get more of my stuff scanned in and uploaded. The big slowdown is that as I upload to Etsy, I try to also crosspost patterns to the Vintage Pattern Wiki; maybe I'll concentrate on getting my listings done first, and then go back and do the wiki afterwards.

And speaking of vintage patterns, I had my first vintage pattern identification experience this weekend!

I left the TV on in the background while I was kitten-sitting and trying to clean the house, when a Gidget marathon came on. Gidget, Gidget Goes to Rome, etc.

Well, when Gidget Goes Hawaiian came on, I actually sat down and watched some of it, after seeing this dress in one of the early scenes;

I can't even explain why this excited me so much; most of the sewing blogs I read have people who can look at any article of clothing and name five commercial patterns that they could use to make a reasonable facsimile of that item. I, on the other hand, am only starting to notice details like dolman sleeves and fancy button plackets, and topstitching. To be able to make a connection between something in my pattern collection is pretty exciting, even if, in this particular case, the pattern is so distinctive I'd have had to be blind to miss it.

On another note - I read a lot of blogs that have advertising, and I don't personally find it offensive or awful, and I hope you don't, either. I've had Google Ads for some time, and have recently joined BlogHer because if I'm lucky, I'll be able to afford the $125.00/yard fabric I finally selected for my wedding dresses, of which I appear to need 9 yards. Yeah, that's a whole other post.

At any rate, it's not like I'm trying to get rich or anything crazy like that; since December 07, my Google Ads revenue account has reached $1.29 - not exactly early retirement money. At any rate, I'm giving it a try, to see how it goes. If it goes well, my blog will get more traffic, which should increase my ad revenue a little bit, and I'll be dressed like a fairy-tale princess at my wedding. If it doesn't...well...actually, if it doesn't, it probably won't bother me at all. It's my freaking wedding - I'm not going to remember any of it anyway. If it weren't for the photographer, I might be tempted to show up in a t-shirt and jeans. With sequins.

No more cat posts. After this one.

2008-08-25T07:30:00.008-06:00

Thanks so much for your comments over the last couple of posts. I promise, one last cat post, and then it's back to makin' stuff. Well, attempting to make stuff.

One quick point about my last post; it's not really that three cats or four cats are enough cats - it's just that I think I have the soul of an animal hoarder, and The Hotness is the same as me, or perhaps worse. I think we could probably live quite happily with 90 cats.

And 40 dogs. And some sheep and goats. And maybe a piglet, because I LOVE bacon. Not that I would eat my piglet, but at least I'd be doing my part to balance the bacon I eat against the bacon I feed. And now that I've said that, I have to add that I would also not eat any of my other animals, because I'd love them, too, even though I don't love lamb or dog meat. This paragraph has really taken a turn for the worse.

Anyway, if I don't put a limit on it, we're going to be one of those couples you see in the news who've built themselves a little shed on the back of their property to live in, while their 110 cats live in their 2000 square foot home, and they both work full time to bring home kibble and catnip.

I figured I'd give you one last kitten update, because in my imagination, y'all are on the edge of your seats, and lost sleep last night wondering about him. And I'm a fairy princess. And I don't have one lingering cankle from the fall off my deck. Hey, it's my imagination, so I can imagine whatever I want!

In order to get the kitten's pet insurance (all our cats are insured), I had to pick a name for him. I liked the name "Beethoven", as Summerset suggested, but when I ran it by The Hotness, he stared at me like I'd lost my mind - I think if I'd suggested Axl or Slash, I might have gotten a better response. Thus, The Kitten With No Name has been officially (and unimaginatively) designated as "Dinger" because he'll spend the rest of his furry life wearing a bell on his collar so we can find him. In reality, we'll probably end up calling him Kitty, or Cat, or GAHHH-getawayfromthere!!, because as Marjie said, he won't know or care, and as the joke says, he won't come when we call anyway.

Contrary to what most folks think, all our other cats are happy to come when called; heck, The Hotness even taught Bonzo to play dead. I'm not kidding - he points his finger and yells "Bang!" and she falls over and lays still, then he yells "Bang!" again and she rolls over and meows as though she's been shot again. I need to record that, one of these days. One of the days when my house is clean enough that I won't mind having pictures of it on the internet. About two days after hell freezes over, I guess.

Anyway, Dinger's doing pretty well - The Hotness was sick as a dog yesterday, so we spent the day crashed out on the couch watching movies, which suited Dinger just fine.

Today I'll need to run into town to pick up some kitten formula; he's very emaciated, as you can see from this picture - ignore the bum, and check out those hips and ribs! And that backbone! Cripes, you could slice cheese with that thing!

He's happy eating the hard food I've got for him, though strangely, he wasn't interested in the wet food at all, but with a high kitten metabolism, I don't think he'll be able to eat enough hard food to get to a healthy weight without formula.

Gaylen - yeah, The Hotness is allergic to cats, too, but that didn't stop him from already having three when we first met. He isn't allergic to dogs, but we don't have any of those yet. I stress the "yet" - as soon as he gets our fence up, I'm getting him the black lab he's been talking about for four years.

Karen - The Hotness is smitten by the kitten. When I called him to let him know that I'd emailed someone about a dirty, starved, deaf kitten, he got all excited, and called me every ten minutes for the next two hours to see if she'd emailed me back yet. Of course, he doesn't call it "excited," just "mildly interested, whatever". When she finally called and we made arrangements for me to pick Dinger up, The Hotness called every ten minutes until I actually had him, then quit work early and met me at home. But not because he cared about the new kitten, just 'cause he was tired, you know? Wink wink.

The rest of the cat-family (pride is as good a word as any IMO) is staying neutral. Except Smooshy, who's kind of angry/scared. Boobah and Bonzo both visited us on the bed last night (where Dinger was laying), although only briefly, but Smooshy is kind of unhappy. I've been picking her up and petting her and giving her lots of attention, but she's got no interest in Dinger at all. Meh, give it a week and they'll all be fighting over the catnip mice.

Before I sign off, here are a couple of gratuitous Dinger shots.

If this were a lolcat picture, it'd be tagged "I can haz up?" We have a really high bed, so it's quite the climb. I put up our cat-stairs, but he seems to enjoy staring at me until I lift him up, or else just using his claws to scale the side of the bed.

Does he not look like Brain from Pinky and the Brain?

Bony and bigheaded. And I don't know if his legs look long because he's so emaciated, or if he's just going to be a tall cat, but when he stands still, he looks like an imperial walker.

Seriously? I mean, really?

2008-08-24T09:58:00.002-06:00

Because Boobah (he of the great head wound) doesn't have enough trouble?

I spent a very restless night with the Kitten With No Name; he yakked twice more and laid around lethargically until about 2:00AM, when he got up, took a tremendous, stinky dump in the litterbox I brought to the bedroom for him (yeah, I'm oversharing), then proceeded to eat, drink, and play like a perfectly healthy kitten, even though is ribs and hips are sticking out all over.

We've had two cool days after a couple weeks of heat, so I left all the windows open in the house last night. We live in an area where winds can gust quite quickly, going from 0 to 20 MPH in the blink of an eye. This morning, about half an hour ago, the gusts started.

Boobah was laying outside my office door, quite sound asleep when the wind kicked up, sailing through the house and slamming doors everywhere.

One of them slammed on the tip of his tail.

The very tippy-tip, the very end. And it hacked off about 1/16th of an inch of flesh and hair, as though with a meat cleaver.

Why. Why, why, why?

He's lost more flesh in a friendly catfight, but honestly, this cat just doesn't need any more injuries!

Poor, poor Boobah!

What do you name a deaf kitten?

2008-08-23T18:40:00.009-06:00

Who cares, it won't come when you call it!

Old joke, and suddenly, not as funny. Well, okay, still as funny, but only because I have the sense of humor of a six year old.

The magic number of cats in our household is four. Two for The Hotness and two for me. I lie - all four are for The Hotness, because he is to cats as St. Patrick is to snakes.

In March, we lost our eldest cat to old age, and I swore up and down, no more cats, not for another two years. After about a month had passed, The Hotness started looking in the classifieds and on the SPCA website for kittens, but I was adamant - no more cats. At least, not until Smooshy was two - I don't want a bunch of cats the same age, because it seems like they all hit the wall at the same time, and that's hard on a cat family, much less the human family.

Three cats are enough cats.

In an attempt to subvert my will, The Hotness would print out pictures of kittens and tape them to the bathroom mirror, or leave them on the seat of my chair, or tape them to the TV remote, but I kept saying no - no more - no kittens.

Then yesterday, I was looking for sewing stuff on Kijiji - I have pretty good luck finding old sewing machines there - when I accidentally (I swear, it was an accident!) clicked on Cats and Kittens. The picture at the top of the screen showed the grimiest, skinniest, saddest-looking kitten I've ever seen. I'm not partial to white cats, but I AM a sucker for a sob story.

The lady who posted the picture had found the kitten in the ditch on one of the hottest days we've had this year. She was driving down a gravel road and stopped for a stop sign when she saw something white and small, just kind of laying there, swishing it's tail. She said "I told myself not to look, because I just KNEW it was going to be a cat, and that I wouldn't be able to drive off and leave the thing."

This woman is a dog trainer, and at the time, she had a van full of her own very large dogs, but she pulled over, shoved the dogs into the back, and walked over to this kitten, who didn't even have the strength to run away.

Unfortunately, after a night of trying to make it comfortable and help it eat a bit, she started to get suspicious that the kitten, in addition to its ear mite infestation and its malnutrition, might also be deaf. Turns out, she was right. The little guy is deaf as a fencepost.

She couldn't keep it, not with a house full of great danes and rotties (she's a dog trainer, remember) and our local SPCA is not currently accepting cats - they have NO empty cages at all, and have run out of cat litter six times in the last few months - if it wasn't for folks bringing in the odd bag of cat-litter for donations, they'd be in a world of hurt.

When I say "not currently accepting cats," what I mean is, they'll still accept cats, but it's not a no-kill facility, and once they reach, and, God love 'em for trying, exceed their capacity, there's little else to do but make room. Enough said.

What was I supposed to do? I already have one cat with missing head-flesh (apparently, the problem is the result of food intolerance, and isn't stress related, thank goodness) and two others, one just barely a year old. But I couldn't stop myself. I sent the woman an email, and made arrangements to take the little gaffer off her hands.

Long story short, meet The Kitten With No Name.

I've given him a bath and a really good ear-cleaning (along with an ear mite treatment - ugh!). He's barfed twice already, and has the shakes like he's coming off a three-day bender, and has basically lain in one position since I got him. He played briefly with a toy shrimp I brought him, but lost interest and fell asleep.

I think he'll be all right, once his tummy calms down. He drank a little water, and was a bit interested in the litterbox. But what's killing me is that he can't hear the sound of my voice, so he can't tell that I'm trying to be nice to him. I know he's just a cat, but it's really breaking my heart that he can't hear me, and that I'm scaring him by just showing up next to him.

The only time he's stopped shaking is when I sat on the couch and held him so that his head was resting against the side of my neck, then sang "You Are My Sunshine" about nine thousand times, so he could feel the vibration.

Poor little sucker.

I'm going to go play the xylophone on his little ribs for awhile, and curse myself for getting involved.

How many more times can I use "Eeeee!" as a post title?

2008-08-22T17:04:00.009-06:00

Look what I got!!!

Eeeee! Squeee, even!

Summerset, who won my ruffler foot giveaway, sent me this postcard, along with a pretty little thank-you note.

It's lovely, and sparkly, and colorful, and is ten minutes from being framed and hung in my sewing room!

Summerset, thank you, thank you, thank you! If I had any actual skills at all, I'd make you a lovely, handmade gift in return, but I'm not sure that you'd have a whole lot of use for a glitter macaroni bracelet.

But really, thank you! It was a lovely surprise to run into on an already very nice Friday!

How much is too much?

2008-08-21T06:34:00.010-06:00

I'm not much into astrology (which means that I read my horoscope daily, but for amusement purposes only) but as far as it goes, I'm a fairly typical Leo (which actually got me fired from a job, once - funny story, but we'll get to that later). I'm kinda loud, kinda passionate/emotional, that sort of thing.

The thing is, my personality and my clothing have never really matched - I'm REALLY plain jane in what I wear, so though I'm attracted to things that sparkle, I don't actually wear much of it. That said, I guess for my reception, denim skorts and a t-shirt probably wouldn't be completely appropriate. Still, I really wonder if this might be too much sparkle for a reception dress;

I found this at Anna's Bridal Lace & Fabrics on Ebay, and was immediately smitten. With it, I could avoid sequins altogether. That would be nice, since the thought of sewing even one more sequin on lace makes me want to weep. And angers the finger puppets. Well, not the Vulcan one, because he's pretty even-tempered, but the other one is quite wrathful.

Which reminds me, I never posted the pictures of the beadwork I completed before deciding to change the color of my dress from green to gold.

I'm in the process of removing the beads and sequins, but here's part of one flower and the scalloped border. Please remember that I'm new to beading, and if I recall correctly, this is one of the first flowers I did.

Originally, it had silver seed beads and swarovski crystals in the middle of the flowers, but they've since been removed, so you can only see them on the scalloped edge.

In any case, I do have a huge glut of a light gold crepe-back satin (about 20m - it's shiny, I'm a crow, ergo, when it went on sale for $1.99, I bought what was left on the bolt), so all I really have left to purchase is the lace. I need about 3.5m (about 4 yards) and then I'll be ready to get to work.

The lace isn't my only problem, though.

Stupid, stupid, stupid cat. This is Boobah.

Uh, yeah. He's dressed for Hallowe'en. He's SpiderCat. Don't laugh. Okay, laugh.

Anyway, every time I deep-clean the house, Boobah rips off part of his face. No exaggeration - he peels off flesh. If gross pictures make you queasy, feel free to stop reading here - picture to follow.

In the spring, he removed the hair and a few layers of flesh from around his mouth, and last week, while I was preparing to have the in-laws over for the weekend, he did this;

That collar is Boobah's personal version of hell - he backed up for a full day before finally realizing that no amount of backwards motion was going to free him.

