1. Got my car fixed. I won’t go into the whole story but it’s been having this “burping” problem since right before Celebration. We drove to Orlando and back with the “burping” – realized we did need to get it looked at but put it off until it died on me in traffic last week. Took it in Tuesday. $345 later it’s fixed and running nicely again. Thankful it wasn’t a bigger fix.
2. Wednesday night I had big sewing plans! I was a little stuck on Mon Mothma – I need brown thread – but I had an idea about something I wanted to make. Chase got home with dinner, we sat down to eat and to watch our current AFI movie (Blade Runner) and 2 minutes in, the power flickered and went off. And then it was off for nearly 3 hours. So… no sewing. We worked on the bookshelf in Chase’s office while we still had light until it got too hot, then we went outside and went for a little walk. By then it was dark so we had to start lighting candles. Sat around on the couch until around 8:40 it flickered back on. So that was a huge waste of a night.
3. I made the thing
After the power came back on that night I got a little bit of progress made and last night I finished it off.
It’s not perfect but it will do for my swimming at Na’s this summer.
It’s 100% leftover fabric. Red and gold were scrap fabric, the navy blue w/stars is some yardage I bought a few years ago when I needed some more fabric to meet a minimum order, so I got a couple of yards of this and it’s just been in my stash.
I used KwikSew 3239, the same pattern I used for the Spiderman swimsuit back in 2005. I decided to use the triangle top instead of the full coverage top, a decision I now kinda regret because I think it would’ve looked better in the full coverage.
I have a… complicated relationship with swimsuits. For years I refused to wear anything I deemed a “triangle” – just bits of fabric and string. I needed something athletic and hardy to do the kind of swimming I did (lots of jumping around, diving, etc) and that was hard to find, especially in a 2 piece which I preferred. I mostly preferred two piece because I liked the boy shorts – and have you ever looked for a one piece with boy shorts? I was extremely uncomfortable with wearing any kind of “triangle” swimsuit for YEARS. And that’s the whole reason I ended up making the Spidey swimsuit – I could make exactly what i wanted, AND make it geeky – there were no Thinkgeek or Hot Topic geeky swimsuit options back then.
Eventually I kinda relaxed my views on triangles and even owned a few for a while. But in probably the last 7-8 years, I’ve gotten to where I CANNOT find tops that fit. In any shape, triangles, full coverage, whatever. And it’s because my upper measurements have gotten SO weird; I still have the same band size I’ve always had, which is tiny, but the girls have slowly gotten bigger over time to the point that nothing off the rack fits. (If you see me complaining about old costumes not fitting, this is mostly the reason why.) I can buy a small that actually fits in the band size but doesn’t really cover everything. I can buy a medium or large that does cover everything but the band is gaping. I was able to get away with tops that tie on for a while, but that gets seriously uncomfortable after an hour or two. I’ve not been able to buy any of the cute Hot Topic swimsuits because of this – none of them fit. I really wanted that Sailor Moon one, too. The only top I could find last summer when I went shopping was a giant full coverage top with a bib sort of thing that covers the chest. Blah.
So I decided it was time to make my own again, because I could control the size of the band and the size of the cups and edit and alter it to fit me. And I had plenty of scrap spandex, so why not?
For the top cups I used the large, but changed it up to put a dart in the front to create the curve, instead of the huge gathers along the bottom the pattern called for. Also made the necktie and the lower band thicker. The neck tie I turned into a strap and sewed them together at center back. It looks a little wonky there where I sewed it, and some of the yellow bands in the front are a little twisted and uneven, and it could use some handsewing in places to tighten it up… but who cares? I’m not wearing this to a con. It’s just for fun and some swimming!
For the bottoms I left out the front lining and instead just full lined them, and added the yellow band at the top.
So that was a long diatribe. But I have a lot of feelings.
Anyway I also went through and kinda cleaned off the stuff I had just saved in my top folder on my laptop, and some of it was some costume stuff I’d used for like instagram but didn’t have on my site or smugmug or anything. So here we go.
First up is this super silly Disneyland thing which I could not find on my smugmug… I don’t know why! I know I had it somewhere but I couldn’t find it so I scanned it to post on ig.
When we went to Disneyland in 2010 Kevin had a Disney gift card to spend on whatever he wanted. He decided he wanted to do one of those photos where they paste your head on a picture of characters, and he wanted to do this Star Wars Hoth set-up one.
It absolutely cracks me up, I have a copy framed in our living room. Everytime I look at it I see something else that makes me laugh. Whether it’s Chase’s giant pasted on head, the fact the angle of his head is wrong, that hair on Kevin, Kevin’s super intense look, it’s so funny to me. Chase thinks it’s so ridiculous for a number of reasons, first being that yeah it doesn’t look great, second we could’ve photoshopped this better ourselves, and third we HAVE those costumes we don’t need our heads pasted on!!
But yeah I don’t know how I didn’t have it online to start with it but now it is. Yay.
Second is a Wonder Woman white backdrop pic I’ve never used for anything. But I like it.
I used it for my Mother’s