I hate that I did this to him - obviously when I clean the house, it stresses him out. I know it's not the cleansers - I use the same things all the time, and unless I vaccum behind the furniture, pull out the stove and fridge, and catch up all of the laundry, he doesn't appear to be bothered in any way.

WTF? Seriously!?

I realize that cats' brains are about the size of walnuts, and that euclidean geometry is largely lost on them, but for a cat, Boobah is pretty smart. If he had opposable thumbs, I think he could easily handle some of the grocery shopping. Well, he can't read or drive, but...anyway, why isn't he smart enough NOT to flay himself when I clean the house?

Stupid, stupid cat.

He's sitting here staring at me, and I'm pretty sure he's thinking "Why don't you stop typing and go use your opposable thumbs to open a can of tuna, jerk?" I guess it's the least I can do.

Empty House

2008-08-20T06:35:00.004-06:00

Ah, family.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent the weekend hosting one set of in-laws - my fiance's older brother, his wife, and two children, ages 5 and 2. I'll call them the Jetsons (second favorite cartoon family, after the Simpsons, but before the Flintstones).

In the six years we've been together, it's the first time the George and Jane have made the nearly nine hour drive to visit us, a heroic feat with two young children. The Hotness and I were very grateful; our work schedules are a train wreck right now, so we wouldn't have been able to spare the time to drive out to see them until November.

I spent a good portion of the weekend nomming chubby cheeks and elbows, and making myself scarce when the little one's diaper started to stink.

As an aside, I love toddlers, but I cannot abide babies. I fear babies. I am baby-phobic. When I attend baby showers, I bring gifts, but prefer to see the baby from across the room, and I won't hold it for ANY reason.

Babies smell nice, and they're cute, but no matter how rugged they really are, to my eyes, they're these fragile little glass creatures, and if I touch them, I might break them. Everyone assures me that when I have my own, I'll feel differently. In turn, I assure them that when I'm certain that I can train a baby to use the litterbox, I'll start having babies.

That's always good for a blank stare.

I'm kidding about the litterbox (mostly) - in reality, I'm really looking forward to having at least one child - The Hotness is a stellar uncle, and he'll make a really wonderful dad. Plus, then I'll be a mommy blogger, which I think will be a lot of fun! Or will at least lead to more interesting posts than this one.

Anyway, to thank them for making the trip, The Hotness and I planned a number of fun activities, not the least of which was catching the live-action Sesame Street show. The kids enjoyed it a great deal, and the rest of us enjoyed seeing the kids happy. And the mini-donuts. And the thickly veiled adult humor.

We considered taking the kids to the Zoo, but the temperature reached a near-record high, so we decided not to bother. The Zoo here isn't really a big, magical place like some zoos. They're more of a wildlife preserve with large fenced-in areas, so there are a lot of ungulates (deer, caribou, bison, antelope, moose, etc) but not much else. They do, however, have a really excellent gopher exhibit. I kid you not. A gopher exhibit, in the prairies.

Ah well. Now that my house is empty, it's back to sewing. I've cut out the muslin for the big dress, and will be starting assembly soon, but I'm having a heck of a time finding gold lace for the reception dress. I was hoping to find something that already had a bit of sparkle, because I'd really rather not do all that sequin application if I can avoid it. And I'm not too keen on spending $130.00 for pre-beaded lace - I want to do some of the work myself. I just want something with a bit of metallic thread. Any ideas?

Thanks & have a great weekend!

2008-08-15T18:26:00.002-06:00

Hey y'all! Just wanted to say that I've really appreciated your comments on my recent posts. Sometimes it's a little daunting to tell stories about the stupid things I've done - it would be so nice to be cool and together, (and to have less of a clear recollection of what my fingers looked like tangled in a hand mixer) but whatever!

Gaylen, thanks for the B-day wishes! I can't for the life of me figure out how you knew it was my birthday, but it's probably not half as mysterious as it seems, and it was very appreciated!

The Hotness and I are having the in-laws over for the weekend - my inlaws, not his - his older brother and sister-in-law, and their freakin' adorable children, so I'll get no sewing done, and no posting either.

One thing I did decide, though - I've suspended hand-beading the green fabric - I'm going with the gold wedding dress, which means that I need to go shopping for lace and sequins and beads and whatnot. (Tee hee!)

Not sure what I'm going to do with 9 metres of bridal lace and stretch satin - maybe I'll be making bridesmaid dresses after all!

TTYL!

Rachelle

Karma

2008-08-12T18:57:00.006-06:00

Since I'm still beading that stupid lace for my stupid wedding dress, I thought I'd post another (quick) story about what it's like to be me.

I've spent a goodly amount of time in emergency rooms throughout the course of my life. Without giving it much thought at all, I can remember getting stitches six times, hard casts twice (including the faux cast they put on my fingers after the hand mixer incident, soft casts four times (including the fall I took off my deck), and three other incidents where I didn't get anything but good drugs. And that's without racking my brain - I'm sure there are more that just don't come immediately to mind.

This particular time I'm thinking about happened about a week after I learned about Karma in school.

I came home from school a bit late, and as I was walking down my driveway, I could hear my mom yelling. My mother isn't a screamer - she's pretty even tempered, so I ran into the house to find out what's going on. Turns out, she was shouting at the dog.

The door we used to get into the house led directly into the kitchen, where the yelling was happening. I walked in and watched my Mom loudly ask the dog several questions as though she expected answers. She was waving her hands and her face was all red.

Duke was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing - he sat down and started licking at his nether region, clearly not caring what she had to say. This INFURIATED my mom, who apparently didn't realize that Duke was A DOG, and therefore ill equipped to have a rational discussion with her.

Of course, I was standing in the doorway laughing my ass off, because I was a teenager (and therefore a jerk), and because catching my mom acting crazy wasn't an everyday occurrence.

She yells at me that I'd better stop laughing, then goes to shoo Duke out of the open kitchen door.

Duke's looking at her like "Seriously? You want me to go outside? Can't you see I'm licking my junk, here?" and is clearly reluctant to go anywhere, and since my Mom isn't a hitter, she won't reduce herself to smacking that smug look off his furry face, so she gestures wildly and starts to swear at him.

My mom is TEENY. She's barely five feet tall, and weighs maybe 98 pounds soaking wet - the dog is probably big enough to take her down without a problem, and frankly, I've never seen her this excited, so I'm laughing so hard I can barely stand up. I'm holding myself up by the door jamb when she turns on me and shouts at me some more, which really just eggs me on.

Finally, she's had it. She bends over and plants her hand on Duke's back (he's sitting in the doorway, having gone back to his...erm...personal hygiene routine) and gives him a shove out the open door, then SLAMS the door shut with all her might.

The door pops back open.

She stands there looking stunned for a moment, and I laugh even harder - seriously, you shoulda seen the look on her face. She reaches out and slams the door again, this time hauling it back as far as it will go before whaling it shut. BAM!

It pops back open.

I am SHRIEKING with laughter at this point - seriously, I've never SEEN my mom so mad, and right now, she's five feet of exposed nerve.

She grabs the door with both hands and flings it shut again, following with a kick, and guess what...the door pops back open.

Still shrieking with laughter and gripping the door jamb to keep myself upright, I suddenly realize that something's wrong. Terribly wrong. With my hand.

Mom's given up the slamming, realizing that if it won't close after that two-handed slam/karate kick, doing it again probably won't do it - now she's trying to figure out why it won't close.

Suddenly, we both go very still and silent, and I slowly turn my head toward the door.

Toward my fingers in the door jamb.

In the way of the slamming door. Keeping the door from slamming.

Instant Karma. Universe is back in balance.

I am yelling for my mom to stop laughing, and my mom is, no exaggeration, rolling on the kitchen floor, laughing her guts out.

Waffling

2008-08-11T06:38:00.004-06:00

I've gotten a great deal of beading and be-spangling done on the lace for the bodice of my wedding dress, and have come to a few preliminary conclusions.

One, I am a crow - shiny things make me very, very happy. This has led to a certain amount of possible overkill. I'm not totally sure, but I think I've just plain gone too far. I think I've gone from wedding sparkly to circus sparkly. I'll post a picture later, to illustrate my point.

And two, I've begun waffling on the color for my dress, so this all may be a terrible waste of time.

I saw some of this same kind of lace in a warm, non-sparkly gold, and I just happen to have a whole BUNCH of heavyweight, light gold, crepe-back satin in my stash. Gold is still a little nontraditional for a wedding dress, but it's much more traditional than, say, green. Plus, it's on sale, and I only need four metres of it. Well, three, really, but it's nice to have a bit extra.

Plus, I find myself further waffling over the dress itself.

My original plan was, in fact, to have two wedding dresses - one for the aisle, and one for the reception. The one I've been posting about was to be the reception dress.

Then, I decided that all I really want is one dress, and again, that's the one I've been making muslins for. But the thing is, all these stupid bridal magazines make me feel unsure of myself - like maybe I'm missing out if I don't have a giant poof of a dress.

Then, like a dork, I went and tried on a few poofy dresses, and man, did I LOVE swishing around in all that taffeta and crinoline. Since we're having an August wedding in a venue with no A/C, I wouldn't want to spend a bunch of time in such a large dress, but I do rather enjoy the idea of making a spectacle of myself that way.

Anyway, when the original plan was in effect, I bought a whole schwack of taffeta in a number of different colors, plus white, and a crinoline (well, hoop-skirt, actually), so I've got everything I need to MAKE two dresses. I also picked up a few patterns to choose from:

and even

although that last one, M5321, got pretty badly panned on PR. Plus, as you've probably noticed, I'm kind of a fan of a more vintage look, so that last one's probably out, though it's my mom's favorite.

Meh. It's unlike me to waffle around and be indecisive, particularly about clothing. I suppose there's a case to be made for the idea that it's normal to obsess a bit about a dress that will be forever immortalized in pictures, but really, if I'm going to worry about something, I should be worried about the size of my rear end. Strangely, all I seem to care about is the dress.

I guess the best way to answer this question is to make a muslin of the poofy dress - if I do it and hate it, then I won't have to duplicate it. If I do it and I love it, then I guess I'm going back to plan A - two dresses.

Why I seldom use hand mixers

2008-08-09T08:57:00.010-06:00

When I was eight, my mother banned me from the kitchen.

There were a few episodes of burned pots (hot chocolate that only made it to the stage where you put the milk in the pot and the pot on the stove, then get caught up in the latest episode of GI Joe, and then suddenly, the kitchen is full of smoke), and one episode of a recipe for green bread from some kid's TV cooking show (which also ended in a kitchen full of smoke).

Unfortunately, such a ban is only enforceable if you're actually there to enforce it, so I still did kitchen-related activities on the sly.

One day, I decided to make hot chocolate with marshmallows. Remembering the last burned pot, I stood over the stove, listening to GI Joe instead of watching it, and made a perfect pot of heated milk.

Since we'd had mashed potatoes the night before, the electric hand mixer was sitting on the counter, with the drying beaters on the tea towel by the sink. I got a bright idea - instead of stirring the hot chocolate mix into the hot milk with a spoon (how old-fashioned!) I'd use the mixer to make it really fluffy!

Remember I was eight, so the idea made perfect sense to me.

So I plug the mixer into the wall, put the beaters in the pot, and very carefully use the mixer to make frothy hot chocolate. Yay me, right?

I finish watching GI Joe, then Transformers, and half of the Smurfs before I remember that I'd better have everything cleaned up before Mom comes home. So I go to the kitchen, wash the pot, wipe down the stove, and try to eject the beaters from the mixer.

I'm an eight-year-old city kid - I have hand strength approximately equaling that of wet bread. So I push on the button, and push, and push, but nothing happens. I try with both thumbs, and still nothing happens.

Oh crap. Now Mom's going to come home, and the beaters are going to be covered with hot chocolate, and she's going to know I used the stove, and I'm going to get in some real trouble!

Again, I'm eight. I have the perfect solution!

I fill up the sink with soapy water, and with the mixer plugged in, I climb up on the stool I use when mom and I are doing dishes, and I drop the beaters into the sink and turn them on.

All is well so far - it's making a sink full of foamy bubbles, and when I pull the mixer out of the water, I see that they're sparkling clean! I'm awesome! I'm She-Ra! I can figure anything out!

I hop down from the stool and face my second dilemma - I need to dry the beaters. I grab a tea towel and start dabbing at the beaters - remember, that thing is still plugged in. Suddenly, I DO remember that the thing is still plugged in, and I get the bright idea that the best way to dry them is to put the tea towel into the beaters and turn it on, then pull the towel out the other side.

I'm not entirely stupid - I realize that there's a risk to this endeavor, but I figure that I am cool enough to take the risk.

With the mixer still plugged in, I gently tuck a corner of the tea towel into the beaters, and hit the power button, pulling my hand away from the towel quickly.

The beaters whir to life, but the towel falls to the ground - I let go too early.

I pick up the towel and tuck the corner in again, and hit the power button, once again pulling my hand away from the towel. Once again, the towel falls to the ground.

Now I'm kinda mad. Why isn't my brilliant plan working? How will I ever earn a spot on the Joe Team if I can't figure out how to dry these beaters?

I'm determined that it's going to work this time. I tuck the tea towel in, hit the power and THEN try to let go.

Problem.

Those beaters? They move FAST.

That tea towel? It's laying on the ground.

My fingers? All four are woven through both beaters, with part of my palm wedged in between the two and my thumb sticking out.

Somehow I have the presence of mind to take three big steps backwards, pulling the plug out of the wall, but that doesn't solve the problem.

EJECT! EJECT! EJECT!!

OMG OMG OMG, I need to get this thing off of me! But wait - remember my weak fingers - if I couldn't eject the beaters with both hands, then trying it with my left hand by itself certainly isn't going to work.

As I dance around the kitchen, I start shrieking in panic, (because even though the pain hasn't really set in yet, I'm very aware of the fact that it soon will).

I dance around for a few more seconds, then realize fully that no matter what I do, I will not get this mixer off by myself. Waiting for my mom to come home is not an option - she might leave me in the mixer to punish me for using the stove (hey, that's what I THOUGHT, not what my mom would actually have DONE).

I suddenly remember the next door neighbor, Christine. She has a son about my age, and we walked home from school together. She waved at me from the doorway when her boy got home, so I know she's there. Without stopping for shoes, I bolt for the door, the mixer's power cord dragging along behind me like a tail.

Now, for just a second, imagine you're Christine. You're making dinner and suddenly the doorbell rings. You wipe your hands and start down the stairs to answer it, and when you get halfway down the stairs, you hear this strange, inhuman whimpering. When you throw open the door, you're confronted by the sight of the strange kid from next door IN HER UNDERPANTS with an electric mixer attached to her hand. Oh, did I forget to mention the underpants? Yeah, the last time I got busted for using the stove, it was because I got hot chocolate mix on my pants and my Mom saw it. So in order to enhance my stealth, I'd taken off my pants before I started cooking.

I can only remember my childhood in snatches and bits, and some of my memories are foggy. That said, the memory of Christine's face as she opened her door and took in my half-naked, finger-tangled glory will stay with me forever.

She stared at me for about ten long seconds, then slammed the door in my face, laughed hysterically for about five more seconds, then opened the door again, face completely composed. She grabbed the mixer and tried to eject the beaters, but no surprise, since the things aren't easy to get out in the first place, the process is no easier when there's a bunch of flesh wedged between the beaters. So she grabbed her kid, bundled both of us in the station wagon, and took me to the ER.

It's anticlimactic, but in the end, nothing was broken except my spirit, since EVERYONE laughed at me - the nurse at admitting, the ER nurses, the doctors, my parents. I wonder if it would have been as funny if I'd been wearing pants.

Eeee! It's baaaaack!

2008-08-07T19:07:00.000-06:00

It's been a little while since I posted - my apologies. I've been in hand-beading hell, and trust me, that's not a good place for a clumsy accountant.

I've caught myself counting the f-ing sequins as I attach them, and from my calculations, each sequin itself costs .001 cents (yes, that's one hundredth of a cent), and the time to attach each sequin, at my regular hourly rate, costs about 52 cents, both because I am slow AND because I am expensive.

I've figured out that by the time I'm done beading the fabric for the bodice, I will have invested $2.00 in sequins, $8.00 in Swarovski crystals (thank you, Ebay!) and other beads, and $6000.00 of my time. I will have also lost two pints of blood, and most of my sanity. Needle, meet fingertip. Needle, meet fingertip. Needle, meet fingertip. Why don't you two get a room, already!

Is it still called finger puppets if there are no actual puppets on the ends of your fingers? Is it wrong that I have different voices for the index fingers of each hand? Is it wrong that one of those fingers swears in Japanese, which I'm pretty sure I personally never learned? The other one appears to be Mr. Spock, so it doesn't swear much at all, but have you ever seen a finger try to raise a disbelieving eyebrow?

Oh, sweet sanity, how I miss thee!

I've made a few other garage sale scores, which I'll post in detail about later (I know, will you be able to sleep tonight, knowing that I've bought more vintage patterns but haven't told you which ones?) but for now, I'll just say this; remember the giveaway a couple of months back? Where I gave away a ruffler foot because I had four of them, and four is too many?

Well apparently, God or the universe, or fate, intends me to own four ruffler feet, because I bought another box of antique Singer attachments sight unseen - the lady told me I could have the box for $2.00, but only if I didn't open it first - and lo and behold, there was another ruffler foot, in perfect condition.

There's also a gathering foot, a roller foot, a bias binder foot, a zipper foot, a rolled hem foot, and an adjustable hemmer foot, which made me emit a high-pitched manic giggle when I recognized it after opening the box. I sort of wish I'd at least made it to my car before opening the box, because I'm pretty sure that a few people actually left the garage sale because I started doing the squealing happy dance in this woman's driveway.

Anyway, I'll post pictures of my beading progress when the effects of the blood loss die down. Until then, the left hand finger puppet hopes that you will live long and prosper. The right hand finger puppet says "kusu o taberu na!" but I'm pretty sure it's talking to me.

Test Dress #2

2008-07-28T11:51:00.002-06:00

As I suspected, it took me longer to baste the lace to the fabric than it took me to put the dress together. I basted over the weekend, and finished assembly this morning. Here it is, in all it's glory. Okay, glory is a really big exaggeration. But here it is, at any rate;

The cream lace over the blue fabric is NOT the look I'm going for - my actual dress fabric (unless I change my mind) is this silvery green, tone-on-tone bridal satin and lace;

The lace and fabric I used on this test dress were truly the crappiest fabrics I've worked with so far - both are from the $1.47 bin at Wal-Mart, and I'm pretty sure green fabric is some kind of super-cheap lining stuff that frays if you give it a hard glance.

Just as a reminder, here's the redrafted bodice, in the original pink version. The last time I showed this, it was held together with binder clips, and not actually attached to the skirt of the dress in any way. I've now basted everything together, just to double-check the fit, and doing so has taken care of some of the gaping that was happening - apparently, binder clips are simply not up to the task of carrying "the girls" around.

It's a huge improvement from the monoboob, but it's really... Well, it sort of magnifies everything with it's shininess. Plus - does that look right to you? For some reason, that crossover in the front looks strange to me, like there's too much fabric. But then when I look at similar pictures on the internet, I see the same effect. Maybe I'm just being hypercritical. Anyway, here's a close-up of the new dress, with the lace overlay.

I'm still torn between leaving the bodice in just the satin - the silver green satin isn't nearly as shiny, so it won't look so dramatic, but I really love scalloped edges of the lace on this version.

One thing that troubles me, though, is that if I use the scalloped edges on the bodice, it does funny things to the orientation of the flowers; is this something only people who sew will notice, or is it just glaringly obvious to all and sundry? Oh yes, and that reminds me - I am aware of the fact that I have had a small accident with the way I've positioned the flowers over my bust. Don't worry, it's just the test dress. In the real dress, this won't happen. Probably.

The wider skirt is a HUGE plus - the original pink dress had a more close-fitting skirt, with no flow to it, which was pretty unflattering. I was going to use the original pattern, but really, it was just cut on the fold, and was basically a rectangle, so the top seam that runs under the bust was just a straight seam. You can really see that from the pattern on the picture;

I ended up not using the pattern at all for the skirt - I cut the back skirt as a very rough rectangle, with a narrower top than bottom, and I originally cut the front skirt as a rectangle, then folded it in half and took a big, curved scoop out of the top so that I'd get that sort of bias-cut, flowy look. That also eliminated the need for the darts at the front, although the back still needs them.

In reality, I only used one piece of the original pattern to make this dress - the single piece of the back bodice - the rest is so drastically different that if I compare the pattern pieces to the pieces of the dress, they're nowhere near a match. And since neither of the sewn versions actually require me to use a zipper to put the dress on and take it off, I'll likely just cut the back bodice of the third version out on the fold, instead of cutting two separate pieces and joining them with a zipper.

I still have to cut about 1/4" off the armhole at the back of the arm - the fabric kind of binds up there, and I'll likely draft a couple of tiny darts at the neck, because there's a little bit of extra fabric across the top of the piece, but all in all, I think I'm on the right track.

One Down

2008-07-26T08:40:00.004-06:00

I finished hand-tacking the Pink Abomination together last night and tried it on.

It fits, it's fine, it's over.

Since it was the first test dress for the wedding dress I plan to make, originally, I had thought to finish the whole dress, including embellishment and whatnot. What a dumb idea - why spend hours on beading I'll never wear? What was I thinking?

Anyway, further work on that dress is unnecessary - it's pink and I'll never wear it in public. Gee, do I sound like I'm still trying to convince myself? Anyway, I started the second test dress last night, in slightly less intimidating fabric. Since it's still a lace overlaying something moderately slippery, though, it means that, once again, I find myself hand basting the lace to the fabric on all of the pattern pieces. Is this what interlining is? Where you take two pieces of fabric and use them as though they were one?

Well, in any case, the new dress has the new bodice front, as well as a much wider skirt. It's such a simple dress to put together; just six pieces; the front skirt and back skirt, the right and left back bodices, and the right and left front redrafted pieces.

I'm not kidding when I say it's going to take me longer to tack the lace and the fabric together than it's going to take for me to assemble the dress to a wearable state - the actual assembly is about five minutes to install the invisible zip, and fifteen to pin and machine tack the rest together.

With luck, I'll have pictures later today!

Jackpot!

2008-07-24T11:35:00.007-06:00

In the city about a half hour north of the small town I live in, only losers wait until the weekend to start their sales. Literally 90% of the garage sales start on Thursday, with a few starting on Wednesday afternoon - by Saturday morning, you might as well stay home, because all that's left is old Barney videos, broken toys, and cheap glassware. Of course, by Saturday morning, it's pretty much all free, 'cause everyone's sick of sitting on their lawn with all their worldly goods around them, but crap is still crap, even if it's free. That's a lesson that took me nearly 30 years to learn. If I've actually learned it, that is.

Anyway, yesterday, on the way home from a meeting, I stopped at a garage sale that was just being set up, and I bought a bag of vintage patterns, sight unseen - the bag was stapled shut and just said "Old sewing patterns". I decided it was worth a chance, and the price we negotiated was certainly fair.

Boy, did I score BIG!

They're all really great vintage patterns, from the '40's to the '70's or so, I think. This in itself is great news, but the best part, the very BEST part, is that they're nearly all larger sized patterns. The smallest one is a size 16, with a 34 bust.

Eeeee!

And how about these?

That last one? B3615? Yeah, it's uncut & factory folded! EEEEE!!!!

There are about 10 other patterns here; Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm so excited about these, since I've barely had time to sew anything for the last couple of weeks. Still, I find myself very inspired, and am, this very second, going to go off and work on the last of the adjustments to the Pink Abomination. My goal is to finish it, and get started on the next version - Abomination 2.0, as it were, with a more flared skirt and the new front bodice.

Oh, and by the by, I've also started a new, non-sewing blog, at www.notverycool.com. That way, I can spare you endless stories about my cats and poor driving habits, and my lack of ability to control the sounds that come out of my mouth. Unless you actually want to read about those things, in which case, you can see that stuff over there. Lucky you!

P.S. And for those of you who are fans of Jenny at Chronically Uncool (as I am), please note that I checked with her before starting notverycool, because, well, they're kind of similar names. Thanks Jenny!

Gone Postal

2008-07-22T18:18:00.000-06:00

I had a near miss fender bender today - the guy in the turning lane next to me got a little ambitious, and tried to force himself into the space my car was already occupying. I straightened him out with a honk and a ~~one finger salute~~ glare. I personally do not give people the bird, so when such a thing happens, I blame it on CrazyRachelle.

See, there's Rachelle (that's me), and then there's CrazyRachelle.

I, Rachelle, am mild mannered, easygoing, and largely unconcerned with what's going on around me unless it directly affects me. When people are bitchy or rude, I normally barely notice, (which is probably bitchy and rude of me - oopsie.)

CrazyRachelle, on the other hand, is a traffic-fuelled rage-monkey. She only comes out when I get behind the wheel, but this chick is NUTS, yo!

Tailgaters beware; if she's in the slow lane and you're so close to her that all she can see in her rearview mirror is the hood of your car, she WILL take her foot off the gas and coast along however fast the car takes her, until you finally pull around her. And if you're in a really expensive car, talking on your cellphone while you're tailgating her with an empty fast lane beside you both, she might consider slamming on the brakes briefly, just to watch you drop your phone and scream.

That big empty lane beside you? The fast lane? They call it the fast lane for a reason, you jackass. Move over into it - there's no traffic over there, and if there is, THEY want to go as fast as you or faster.

And speaking of the fast lane - CrazyRachelle wants to make absolutely sure you are aware that they call it the fast lane for a reason. CrazyRachelle doesn't care that you're behind the wheel, watching a Disney movie on the drop-down widescreen, in-vehicle theatre in your giant, gas-sucking, minivan, and that you and the kids are singing "Bare Necessities". CrazyRachelle loves that song, too, and wishes she could hear it.

But there are two problems with what you're doing, and CrazyRachelle isn't even going to BOTHER talking about the fact that you're hurtling down the road in a two thousand pound vehicle which currently contains the fruit of your loins, and you're not watching the road.

She worries about your children, and hopes they make it through the trip, but frankly, what really pisses her off is that you're doing this IN THE FAST LANE. At 10KM below the speed limit.

She has two pieces of advice for you - one, GET OUT OF THE FAST LANE, DUMBASS, and two, before a long road-trip with the kiddies, take them to the library and let them pick out some books on CD. CrazyRachelle reccommends the unabridged versions of Charlotte's Web or Harry Potter (CrazyRachelle knows, you have the movies in your minivan, but trust her, there's stuff missing in there, including YOUR SAFETY!)

Anyway...

Nothing illustrates the difference between Rachelle and CrazyRachelle like the incident that happened to us last summer.

So there we were, turning left. CrazyRachelle waited our turn and got about halfway through the intersection when a Canada Post van came careening around the corner, across two lanes of traffic, and slid into her.

CrazyRachelle pulled over to the side of the road, and got out to survey the damage. She was so angry she was shaking, and when the mailman got out of his truck, she proceeded to ream him out, very rudely. She ~~screamed~~ said things like, "Where did you get your driver's license, Wal-Mart?" and "Maybe if you were tall enough to see over the dash AND reach the pedals, this wouldn't have happened!"

The mailman made a half-hearted attempt to blame the accident on CrazyRachelle, but the skidmarks on the road made it pretty obvious that it was his fault.

Fortunately, other than the fact that ~~we were~~ I was a little shaken up, there was really no damage to the vehicle, just a small flattened area and a smear of paint transfer from his white truck to my purple car, which rubbed off without a problem. By the time the mailman brought out his insurance information, CrazyRachelle went away, and I resurfaced. Unfortunately, for the unsuspecting mailman, that wasn't about to improve his situation.

The poor guy walked over to me, looking lumpish and mortified, clutching his insurance card. I gave him a toothy grin and said "You know, there's not much damage - I'm probably not going to claim anything, so if you want, we can just skip the whole insurance exchange thing." He brightened visibly, and said thank you, then started to turn to go back to his van, but I was suddenly wracked with guilt for all the mean things CrazyRachelle said.

So what do I do? Well, rather than just letting the guy go away with his dignity intact, I blurted out "Wanna hug it out?" then didn't bother to wait for a response - I grabbed the poor guy and awkwardly hugged it out, including some side-to-side rocking, and some enthusiastic back-patting.

Awk-ward!

Rachelle? Nice, but kind of creepy. CrazyRachelle? Not nice. And kind of judgmental.

Success! (Of a sort)

2008-07-21T06:18:00.004-06:00

So, I'm pretty freaking proud of myself! Not because it worked perfectly (as you'll see) but that it sort of worked.

As I said, I decided to try draping a new bodice, because I was having some problems doing an FBA on the pattern piece I was working with.

I ripped out the old bodice front (and may I just say, I've learned a VERY important lesson about stitch width on a test piece - it took me the better part of an hour, and I said curses in many languages, many made up just for the occasion) and pinned the dress on Clarice, then went about draping a new bodice.

It's far from perfect - but it did actually work. I couldn't figure out how to translate the pinned gathers into useful information, so I used a pencil to mark up the test fabric, then unpinned it, trimmed it, and cut out two pieces of pink fabric. This is what I ended up with;

Note that it's only sewn on the shoulders and sides, not the bottom, and it's held together with binder clips, which explains the weird ripple on the one side. Plus, I did a pretty bad job of tacking the shoulder seams together, but all in all, I'm pretty confident that I'm heading in the right direction, at least.

I'm going to cut out the lace, and see if I can't figure out a way to include the lace in this thing, because otherwise, the shiny fabric makes my boobs look scary, and the fabric for my real dress, while slightly less shiny, will still probably have the same effect. It's worth a try, at least.

Pink Abomination / Deep Fried Moths

2008-07-09T10:36:00.001-06:00

I think I had a breakthrough.

The Pink Abomination, (AKA giant transvestite skating costume) is kicking my ass, and I finally figured out why. They say the definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Hey, I never claimed to be sane. I've tried editing the pattern for the bust area in a number of ways, and none of them work properly, so maybe I need to stop trying.

The last time you saw the top of the dress, it looked like this;

I had converted the bust gathers to bust darts, then realized that this, in addition to the repetitive floral pattern over the bust, REALLY make things look bad. And there's no getting around this - there is NOTHING I can do with those flowers so that they aren't either directly over my lady-lumps, or else just sitting between them.

Here are all the things I've tried so far;

Tried
Following the pattern exactly
Result
Massive monoboob (where two become one because there isn't enough fabric), along with wicked underarm gaposis

Tried
Adding 2" of length along the bottom seam to give more chest room
Result
Baggy gathers that sit right under the breast line and make me look like gravity has been particularly cruel.

Tried
Doing an FBA on a pattern without darts (which I made up as I went along, because I couldn't find a tutorial on the 'net)
Result
Strange curved seam at the sides, moderately...lumpy appearance of excess fabric.

Tried
Redoing bodice #2 and changing gathers to darts
Result
Monoboob again, plus gaposis under the arm, which only went away when I made a really awful-looking seam from the underarm to the bust point. That's the picture that's shown above.

The Bottom Line
I like everything about this dress except for the front of the bodice. It's high-backed, which I like, and the length of the skirt is pretty good. I'd like the skirt to flare out a little more, which I think I have the skills to do just by cutting the skirt a bit wider. The only problem is the bust area.

I think I might try draping a bodice for myself - I have a dress dummy and all the right materials, so what I think I might do is remove the front of the bodice, pin the whole hot mess to Clarice (too much Silence of the Lambs), and then see if I can drape a simple halter. I'll probably try it with the lace, just to see if folds make the flowers less boobcentric, but I'm starting to think that leaving the lace on the skirt and doing the whole top of the bodice in just the satin would be perfectly fine.

Once again, I'm REALLY glad I went out and bought pink fabric for this test dress. If I'd have experienced failure on this level with the silvery green fabric I intend to actually use, I'd probably have given up and bought a dress by now. It's kind of an expensive muslin, since it's the same fabric as my actual dress fabric, just in a yucky color, but honestly, it's still cheaper than giving up.

Deep Fried Moths
In my last post, I mentioned that I'd just returned from the lake. Every year, we try to get out with the Hotness' family - his older brother and wife (I'll call them Fred and Wilma) and his younger brother and wife (I'll call them George and Judy). This year, Judy is very pregnant with the Hotness' new niece or nephew, so it was just the Hotness and I, Fred and Wilma and their two boys, and Wilma's parents.

I come from a hardcore camping family, as does the Hotness, so I'm used to a certain level of discomfort while camping. On past camping trips, we've mostly tented, and as much as I enjoy actually camping, I LOATHE setting up and taking down, particularly since taking down always seems to happen in the rain.

This trip, however, was our first trip with our new (to us) 29 foot travel trailer. We bought it late last year as insurance salvage - it was written off due to "hail damage" which in this case, equates to five, dime-sized dents across the top and a small crack in a fiberglass panel at the front of the trailer, invisible to the naked eye.

We paid less than $2000.00, and the thing has an awning, a working fridge, stove, and oven, a full bathroom including a little tub, a king sized bed and AIR CONDITIONING. Yes, AIR CONDITIONING, all caps, and maybe even some exclamation points!!! Gaylen and Marjie, you mentioned that you aren't really into roughing it, but I think you'd both enjoy doing it this way!

On Friday, it hit 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 Fahrenheit) before 12:30 in the afternoon, so we cooked brunch outside, then went inside and sat in the air-conditioned shade and had a leisurely meal. That night, it was still pretty warm, but over the course of two days, the Hotness had caught enough fish to feed six adults and two children (his limit plus reeling in mine - I'm an indifferent fisher; I love to sit in the boat and fish, but I could not care any less about actually catching a fish).

My future sister in law Wilma has magical fish fry powers - I'm not sure how she does it, but she's like the Macgyver of fish batter - she can take a few seemingly unrelated ingredients and turn them into deep fried heaven. Of course, if you deep fry bear turds, I'd probably eat them with gusto, which in part explains my large rear end, but I digress.

Each of us fired up the camp stoves and started cooking - she did the fish, I did the chips. Halfway through the process, the Hotness decided we couldn't live without a lantern on the cooking table. Wilma and I eyed one another doubtfully, but the Hotness couldn't be talked out of it. Until ten minutes later, when Wilma and I were living a scene from a horror movie in which moths descend on you and...uh...flap their wings at you. Okay, so it wasn't really all that scary. Until the moths started landing in the hot oil. They really crisp up nicely, but I doubt they taste very good.

It wasn't quite as horrific as Camilla's spider (thanks, by the way - I've been dreaming of giant spiders for two nights, now), but it WAS pretty gross.

Anyway, I'm off to try to figure out how to drape a bodice. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

The Return

2008-07-07T08:31:00.000-06:00

Ahhh, camping. Spiders, fish-guts, and deep-fried moths. This is the stuff dreams are made of!

Regular posting will resume later today or tomorrow morning!

Long stories short

2008-06-25T18:00:00.009-06:00

Well, I've been promising a sewing post, but again, I've been a bit sidetracked. Finally, everything is coming together in a more or less positive way, so I can finally explain why.

Recently, my Grampa had a pretty bad heart attack. And more recently, one of our cats got sick.

My Grampa is an awesome guy. He's not perfect, (he's the first one to tell you that), but he's an excellent Grampa - he taught me how to fish, and how to dry deer meat, and how NOT to dig holes in the driveway for a swimming pool.

Anyway, after his heart attack, he developed pneumonia, as older folk are apparently wont to do, and they put him on this antibiotic that made him hallucinate. Long story short, he didn't hallucinate scary things - he hallucinated that he was James Bond, and had to escape the hospital. Apparently he made it to the parking lot twice - TWICE, ducking through hallways and creeping past the nurses' station.

I hope when I am in my late 70's, I am still spry enough to make two very creditable attempts to escape a hospital!

Now that Grampa's on the mend, my attention turned to Boobah.

Boobah's got a ton of personality, so when his behavior started to change, we noticed it right away.

Monday afternoon, Boobah started acting funny, hiding, not jumping up on the furniture, that sort of thing. You'd think I'd be happy about this turn of events, but really, when you're used to ~~cuddling~~ scolding the cat for jumping on stuff, and suddenly there's no scolding, usually it's a sign that either a) your cat has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a changeling, or b)something's wrong.

So last night, I...well, okay, I give my cat tummy rubs every night. And yes, when I give him tummy rubs, I talk to him like he's a baby. I suppose it's a pretty common behavior for cat owners, but I still feel kinda lame admitting it.

So anyway, I was giving him tummy rubs, and he felt...wrong. And when I rubbed the middle of his belly, he made a sort of startled growl/meow, and looked at me as though I'd just knifed him in the gut. Cue panic attack. I imagined that he'd eaten one of the innumerable furry catnip mice that reside ~~all over the living room floor~~ in a neat pile by the cat tree, and that we'd have surgery and a funeral, and we'd be sadly short one Spidercat.

Long story short - he's constipated. Just your garden variety "I-horcked-out-on-too-much-dry-cat-food-and-was-too-lazy-to-go-to-the-water-dish". Thank goodness. Our mutual punishment (he for being lazy and I for having opposable thumbs, I guess) is that I get to feed him medicine every eight hours. He doesn't like it much, but whatever.

I bought pet insurance for the whole cat-family on Saturday, and when Boobah got sick on Monday morning, a couple of hours after the coverage went into effect, I honestly felt just a little bit like I'd cursed him. And seriously, how do you explain that to the insurance broker? "I know he's only been covered for 12 hours, but could you please write me a cheque for $1800.00?"

On the upside, I got to see an X-ray of my cat - intestines are cool! And also, in protest of the X-ray, he "expressed his anal glands" which is the technical term for squirting stinky tuchus goo all over the table. Which means he doesn't need to have his anal glands manually expressed now! Way to save us $100.00, my friend!

They think I'm evil

2008-06-24T08:18:00.005-06:00

I finally learned why strangers have been looking at me like I'm a madwoman lately.

I only used to listen to my MP3 player while I was at home, doing housework or sewing, or gardening, or stalking the gophers that have taken up residence on the back lawn. Recently, I've started bringing my MP3 player into town, so I can listen when I'm shopping, or working, or whatever.

I generally listen to audiobooks instead of music, especially in public. I used to listen to music, but I stopped because, unless I am actively concentrating on being still and quiet, I am completely unable to control my singing and dancing.

If there's music, and I either know the words, or can make them up fast enough, I am singing without realizing it. I'm genuinely unaware of the sounds that are coming out of my mouth. It wouldn't be so bad if I could control my volume, but no, if I'm singing, I'm singing in AT LEAST the same volume as my normal speech, and usually louder. And if it's a tune I can dance to, I am also dancing. Well, not just dancing. Dancing and walking, dancing and shopping, dancing and trying to stand still. It's...well, it's a travesty, since I lack both a decent singing voice AND coordination.

Anyway, when I go out in public now, or do anything that requires me to sit still, I listen to audiobooks instead of music. Or at least, I used to.

Yesterday, I was at the gas station, waiting in line to pay for my gas. It was a pretty long lineup, so I plugged my earbuds in and turned on my book, and as the line slowly moved forward, there was a part about a woman tugging her braid. I reached up and gave my own braid a good tug. Then, it described a character doing an evil, sneering laugh.

Unconsciously, I did an evil, sneering laugh. Out loud.

I realized immediately what I'd done. For a second, it was like time froze. The two women in front of me turned their heads very slowly, to look over their shoulders with matching, horrified expressions, and the guy behind the counter stared as though I'd just whipped a Glock from my waistband. I slipped ahead, dropped two twenties on the counter, and ran out of the store, feeling like my face was about to melt off my head.

I guess I have to find a new favorite gas station.

Ruffler Foot Winner!

2008-06-23T07:56:00.003-06:00

Once again, I numbered the entries in the order in which they were received;

MizKatie - 1
Mary - 2
Shannon - 3
Summerset - 4
Angela - 5
Kelly - 6
Contessa Kris - 7

Once again, thanks to everyone for entering - the more excess stuff I can clear out of my stash, the better!

Because I had more than 6 entrants, I used the random integer generator from random.org, asking it to choose a number between 1 and 7. Here was the pick;

Summerset, you're the lucky winner! I'll be popping over to your blog shortly to pass on the good news!

Sewing blogging to re-start tomorrow!

Last Giveaway (well, this week, anyway)

2008-06-20T07:35:00.004-06:00

Like last time, I had enough winners that I only needed to roll one die at random.org.

I listed them, again, in the order they entered -

Camilla - 1
Contessa Kris - 2
Miz Katie - 3
Kristin - 4
Queen of the click - 5
Carla - 6

My deepest thanks to all who entered, and those who just commented for the heck of it - I haven't been posting much, or much that's interesting lately, so thanks for hanging in there - I'll be sewing this weekend, and posting about some of my projects, as well, including another update on the Pink Abomination.

In any case, todays winner is;

Kristin! I'll be shooting over to your blog shortly, to let you know!

And finally, as one more time-killing tactic before I am ready to start posting regularly again, and also so I can promote my Etsy store, I offer this item as my final prize. This week, anyway;

This is a brand new ruffler foot for a short-shank sewing machine. It's ~~loud, clanky, and scary~~ surprisingly easy to use. Honestly, scary noise aside, this thing is incredibly fun to play with - the first time I put it on my 50's Viking machine, I made ruffles out of ALL of my scrap fabric. I probably spent two hours gleefully making ruffles knowing that they're not likely to ever be attached to anything.

We're starting fresh, now - nobody is pre-entered. If you want this ruffler foot, leave a comment, stating your desire to make ruffles out of everything you own!

Another Giveaway

2008-06-16T10:26:00.006-06:00

We have a winner in my first ever giveaway! Yay!

Because there were only three entrants who commented before the end of the day on Saturday (I say only, but I'm pretty glad I HAD three comments), I went to random.org and rolled the dice. I assigned each commenter a number from one to three - the first who commented was #1, the last, #3, and then rolled the dice. Here's a screenshot;

Gaylen, you're the lucky winner of the two-pack of patterns! Yay! I'll be popping over to your blog shortly to email you the news!

And now, without further adieu, on to the second giveaway!

It's a very nice feeling, sending patterns out into the universe, maybe to give them another chance to be lovely. I'm also a giant, grasping pattern Scrooge, and will make aggravated duck noises when I go to drop them in the mail. These two patterns, in particular, are hard to let go of - they're in a size close to what I might actually be able to wear in a few months. And they're cute. And they have all their pieces.

Though I adore the look of both patterns, I know I'll never make either of them. The first is SO pretty (and the model in version A is wearing my hair), but seams that run straight up and down the front of my body just don't suit me. And the second one, while exactly the shape I tend to look best in, has a collar, which doesn't suit me OR my meagre sewing skills.

So I'm setting them free, in hopes that someone else might make something of them, one day. Or at least that I'll have room to acquire two more vintage patterns that I WILL attempt to make.

The two entrants who did NOT win my first giveaway; Camilla and Contessa Kris, are automatically entered in the draw for these two patterns. In addition, the two other commentors who missed the Saturday deadline, Miz Katie and Kristin are also entered.

If you'd like a chance to win these two patterns, leave a comment! All comments received by midnight Thursday will be entered to win, and on Friday, I'll post the winner, and put the ruffler foot up for giveaway!

My First Giveaway

2008-06-12T08:57:00.005-06:00

I feel a bit awkward about giving stuff away when my blog isn't all that...cool. It feels a little like buying friends. Mind you, it won't be the first time I've done that - my mom put pudding in my lunch, so I was pretty popular in grade school.

Anyway, if you've read any other posts, you'll know that I'm freakishly attracted to garage sales and op-shops, and can never quite resist the lure of vintage patterns and sewing notions. Generally, when you're at a garage sale or second-hand store, you don't have the opportunity to buy only the one item you really want - usually the item you want is combined with a bunch of other items that you don't need.

I'm a greedypants, and have sort of enjoyed amassing my collection of stuff, but now that I'm on the injured list, I've had some time to paw through all my stuff, and have realized that much of it, while perfectly lovely and useful, is of no use to me, or unsuitable in terms of style or size.

Therefore, I've opened a little Etsy store to clear out my vintage patterns and notions. If it's old and I won't use it, it's going to end up for sale there. Hopefully I'll make just enough to cover my garage sale habit.

To celebrate, I'm giving away a few items, to get the ball rolling on the clearout. I have three vintage patterns to give away, as well as a brand new ruffler foot. Today, it's a two-pack of incredibly similar patterns;

Essentially, this is one dress, five necklines, and it's a simple, pretty style. I really like these patterns, but while the style is flattering, it's not flattering on my particular shape. Therefore, they have to go.

If you want these two patterns, leave a comment to get in the draw. I'll draw a name from the first five people who comment before Saturday, and we'll have our winner. Um, if fewer than five people comment by Saturday, then I'll draw from however many comments there are.

I have two other items to give away over the next few days, also; after we have a a winner for this draw, the next draw will be for two larger-sized vintage patterns, in the 18-20 size range. Here's a sneak peek at one of them;

And then next week, I'll be giving away a brand spanking new ruffler foot for a short-shank machine.

This loud, scary item is incredibly easy to use, even if it IS loud and scary. You can make ruffles and attach them to stuff at the same time, though I haven't figured out exactly how, yet. I have four of them - I bought one on purpose, and the others just sort of appeared in among the lots of other stuff I bought from garage sales and such. I don't need four of them, and two of them are brand new - one is still in it's original packaging, even.

Anyway, if you want the two-pack of patterns, comment away!

Oh yeah, and...

2008-06-11T10:56:00.009-06:00

my next post will be about sewing, I promise! In fact, I'll be having a bit of a giveaway - I recently picked up a most excellent box of sewing machine goodies at a garage sale, so I now have an extra ruffler foot and a whole bunch of vintage patterns that I'd like to send to new and loving homes. I'll save that for tomorrow's post, though.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about my most embarrassing purchases in the name of fitness. The reason for baring my soul was because Jenny at Three Kid Circus was having a contest, in which the winner would receive a Wii console and a Wii Fit Kit, including one of those new-fangled Wii Balance Boards.

Long story short, I won, and my Wii arrived late last week. By FedEx, no less.

I just wanted to say thanks once again, to Jenny and her selection committee - this is the coolest thing EVER. I'm not a huge video gamer, but this whole "up off the couch" thing makes it SO much fun. I can barely wait until I'm healed enough from my fall to get back on the board and back on track!

Aye Caramba!

2008-06-11T09:28:00.004-06:00

Sorry for the blip in my blogging - I was doing so well, there. I'll be back to daily posts very soon, and I have a lot to post about, but I took a pretty bad tumble off our deck, and am having a wee bit of difficulty getting around.

I'm not sure which part of my fall I enjoyed the most, the sound my knee made, or the sound my ankle made, or the part where I laid in the dirt for half an hour, pretending not to cry, cursing myself for flailing as I fell. See, when you fall down, you're supposed to go limp - it's supposed to be easier on the body, and honestly, I wipe out so much that I'm pretty good at instinctively relaxing on the way down.

This time, though, I had my laptop slung over one shoulder, my car keys in the other hand, and a very limited amount of space to fall - too far to the right, and I would have landed atop a very large pile of recently removed Christmas lights which SOMEONE should have wound up, packed up, and stored by now. If I'd landed too far to the left, I would have fallen atop a large, handmade bird house which might just be the love of my fiance's life. Going limp wasn't an option.

So I flailed as I fell, trying to land in the clear space, and I let go of my keys as I went down. With the power of the mad flail behind them, they flew pretty far, and landed about 30 feet away from both the door of my house AND my car door, about 25 feet from where I went down.

Even better, I live 25 minutes away from town, and inside the house, I have a staircase I'd have to climb in order to get to a phone. So what did I do? I dragged myself on my belly across the freshly tilled soil and retrieved my keys, then dragged myself back to my car, where I used the mirror to pull myself up. I got in, drove to where my laptop landed, then did a donut on my back lawn to drive myself into town, to emergency.

Anyway, at least I can put it into perspective - bad news, I wrecked my left leg, good news, I waxed my legs JUST before I went outside, so at least I didn't bring fur into the ER.

Shortcut Skirt

2008-05-29T12:33:00.007-06:00

Howdy!

Well, Smooshy's surgery went well, and outside of being treated like a leper by our other cats for two days, she's just fine. Still on the outskirts of the cat family, but fine.

Yesterday at around 3:30, I decided to take a sewing break. My mind was mush, and I needed something that wouldn't require a great deal of thought. I put on my MP3 player, loaded a book to listen to, and by 7:00, I'd made this;

I have a bin full of short-cuts & remnants of 1 metre to 1.5 metres in length. This was a 1 metre cut of 60" fabric - it's brushed rayon or something, it's got a lot of body, but it's very soft to the touch, and fairly drapey.

I ripped up 6, 6" strips, and used three for the bottom ruffle, two for the middle ruffle, and one for the waistband (not shown). I used my ruffler foot to make the gathers in the bottom ruffle and middle ruffle, then sewed the two levels together. The top of the skirt is essentially the rest of the fabric, sewn in a tube up the back, with an invisible zipper at the top. I fit the waist by pinching the excess and marking it with chalk, then darting and cutting as necessary.

I'm really pleased with the results - this is definitely a skirt I'll wear in public. It's far from perfect - the centre seam on the middle ruffle is REALLY obvious, though I don't really care - that's easy enough to fix.

It would have gone much faster if I hadn't spent so much time fiddling around with my ruffler foot - that thing is just so darned much fun! I made ruffles out of every scrap of fabric laying around, just to figure out the length and depth of the ruffles for this skirt. I think this might be a 1.5 hour skirt, start to finish, and less if I just put in an elastic waistband, which I might do the next time around.

Note to self; wear more skirts.

And finally;

We put the towel down so that Smooshy would have someplace cozy to sleep - for whatever reason, she loves terry cloth. Unfortunately, Boobah (the black cat) and Bonzo (the fluffy one) also like terry cloth. And each other. Like I said, Smooshy's still on the outskirts of the cat family.

Too busy to sew

2008-05-26T20:00:00.003-06:00

Not too busy to stop by random garage sales, but I haven't done any actual sewing for more than a week, now.

Since my fiance and I decided to get married at home, we have a lot of work to do in terms of making our yard into a place people might actually want to hang out. Our house was built in the early '70's, and essentially, when the builders were gone, the owner just figured "Meh, who needs to landscape?" and let grass grow over the damage the heavy equipment done.

Then, just before selling to us, he'd rented the property to some really awful tenants. As an example, our first Halloween (Oct 2006), we had a HUGE swarm of mothers come to the house along with their kids, hoping to catch a glimpse of the house, to see if we still had a functioning meth lab in the kitchen. I'm not kidding. One lady actually pushed the door all the way open and pushed past me, and said that we'd done a good job erasing evidence of the "crack fire" (her words, I kid you not!).

Questions of the interior of the house aside (seriously - there is still a large 2x4 BOLTED, not screwed, to the wall in the basement, to which a six foot length of chain is also BOLTED. I still call it the torture room)...as I was saying, questions of the interior aside, they were also kind of yard pigs, and when my fiance brought in a bobcat last weekend, he made the discovery that some of the lumps on the lawn were, in fact, garbage bags that had simply been pitched off the front stairs, and allowed to grow over with grass and dirt.

So, our front and back yards are really torn up, and I spent the weekend digging up all the lilac trees I planted last year, to make room for a new fence, as well as putting out some bedding plants, to make the deck look less like a junk sale and more like a place to bbq. Amazing what some petunias will do!

Tomorrow, I have to take Smooshy in to the vet to get her spayed - I've never, EVER had a kitten before - I've only ever rescued/adopted adult cats, so this whole "in heat" thing kind of took me by surprise. I didn't realize that it would happen so soon, or that one small animal could manufacture so much noise. And urine.

Anyway, I'm off to cuddle with her for a little while - after tomorrow, I think it will be awhile before I get any more kitten lovin'.

FREEEEEEE!

2008-05-24T19:16:00.009-06:00

Did I mention my love of garage sales?

I only went to a few this weekend, because I was a little pressed for time, but I made two scores. One, which I haven't taken a picture of yet, is a necklace and earring set which probably contains Real Artificial Rubies, along with a few Real Industrial Grade Diamond Chips, but which is a cheerful bright red, with a few of the little details you normally only see in high-quality jewelery, like security clasps on the earrings and such. Have I ever mentioned that I'm a crow, and I'm unnaturally attracted to shiny things?

Anyway, my ultimate score was this;

It was FREE!!!!! Yes, free. In fact, the lady who gave it to me told me that she'd give me five dollars to get it off her property. I was already sprinting to my car in a very ungainly fashion as the words were coming out of her mouth, though, so obviously I missed out.

Turns out, it's both a lovely, working sewing machine, AND a mystery. When I got it home, I Googled the brand name, Castle, and came up with nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Seriously - until today, I didn't belive that it was possible to acquire an item that doesn't have any information posted about it on the internet, but it appears that my freebie is just such an item.

I'm really curious about it's heritage - it clearly says "Made In Japan",

So it's clearly not a Singer. Question is, what IS it? There's got to be a blog out there that I can get info from; any ideas?

And here's this post's token cat shot;

All this cuteness is going to make me barf. Or buy another cat.

One Of Everything

2008-05-23T05:29:00.001-06:00

I thought I'd post a quick update on my One Of Everything project.

I was all in a bother to get some sewing done this weekend, but decided instead to sit back and get all the prep work done, first. I cut out a number of the patterns; I always cut my patterns on the outline of each piece, rather than to any size, so that I don't lose size markings for smaller sizes. I then spent a bit of time staring at my stash, figuring out what fabric I'd use for what item of each pattern.

I'm really excited to sew from my stash - now that my "fashion" fabric is where I can see it, it's much more fun to play with.

When I did my last stash sort, I surprised myself by having a lot more fabric than I thought. I had been storing everything in clear plastic bins, but that wasn't a very good solution, because I couldn't actually see everything unless I pulled it out of the bins first.

When I reorganized, I basically left all the "formal" fabrics in bins, and stashed the bolts of taffeta under my cutting table, put all the under 2m cuts into a bin, and put all the regular fabric on the shelves. Notice that I have room for more fabric;

This project has given me a chance to review what I have on hand in terms of fabric and notions, and try to put together packages so that I can see if I actually need to buy any more fabric. HAHAHAHAHA!!! That makes it sound like I'm going to NOT buy fabric - it's funny 'cause it's not true!

Anyway, this is a good exercise for me - pretending that I'm going to pare down my stash and keep it pared down is great fun! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to town - Simplicity pattern sale. I have no intention of buying fabric. Let's see how that works out for me!

Pattern Rescue

2008-05-22T05:00:00.001-06:00

I'm not sure if you've heard of Pattern Rescue, but just in case you haven't, I wanted to say a quick word about it. These folks collect and GIVE AWAY sewing patterns, many of which are vintage patterns. FOR FREE! And if you donate a bit of money (like, the cost of postage, or more if you can), or send in patterns you no longer want, you get to select more free patterns as they get posted!

From what I can tell, they started off as a sort of swap site for vintage patterns. That's actually where I picked up these two patterns, which are part of my One Of Everything project;

Also, if you have a vintage pattern with pieces missing, they'll help you locate your missing pieces, or find another person with that same pattern who would be willing to trace your missing piece from their complete pattern!

They do other perfectly nice things as well, so I strongly suggest that if you have a minute, you should check them out at http://www.patternrescue.com/.

You know, recently, on another blog with a large following (y'all know which one), there was a huge kerfuffle between a much-respected sewing blogger and a...well, troll, I guess, for lack of a better word. Essentially, it's this ~~troll's~~ person's belief that there is a vast sewing conspiracy, and that all sewing blogs are maintained by one single minion of those evil fabric corporations. My sewing conspiracy name, by the way, is Kiki Caswell, but my cape is at the cleaners right now, so it's just me and my platform boots posting today.

There were a few pretty pointy digs about the mutual supportiveness of the sewing community at large - essentially, it appears that we're all a bunch of phony, sappy morons; a pack of stupid lemmings. Aye caramba! This actually led me to nearly post a crazy, rambling rant about people who don't like to see other people happy. Thankfully, I refuse to publish angry posts without a day to cool down, so y'all dodged a bullet, there.

If we're all a bunch of sappy, moronic lemmings because we enjoy being kind to one another rather than electing to be nasty and waspish all the time, then I'm a lemming, and I'm okay with that. I'm nasty and waspish enough in my non-sewing life; I'm terribly glad to have e-met you and all the others whose blogs I stalk regularly.

In any case, as far as I'm concerned, Pattern Rescue, the vintage pattern wiki, Pattern Review, and many other great community sites, embody the essence about what's so great about the sewing community. Because I'm so new to the community, I'm sure there are a lot of sites I'm missing? Any suggestions from my readers? Uh...reader, maybe? :)

Garage sale season is here!

2008-05-21T05:30:00.000-06:00

I LOVE GARAGE SALES!!

Okay. I'm one of those people who tries to be careful about throwing the word "love" around. I know, it's weird. Put it on the list of the many things about me that are unexplainable. I tell my family and my fiance, and yes, my cats, that I love them, all the time. I even have a super-duper high-school friend whom I love greatly, and have told her so, without any creepiness. Well, maybe a bit of creepiness, but then we laughed hysterically and went to the thrift store.

There are people (pets count here) I love, and things I love, and I never mix the two up. It's always people first, then things. At least in this, I have my priorities in order. Now if only I could remember that it's groceries first, and THEN fabric, not fabric first, and THEN groceries, I'd be much more popular at home.

Many of the things I love are both mundane and ridiculous - "The Cutting Edge" is a great example of that. I can't explain why I love this movie, I just know that when I wipe out, or see someone else wipe out, the urge to scream "TOEPICK!" is almost crippling. In addition, I love peridots, and The Thomas Crown Affair, and corsets, and containers - oh, how I love things that hold things! Many years ago I took a solo trip to the southern US, and on my last day, I stumbled across The Container Store. I nearly cried when I realized I had no room in my luggage to bring some containers home.

Even above the container fetish, though, is my complete and utter love of people who lay their castoffs out on their lawn, driveway, or garage, for me to paw through. That's why Garage Sale Season is probably my favorite time of the year. As soon as the weather settles, and the last snow is a couple of weeks behind us, everyone in the city I live near cleans out their closets and attics, and lays everything out on their lawn, or in jumbled heaps in their driveway and garage.

They spend the day sitting in their driveway, smiling at strangers, chatting about the weather, joking about whether or not we've really seen the last of the snow, and complaining about the government (that's how we roll in our prairie city).

I enjoy jockeying for a parking spot and getting out of my car, pockets full of change and small bills, and pawing through stuff that people have held on to, sometimes for fifty years or more. I'm not kind - sometimes I laugh right out loud when I see that someone (other than my dad) actually bought a Thighmaster.

I also get a kick out of people who attempt to sell used items at nearly the same price as you would pay for a new one - witness, the woman who had a stack of really dirty old curling irons tagged at $10.00 each. What? You can get a brand new, cootie-free curling iron for $9.99, and I, for one, will not pay extra for clumps of someone elses' hair.

I bought two of my favorite sewing machines this way - a Singer and a White. I paid $10.00 for the Singer and $8.00 for the White, and both of them work like a charm - I recently gave the White to my mom so she could sew heavy tent canvas, and the thing runs like a freight train - the best $8.00 ever, maybe? I bought a large stack (14 in all) of sewing books, including a number of volumes of the Singer Sewing Reference Library, for $3.00.

This weekend, I got everything shown here for $4.75; (click for larger view)

There are a few things I don't even know how to use properly, like the transfer patterns on the top right, and the two yards of drawcord elastic. The clip-on garters I understand, though what I'd clip them to is beyond me - I wonder if there's a market for them on ebay? Some of the zippers in the pile were obviously removed from other garments, but at least 3/4 of them are brand new and unused, or appear that way.

I've been looking for a pattern for a jewelery roll, without much success - my plan is to pick apart the one in the picture, and make my own pattern, once I understand how this one is assembled.

In that same vein, I got this for $4.00;

I've been struggling to make my own crinoline, and I've assembled and disassembled one a number of times, not really sure if what I was doing was correct. Now that I actually have one in my hands, I know! Plus, this one actually fits me, so I have one to wear while I try to make another!

In addition to all that, I occasionally find some really great vintage patterns. Lately, I've come across a number of patterns for little girl dresses, like these;

I don't actually have children, and when I do, it's likely it'll be a boy - my fiance's family has had nothing BUT boys for three generations, and if I remember 11th grade biology, the sex of a baby is decided by the father, but even so, I couldn't resist picking up these patterns. I'm not normally a very acquisitive person, but really, since I started sewing, all bets are off. Plus, when the lady offered me the whole box (there were 16 in total, most of them 50's and 60's dresses and blouses in sizes 10 and 12) for $2.00, I could NOT say no.

Now that I have them at home and have had a chance to stare at them, I want to make the little sailor dress (bottom right) SO MUCH. Maybe I can adapt it to fit one of the cats. I'm never sure - does dressing up your cats count as animal cruelty, or is it just cute? In any case, I'm off to check the newspaper - that's where I'll find out where all the good sales are going to be next weekend! I'll leave you with this;

Hee hee! They're spooning!

OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!!

2008-05-20T13:18:00.010-06:00

Last week, I wrote about entering the contest Jenny at Three Kid Circus was having.

The prize was a Wii and a Wii Fit Kit, which my fiance and I have been coveting for some time now. Okay, he's been coveting the Wii because he has nephews and can't wait to play games with them online, and I've been coveting the Fit Kit because I have both a very large bottom. And a death wish.

Anyway, I won!! Wooooo!!!!! I mean, WOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

I'd been blogstalking TKC all morning, even while I was doing some actual work (the cats must eat, after all) and then checked my email, only to find that Three Kid Circus had sent me a message, letting me know that I had won.

Here is my graceful, ladylike, polite reply;

OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!!

You're freakin' kidding me!!! Ohh! Holy cow, I'm crying! Oh, don't post that! Oh, whatever, I don't mind - shame and I are only distant acquaintances. Oh, I'm gonna feel like an even BIGGER dork if this is the online version of Punked! You should have heard the sound I emitted when read your email - somewhere between a squealing pig and a whistle - EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! The E's don't do it justice. Oh, I'm rambling.

My address is xxxxxxxxxxxx. My phone number is xxxxxxxxxx.

Yay you! Yay me! Yay Nintendo!

Thank you so very much - this means an awful lot to me! I never win anything - no raffles, no lotteries, not even free coffee! I'm really, really grateful! And now I'm going to go blog about my gratefulness! I'll post pictures of the injuries I'm certain I'll sustain - I'm not sure if I can post video, because my ass will not fit comfortaby across 600 pixels, but I'll try!

Geesh, Rachelle - gush much?

Seriously, though, I'm incredibly grateful to Three Kid Circus and Nintendo for offering such a great prize, and for choosing my submission out of such an incredibly funny group of entries.

Here in Canada, this is the first day back to work from a long weekend, so this is a quasi-Monday. I hereby label this The Best Quasi-Monday I Have Ever Had! Once again, note that I cannot resist Using Too Many Capital Letters!

Woo hoo!!!

One Of Everything

2008-05-15T07:22:00.009-06:00

I am heartily inspired by those on my blogroll. It's actually a much bigger roll than what shows on my page; I haven't yet mastered the art of importing from Google Reader yet, so if your blog was on there before, it will be again, once I get off my duff and get it in.

I digress. I always get very inspired by reading what everyone else is up to. Most interesting to me is watching people build their SWAP wardrobes. Next year, I think I might sew along while everyone's SWAPping, or maybe even enter myself, though I'm not sure if my skills will be up to the challenge at that point. In the meantime, for practice, I've come up with an idea that will likely sound ridiculous to you, but makes perfect sense to me!

It's my own personal Un-SWAP-SWAP.

Since I made the committment last month to drop 10 dress sizes by next April, I have begun to shrink a bit. Not a whole lot - fast isn't the answer for me, personally - but I'm shrinking nonetheless. When I started this, my dress size was somewhere between 22 or 24, and my measurements equated to a 28W or 30W, on pattern labels. Size 24 dresses no longer fit me properly, so I'm a solid size 22, right now, which still equates to a 28W.

I have a number of patterns in my pattern stash that go up to 28W, but at some point, I'm going to shrink out of these patterns. Since I bought these patterns because I liked them, I'd really like to sew them up before they "expire".

Here's my plan;

I pulled all the patterns in my stash that either go up to 28W, or that I feel I will be able to upsize properly. There are 15 in total, and more may be added when the summer patterns go on sale.

Of these 15 patterns, I will sew one garment from each pattern envelope, be it a dress, or a skirt, or pants, whatever. My preference is to use fabric that's already in my stash, but I'm not crazy enough to swear off buying fabric or patterns while I do this.

Here are the patterns - you can click them to see larger versions, if you wish;

In addition to these items, I'm also trying to frankenstein a retro swimsuit, so that I don't have to go through the hell of swimsuit shopping this year.

Now, I'm not a total kook - I know that the patterns above are multi-size patterns, and that I'll have more of a window to make these than just the next few months. But this isn't a project one can complete overnight, so by the time I'm done with this, it will be time to start over, with my smaller patterns. Hopefully, anyway. And in the meantime, I'll have cute, flattering clothes to wear, to get my friends used to seeing me in something other than jeans and T's.

I'm calling this project "One Of Everything", and if you look along the right side of my blog, you'll see a progress list. I feel good about having a plan, even if it's not a plan to make matching outfits - I'm not very good at coordinating this with that anyway, so likely the jumble will suit my personal style (or lack thereof) perfectly!

Enough rambling - I have some sewing to do!

Loose tooth, anyone?

2008-05-14T18:48:00.006-06:00

Okay. I don't normally enter blog contests (the exception that proves the rule happens when Summerset raffles off her art garment postcards).

In this case, though, since my fiance and I have been in the market for a Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit kit for the last little while (they can't keep them on the shelves in our town), and the prize for this contest IS a Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit kit, I figure, what the heck!

Jenny at Three Kid Circus wants us to tell our readers about...well, about the dumbest purchases we've made in the name of fitness.

Sadly, I have more than one.

First off, I am oldish. Not old, but oldish. I remember when the Thighmaster first came out, and Suzanne Somers was all over the TV, hawking these miracle machines. My stepdad, bless his lovely, kooky soul, bought me one for my birthday when I was 16. He didn't buy it 'cause I was fat, or he had any particular idea what my thighs might be like, he bought it because it was a gadget, and who doesn't like gadgets!?

I thanked him graciously, and hastily hid it away. Fast forward two years, and I'm packing my room, getting ready to go off to the military. I come across the Thighmaster that's been residing in a box under my bed, and think "Hey, why not give it a try?"

I sit down on the side of my bed, put the thing where it seems like it's supposed to go, right between the knobby parts at the sides of my knees. I start squeezing. First few reps - easy! Next few reps - still easy! By 50, I'm straining a bit. By 76, I'm done, but won't allow myself to quit until I reach 100. At 89, I start to lean forward, really putting myself into it.

At 94, I shift my knees slightly, and go for a big push, really hunching over to get as much leverage as I can. The whole Thighmaster shifts and rotates, and without warning, the big, hard red knob in the middle of the thing flies up quite rapidly, and hits me square in the mouth.

Ladies and gentlemen, can you say "Split lip"? And one slightly loose front tooth.

My second ill-conceived purchase was the Tony Little Gazelle. I was 22, and really, it's the only thing I've ever bought from The Shopping Channel. That I will tell you about. Or admit to.

The thing that made me want to buy this is how fun Tony made it look. I enjoyed his screams of "YOU CAN DOOOO EEEEEIT!" even though I was harbouring the secret belief that I could not, in fact, do it.

The thing arrives in a box, mostly assembled. I read the directions, put together the last few bits, and hop on.

The first few strides, I'm smiling like a loon. This IS fun! I CAN do eeeit! Faster and faster I glide, taking larger and larger strides. There's no resistance and no bumping, and it takes a while to break out in a sweat, but when I do, I take my hand off the handlebar and reach for my towel.
When I'm finished blotting, I drop my towel, and realize that I am not coordinated enough to grab the handlebar again without stopping. I make a few half-hearted attempts to grab it anyway, and the idea of stopping so I can grab it DOES cross my mind. But instead, I decide that I'll take my other hand off the other handlebar, and rest my hands on the sides while I glide.

I do this, but soon realize that the quality of my workout has dropped, so once again, without stopping, I start grabbing for the handles.

I am REALLY uncoordinated. REALLY. I manage to grab one handle - that is, I put my hand out and the handle miraculously smacks right into my palm - and I lunge for the second, and overshoot. I'm off balance, and lunging, and the whole apparatus shifts microscopically, because my stride is now off. This panics me a bit, because really, it shouldn't move, should it? But do I stop? No, I lunge forward again, and the handlebar I have a grip on comes shooting back, and I punch myself in the mouth.

No split lip. Just one slightly loosened tooth, and scars on the back of my right hand where I poked myself with my teeth. Plus, I fell backwards when I punched myself, and hit the back of my head on the coffee table. And got one foot caught between the support structure and a moving pedal, so I had a nice bruise on both sides of one leg.

And last but not least, my Carmen Electra Fit To Strip series.

I got the whole series from Ebay, and I'd be lying to you if I said I never used it. In fact, I used it this morning. The thing is, I've adapted it to the point that it probably no longer resembles "Carmen Electra's Fit To Strip" and looks more like "Big Bird And Snuffaluffagus Go Dancing".

The first time I tried it, I reviewed all the disks, then jumped right in to try the Lap Dance. I dragged a kitchen chair into the living room, and danced around a bit (I'm not coordinated, but I have a fairly decent sense of rhythm - go figure), and at one point, I got so into the spirit of it that I started to bend over and let my hair down, shaking it out in my very best impersonation of Carmen Electra.

Except I forgot that the chair was there, so when I bent over with great energy and enthusiasm, I slammed my head down on the chairback. Luckily, it only caught me on the forehead - no blood at all, just a very embarassing bruise right between my eyes, effectively linking my eyebrows into a monobrow. No matter how you cut your bangs, you can't hide a monobrow.

Actually, now that I think of it, I've done other stupid things in the name of fitness, but maybe it's best if I attempt to keep a little bit of mystique. But I will say this; if I win the Wii, I WILL post pictures of whatever injuries I give myself while using it. That should be good for a laugh. Or stitches.

Much better!

2008-05-14T06:52:00.017-06:00

Okay, now that the blog isn't pink, surrounded by pink swirlies, I can get back to posting. I completed three projects this week (yay me!). Okay, in truth, the projects don't merit a "Yay!", because honestly, they're pretty simple projects.

First up, the Orange Skirt. Made More Important With The Inclusion Of Capital Letters!

This skirt was made without a pattern, which isn't surprising, since it's a simple straight skirt with an elastic waist. It's very...orange. Orange and I play well together, far better than pink and I do - I'm a "fall", or so I learned from Chatelaine, circa 1989. Even so, this is probably one of those skirts I'll only wear if all my pants are dirty.

Of everything I've made so far, this is the one I paid most attention to. I made flat-felled seams on both the lining and the fashion fabric. I found the process to be absurdly simple, and quite gratifiying, since it results in a really nice finish. See? Lookit me, talkin' about nice finishes and such!

Here's a shot of the inside. Again, I didn't use a pattern, so if my lining is way too short, that's 'cause I got overenthusiastic with my rotary cutter. Seriously, I have a love affair going on with my rotary cutter. It would love to cut off my fingertips, and I would love to throw it away. It's just that I have a sense that it would come back, like that movie with the doll - that woman kept throwing it away, and giving it away, but every time she came home from work, it was sitting in her living room, looking at her.

Funny story. Okay, not really funny. Strange. I got the lining fabric from the Salvation Army. It was new, unwashed, and folded, and by the fade on one of the folded sides, was in someone's stash for a good long time.

I bought it because it was shiny (I'm a crow - shiny things attract my attention). When I was at the checkout, there were two ladies at the till - one ringing things in, and the other folding and bagging. They finished with the woman in front of me, and as she walked away, I set this 2m length of fabric on the counter. The bagger actually CRINGED away from it, and said "Oh, my!" as though it were printed all over with naked female parts.

The lady at the till stood there and stared at the fabric for a few seconds, then gingerly reached out a hand to flip the tag over, careful not to actually touch the fabric, and murmured "How interesting." Both ladies tried to rally gamely - the bagger asked me what I might make out of something so...orange..., and the lady at the till smiled uncomfortably and said that it looked as though it would take an iron well, obviously straining for something kind to say.

So anyway, apparently the lining fabric is cursed. Or so horrifically ugly that it shocked these women out of their shoes. I'm betting on cursed, because then I get to call this the Orange Skirt Of Evil. I really like to Capitalize Things To Make Them Important.

Anyway, on the elastic casing, I think I cheated a bit - I sewed bias binding around the unfinished top edge of the skirt, then folded it over and eyeballed it to one inch all the way around, then sewed it. I think I was probably supposed to do something fancy that wouldn't include bias binding at all, but by the time the elastic was going in, I was getting a bit bored.

Second project - vintage top, made with a real vintage pattern! Well, if the '70's or early '80's is vintage, at least. Not really sure where the line gets drawn.

So, I have more vintage patterns than I should have, and only about four of them are in a size that I could sew and wear today. This is not one of them. As you can see from the package, it's a size 12, 34' bust. My actual bust is 50", so a small adjustment was necessary.

Since this pattern was comprised of two pieces cut on the bias, and some bias binding, it was an easy one to edit, although I'm not sure if I did it the "right" way. All I did was measure the distance across the top of the pattern, where the top seam is supposed to sit, then measured the same spot on my actual chest. The difference was six inches. I was supposed to cut the piece flat, not on the fold, but figured I'd take a shortcut - I carefully folded the fabric on the bias, folded the pattern piece down the middle, and slapped it down. Instead of lining the edge of the pattern up with the fold, I shifted it back three inches from the fold, which gave me six inches of extra fabric, right down the middle, but didn't change any of the other dimensions.

I actually like this little top - I got the size just right, so it fits well and is quite comfortable. However, if I make it again, I'll likely change it so that I can have straps over the shoulders, to hide a brastrap. Because honestly, a 50" bust isn't perky enough to carry this top off without some serious support. We won't discuss the fact that it's pink. It was a remnant, so it was cheap. I'm not down with pink, but I'm down with $1.20 for 1.6 metres!

And finally, the blue skirt I talked about in this post.

Here's the thing. I finished this skirt. I stitched all the rips closed, put a side zipper in, bias-bound the hem, and tried it on. I liked it. Now, however, I can't find it. I've looked all over the house, in all the spots that these things usually end up, including the laundry and the closet in my office, but I can't locate it at all. So either the universe is trying to save me from wearing the saddest little ripped skirt in the world, or Smooshy has stolen it and hidden it with her trove of black socks and spools of thread. Either way, no pics today!

Bear With Me!

2008-05-12T13:06:00.002-06:00

So, the pinkness was killing me.

I couldn't even look at my blog, much less post to it. Thusly, over the next little while, you might see my blog go through some kind of wacky changes - as I write this posts, there are little birdies all over the page. Cute, but not me. Now, if they were kittens...

Anyway, just bear with me - I'll make up my mind soon, I'm sure!

I'm serious - I don't like pink!

2008-05-09T07:36:00.006-06:00

Is there a scientific term for someone who truly believes she doesn't like a colour, but then buys everyting IN that colour? Honestly! I thought I was clear about my feelings regarding the colour pink. I am not a pink person!

Still, I went to the store to pick up some thread for another project, and left with this:

Honest to Betsy, I didn't buy it because I was in love with it - I bought it because it was cheap, and this is my first foray into sewing a stretch fabric - I have 10 metres of heavy, chocolate brown silk (or very silklike) jersey just waiting to turn into something pretty.

In any case, I'll probably start on this dress later today, if only to purge myself of the pinkness. I'll let you know how it turns out!

Oh, and this has been happening a lot around here. Smooshy is a thief, and she's been aided and abetted by Boobah on more than one occasion. Usually she only steals socks (but only black socks!) but lately, it's been spools of thread, right out of my sewing room. Now she's taken to napping with it, apparently.

Because I felt like it

2008-05-07T12:09:00.007-06:00

Well, as you can see, a few things have changed around here! I enjoyed my old brown/green combination, but it didn't really say "WOO HOO - SPRING IS FREAKIN' HERE!!", so it was time for some sprucing up.

One question - can any of you see the swirly background that's supposed to be showing along the right and left hand sides of the screen? I can see it when I'm in edit mode, but I can't see it when I check my page. Not a big deal, but kind of a head-scratcher.

**UPDATE** Disregard that question - I fixed it!

I'm not sure which blog I read it on, but somewhere, I came across a tip to use heavy steel bolts as pattern weights. This weekend, I picked up these;

They're super-huge, heavy galvanized steel washers, which work equally well. (The Razr is just there for scale. And yes, it's pink, even though I dislike pink - I was trying to be ironic. I think maybe I'm just in the closet - secretly, I think I love pink. )

There's definitely two sides to these - one, the top, is rounded and fairly smooth. The bottom has a fine grain, but no snags, so it ought to help keep the thing from slipping around too much. I'm not sure if you can make out the detail in the picture...

Anyhoo, I'm all Bloggered out for the day - time to go read my blogroll!

Yeah, I'm that dumb

2008-05-06T05:30:00.012-06:00

I had a real "DOH!" moment yesterday. I cut and assembled the simplest circle skirt ever;
I LURVE this skirt, 'cause it's simple and pretty, and can be made out of anything, and also because from cutting to wearing is an hour, tops, if you're paying attention. I know this because I've gotten into the final ten minutes TWICE, then made the most ridiculous mistake ever, and ended up with a whole lot of circle-skirt-shaped scrap fabric.

For me, the final ten minutes would have been wrapping the hem with a fun contrasting bias binding, but I decided to make a slight change to take in a few inches at the waist - I didn't NEED to, but I decided I wanted to. So I started to unpick the narrow waistband with my seam ripper.

I don't enjoy listening to music while I sew - I find it very distracting, because I tend to sing along, loudly. It's difficult to sew when you've got your head thrown back, belting out the words to Kathy Mattea's 455 Rocket - "Did you boys come here to race, or just kiss?". Also, I can't sew to Metallica, because I am always driven to do the white-girl head-bang - sort of a really enthusiastic nod. And forget Top 40 - there's no need to be dancing around my sewing room, trying to perfect my booty pop.

Instead of listening to music, I listen to books on CD, or audiobooks I've downloaded from various sellers online. Normally, it just sort of plays in the background, and I don't pay a lot of attention, just absorbing it by osmosis, but for some reason, I was listening more than sewing. Mistake.

Not even thinking about it, I picked stitches on the waistband I intended to remove, freeing up about 5" of the band. Then, for some reason I cannot explain, I decided to rip the rest of the stitches by giving the waistband a good yank. Uh, yeah, note to self - don't do that. About four inches into the rip, the waistband stitches held, and the fabric itself ripped, down about six inches into the skirt. Oy vey!

So there I was, shocked and dismayed, but figured, what the heck, in for a penny, right? I shifted the fabric and gave it another tug. Another length of waistband stitches came free, then held again - a second rip, about 8" into the skirt. Well, what the heck - one more tug can't hurt, right? The third and final rip extends about 6" down, and I still have to unpick the stitches on the last few inches of waistband.

I'm not too worried - the print is such that I can easily stitch the fabric back together with no great loss in the volume of the skirt, though the rips will likely sit funny. Still, I'll have a cool and comfortable skirt for bopping around town, so whatever. But really - I think maybe this pattern is cursed, and I shouldn't make another attempt until I'm willing to think about nothing BUT the skirt I'm sewing.

Off topic - in an earlier post, I mentioned that I had bought a fabric called Peony Garden almost compulsively, in two of three available colors, red/green and purple/green. Well, I finally broke down and bought the last of the three, yellow/gold, and I've already decided to go back for more. What's wrong with me?? Sheesh!

Honestly, I don't know why this particular fabric speaks to me - I'm not a floral person at all. But it's so crisp and weighty, and the colors just...pop. Well, except for the yellow/gold - it's much livelier in real life than it is in the picture. Still, what an odd choice for me!

Stalker Sewing

2008-05-05T10:27:00.006-06:00

Well, for the last few months, I've been hemming and hawing over the fact that once more, swimsuit season is coming, and once more, I hate all the suits I currently have.

I'm a plus-sized gal, but I carry my weight pretty evenly all over my body. Unfortunately, most suits in my size are either styled and built to hide a large tuchus, or prop up a sagging bosom, which means I'm usually swaddled in yards of excess fabric at the bottom, and busting out of the top.

Jenny, over at Chronically Uncool, is creating a retro swimsuit for herself, so I've been stalking her blog for updates on her progress. I'd already decided to do something retro, in this basic shape:

but with ruching at the sides, and wider straps. And, uh, more chest coverage.

This isn't a project I'm starting right away; it's sort of something I'm doing in between other projects, because I'm really set on making my own pattern. At least I've finally chosen some test fabric, which was on sale on Friday. If all goes well, my swimsuit will be made of this material, and if all doesn't go well, at least I didn't spend too much on the "muslin".

Plus, of course, I intend to blogstalk Jenny ruthlessly - not really so I can copy her swimsuit, but 'cause her blog is a good read!

Rebellion for geeks

2008-05-01T09:52:00.002-06:00

I had appointments today, but guess what I'm doing right now? Right now, I mean, not right NOW, when I'm writing this - I mean ten minutes from now!

I'm playing hooky! Hookey? Hookie? Whatever - I cancelled my appointments, put on sweats, slathered on a big green spa mask that smells like honey and sulphur, and am preparing to spend the day playing with fabric.

I'm a rebel! Woo hoo!

One! Day! Left!

2008-04-30T07:53:00.003-06:00

I love being an accountant - I find numbers soothing and logical, and I actually kind of enjoy doing other people's taxes. That said, I'm pretty glad it's April 30th today.

I cannot WAIT to get into my sewing room.

Pink Abomination Update

2008-04-29T05:35:00.008-06:00

Well, three posts in one day, then nothing for a week! Go figure!

I spent part of the weekend tackling the Pink Abomination - there were some issues with the front of the bodice. The pattern shows the dress with a round neckline, which I normally find quite unflattering, so when I cut the pattern, I made an attempt to redraft the bodice to give it a more square neckline. Since this was my very first attempt at ever sewing anything from a pattern, I really shouldn't have tried. I kind of neglected to remember that the front attaches to the back, and cut from the existing shoulder into a square, resulting in this;

It actually looked all right on me, but the shape of the neckline didn't support the shoulder enough, so it kept slipping off my actual shoulders, like a giant, creepy brastrap.

Luckily, I bought enough fabric to make at least one big mistake, and since this was it, I recut the bodice front. I still changed the neckline; I made it a bit scoopier than the original, and I may yet change it one more time, but here it is now, at least;

Another change I made was that instead of the front gathers, I put in a dart, and then another dart at the sides to eliminate any gapping.

Neither of these darts are probably "correct" as far as technique goes, but the fit is sort of all right.

I think I'm going to re-cut the front again - thankfully, I have enough fabric that I can do this without rushing out to buy more, but I think I'm going to return to the original bust gathers instead of the dart - my bust dart is pretty pointy, and I don't want to fiddle with it anymore. And I also need to figure out how to eliminate the gapping at the edges near my arms - I think I know what to do, but I'll probably cut the new shape on a muslin first, to make sure. That should eliminate the weirdness at the armhole.

Wish me luck!

Three posts in one day! Woo!

2008-04-22T15:43:00.003-06:00

I couldn't wait to start sewing up some of my new fabric, but I wanted to start small. Here's my first effort at an accessory;

This is the Retro Tie Bag, which is a free pattern available from Butterick.

I didn't follow the directions, mostly because I couldn't really understand them, which is probably my fault rather than the fault of whoever wrote the instructions. It was simple enough to figure out my own way, though it probably would have been better if I'd actually followed the directions.

I made this to go along with my walkaway dress - now all I need is a pair of vintage sunglasses and cute shoes, and I've got an outfit!

Shortest Wagon Ride Ever.

2008-04-22T11:01:00.011-06:00

Remember my last post? The one where I said I was off buying fabric for awhile? The post I originally put up yesterday, then had to repost this morning due to some spamming issues?

Well, I went to Fabricland to pick up a bunch of patterns I've been ogling, because they're on sale, and somehow, I ended up buying another 10.7m of fabric!!!

In my defence (not that I actually NEED a defence, but...) I truly adore this fabric. It's called Peony Garden, and it first hit the shelves last summer. I happened to be in the store when they got put out, and I was absolutely transfixed - it's the first time a fabric has actually called to me - at that point, I didn't know that fabric could DO that!

You might recognize the red from my walkaway dress, which I hope to finish this week.

Anyway, I circled those two bolts of fabric about ten times, before finally breaking down and buying three metres of each. Remember, at this point, I hadn't sewn so much as a stitch; I was just starting to get ideas. I had no idea whether three metres was even enough to make a garment (I was glad to learn it was, once I finally taught myself how to read the back of a pattern envelope).

Then, about six months later, I saw the fabric again, and even though I had six metres at home, I just felt like I needed another two metres of the red, which was obviously fate, since I needed just that much for the walkaway dress.

Today, when I bought my 10 patterns, I found both fabrics again, on clearance. I bought the last of each bolt. 3.4 metres of the purple, 7.3 metres of the red.

Pros and cons? Well, cons - I've discovered that I have no willpower, but only as it pertains to this fabric - there were a lot of really smashing prints, and while I wanted many of them, I only NEEDED these ones. The pros - that fabric will no longer taunt me, tempt me, make me crazy. I have it all. The colors of both suit me very well, so I'll actually wear what I make from them. Both were very cheap.

Of course, this pushes my stash over the 400m mark. 404.9M, to be exact. I think I'd better go sew something!

Stash Surprise

2008-04-22T07:32:00.002-06:00

Well.

I've been mulling over a reorganization of my fabric storage for the last month or so, but this weekend, I actually decided to get started. I measured, laundered, ironed, and folded my way through my stash.

I thought I had about 200m of fabric on hand. According to my measurements, though, I am sitting at 394.2m of fabric, 176.5 of which is fabric I purchased with my wedding dresses in mind. Of that 176.5, just under 100 is taffeta in a rainbow of colours, which I purchased at an incredibly heavy discount ($1.49/m, down from $21.95/m),but still.

This number doesn't include the amount I've started to work with in the last week or so; a sundress, three skirts, and a walkaway dress, as well as a mock-up of a wedding dress, of which another 9m remains uncut.

I realize that this is nothing at all, compared to some of your stashes, but I am...frankly, I'm both horrified and excited. Horrified that I didn't know how much fabric I had on hand, and excited because I found fabric I'd forgotten I had. Plus, when it comes time to start making up all those formal dresses I bought patterns for last week, it appears that I won't have to buy any fabric, at least.

I think I'm on the "no new fabric until I sew a bunch of my stash" bandwagon for awhile. I don't even have a bit of desire to shop, which is weird, for me. But Butterick and McCall's patterns are on sale this week, so...hey, gotta go!

Sneak Peek!

2008-04-19T10:10:00.006-06:00

Okay, this is the least exciting sneak peek ever. EVER!

Remember the Walkaway dress that I was afraid of back in December? Well, fear no longer rules me. Plus, seriously, I'm ashamed that I was ever afraid. This was WAY easier than the Pink Abomination, and that was pretty easy.

It's not done, and my dress dummy is wider than I am through the waist and hips (yay!), so it doesn't close properly, plus I want to make some edits, AND I need to redo the bias binding around the neckline, but it's a start!

I edited the neckline to drop down a bit lower, basically about 2", because according to everything I've read, the weight of the dress pulls the back down a bit. I finished the poppy fabric with bias binding in the green, and am planning to finish the green with binding in the poppy.

Also, I need to edit the darts that run horizontally at the sides - there's some serious gappage going on. And, I think I'm going to add a strip of fabric about 2" wide along that top inside edge of the poppy fabric, because right now, my bra shows in the area under the arms. I think I probably should have lengthened the bodice, back and front. Next time! And oh, yes, there WILL be a next time.

You know, I'm not really a dress person. Or at least, I wasn't. The only times I've ever worn dresses or skirts in the past, quite literally, were when I was a bridesmaid, and when I was in the military and had to be in full dress uniform, which included a skirt.

At the end of February, my fiance and I both had a block of time empty, and we had $2000.00 set aside for fun stuff that we never got around to spending over the last year (we have no kids, which is why we have disposable income, not 'cause we're rich), so we decided to go on a last-minute trip to Mexico.

We had about a week from the time we made our decision to the time we boarded the plane, and on the second day, I stopped at my favorite fat-girl store to pick up a couple of pairs of shorts. It's an outlet location, so every couple of seasons, they have a huge, Take 70% Off The Lowest Marked Price! sale, which means that items that have already been marked down are basically free.

I picked up an entire wardrobe of dresses, skirts, and tops, for $50.00. That's four pretty, floaty, summery dresses, three skirts, two denim short-sleeved jackets, and four tops. I figured I'd surprise him with an all-girly vacation. In typical male fashion, he was mostly oblivious to the difference, until the first night I dressed up for dinner. Well, really, I did everything I normally do, but instead of putting on jeans and a t-shirt, I put on a dress. He was poleaxed. Best fifty bucks I ever spent.

Back to my sewing room!

A Quick Thank You

2008-04-18T10:00:00.003-06:00

I've noticed that I've been getting more comments on my posts lately, and I wanted to take a moment to thank you all so much for reading, and for sharing your thoughts with me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is sort of a "secret" blog - none of my local friends know I do it. Like Karen, when I talk about sewing, most of my friends' eyes glaze over, or else they openly laugh at me. Which actually, I'm okay with, even though it sounds like they're being very mean - it's my own fault for telling them about the first garment I ever made for myself. I was 13, and it was a dress for a Christmas party. It started to fall apart around 8:00, and by the time I went home at midnight, it was held together by staples. I'd laugh at me, too, if I were them.

As you all know, blogging is a strange blend of personal and private, and while you'd do it no matter what because its lovely to have an outlet, it's the comments that make it fun.

Luckily for me, the crowd of commenters I have to thank this time is relatively small. My thanks go out to Cidell, Amanda, who posts at Sew Retro, Brooke, Karen, Moxie Tonic, Kristin, Jemimabean, Keely, Shannon, and Jenny, as well as those I can't seem to find a link to, Karen, Shar, and Cantor.

As well, I sincerely appreciate those who visit but don't comment - I read all the blogs on my blogroll first thing every morning, and then again late in the afternoon, and I don't always get to leave comments either. Your presence is enough!

Two recent comments I wanted to reply to, though;

Jenny, thanks for your kind words about my patternless corset outfit! I'll post new pictures once I get the outfit completed, and show before and after - it's already changed a bit, for the better, I hope! Make sure you post the swimsuit fabric you decide on - I don't want to be TOO much of a copycat! :)

Kristin, I actually appreciate unsolicited advice - if I haven't solicited it, it's likely because I'm not sure what questions to ask, newbie that I am! I've heard that Vogue patterns can be...uh...well, awful to put together - I checked Pattern Review and got the scoop on a couple of the patterns I selected, as well as a few others I'd originally chosen, and they said exactly what you did - OUCH! In the end, I culled a list of 22 Vogue patterns down to the ones I posted, just because of that, and I'm glad I did.

I'm still a little stunned that I bought the V2928 - it's the only advanced pattern I bought, I think. The fact that there were no reviews of the 2928 on PR before I bought it (or now, for that matter!) makes me feel a bit scared, but what the heck - maybe I'll become the Crazy Cat And Pattern Lady - I'll walk around town with a purse full of cats and sewing patterns too advanced for me to attempt, muttering to myself and throwing empty spools at passing children. It's nice to have goals!

Anyway, thanks again, everyone!

Oh, and one last thing - you haven't seen Smooshy for awhile, so I thought I'd leave you with this;

I often have to remind my fiance that ugly kittens still have a hope of being handsome cats! Meh, we didn't get her for her looks anyway, we got her 'cause she's got a funny personality. Well, that and because she was probably two days away from a sack in the river.

Planning REALLY far ahead

2008-04-16T16:10:00.003-06:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've decided to drop 10 dress sizes, because I've been buying up every cute vintage pattern I've come across, and they're all in sizes 12 to 14. I LOVE these patterns, and though I've always been a fat girl, and have always sort of liked BEING the fat girl, I've decided that by this time next year, I'll be a size 12.

I made the decision on Saturday, and I've already started down a path that will take me there. I don't believe that a traditional diet is the right option for me, because I loathe dieters. Well, that's too strong - I loathe going for lunch with someone who has to flip through a little calorie counting booklet for twenty minutes before she can place an order, or eats her Atkins fare in the car before we go inside, where she sips ice water and watches me have relations with a beef dip.

In the past, I've shifted down two dress sizes easily, in a very short period of time, simply by following the plan at the end of this post. It's only there if you're interested - as I said, this isn't going to become a place where I blog about my daily relationship with food.

Anyway, now that I'm on the path towards being able to sew the cute clothes in my pattern stash, I decided that I should also stock up on the few patterns I REALLY love, in case they're not in print when I'm ready.

This week, Vogue patterns were on sale at Fabricland, for $5.99, so I bought a number in my current size (20 or 22, depending), and I also bought these in a range including 12 and 14;

I LOVE this dress. I can't explain it - the shape of the neckline and the little sleeves, and the sheer amount of fabric... Oh my! Honestly, I think it's a bit overdone, but even overdone has it's own charm, sometimes. And no, I don't think I'll ever have an occasion to wear this dress, but hey, I wasted $5 on a dream - is that so wrong?

I cannot WAIT to have a go at this pattern. I know that by the time I'm able to sew it, the world will be long over the galaxy dress, but it won't matter to me. I will make view D and view E, and wear them, even if they are not in fashion!

Ohh, the neckline, the full skirt. The GLOVES! Oh!

I must confess - I bought this pattern in two sizes - my current size AND the size 12-14-16. I really enjoy the simple look of this dress, and I like that I can add straps without ruining the neckline. I may be wrong, but I think this is actually a newer pattern, so it will probably still be around next year, but I didn't want to take a chance, and at $5.00, why wait?

And finally,

Okay, this dress is NOT a style I would ordinarily wear, but I tried on a wedding dress similar to this one,

and even though I'm not slender, it still looked surprisingly pretty. I think that at size 12, I might be able to pull it off. And again, if not, oh well. There's always ebay. :)

Oh, and here's my plan to drop 10 dress sizes in a year;

1. Walk every day for 30 minutes (already doing)
2. Work out twice a week (already doing)
3. Eat breakfast (starting Monday, after shopping)
4. Switch from an extra large Tim's a day (coffee, for you non-Canadians) to a small Tim's. (This is the only thing that truly makes me sad)
5. Carry a water bottle everywhere, and keep drinking. (starting Monday)

I have, on more than one occasion, dropped two dress sizes in between three weeks and a month by doing this. It sounds too simple, but the first couple of dress sizes are always easy when you're already quite large - it's the rest of them that take a lot of time. I think I can drop ten in a year by doing the same, and doing a bit of portion control as well. For me, portion control is six cookies, not ten, and no eating until I groan. Which means I still eat all I want, but not extra, which I have a habit of doing - both my fiance and I hate leftovers, so if I'm not careful about how much food I actually cook, we'll eat ourselves sick in order to avoid having the same meal twice. If I'm careful about the amount of food I actually cook, all should be right with the world.

Corset/Skirt Combo

2008-04-13T20:21:00.010-06:00

EDIT: Yes, I know the picture is creepy - now I know that photoshopping out my arms and legs makes me look like Boxing Helena, so I won't do it anymore, I promise!

Finally, back to sewing!

I've been working on a number of projects lately; a corset, a sundress, and a skirt with strange box pleats that aren't making a bunch of sense to me.

I'm finding as I'm going along that I'm REALLY bad at following patterns. I need to work on that, because as the complexity of the garments I make increases, I'm going to need some experience with actually following the rules. Sometimes, though, not following the rules works out all right.

I made this corset and matching skirt without a pattern. I'm pleased that I was able to construct this garment at all, though I'm not totally pleased with the details.

The bustline is messed up, and the whole corset is just a teeny bit twisted, likely from lack of care while cutting. I didn't straighten it before I took the picture, so it looks a bit worse than it actually is. Still, once I fix the strange humps at the bustline, and get the correct boning in place, this outfit should end up about as good as any RTW piece. See, that's a measure of my sewing skill (or lack thereof) - all you experienced folk out there are sewing because RTW quality is sub-par, and I'm just pleased that I managed to make something of RTW quality!

As I said, I made this outfit entirely without a pattern. Both pieces are lacking finishing, but already, I have to admit to being pretty pleased with myself. The fabric I used was a moderate weight denim - it would have made great capris for spring, which is what I originally envisioned when I bought it. I still have enough to make a matching bolero jacket, although, while I LOVE the fabric and am pleased with the outfit, I do wonder if adding a bolero in the same fabric would be a bit of pattern overload?

The corset is fairly basic; three layers plus a waist tape, it just needs to have the proper bones inserted in the boning channels; I'm waiting on my order from Farthingales, but when it gets here, I'll be adding black exterior boning casings, and adding black along the seams to the skirt; they're just tacked together right now, so I'll probably remove them and add some black piping or something.

Even if I never wear this piece, I'm still glad I gave it a try. Now I know that I can make reality match my vision, if I go slowly and talk to myself a lot.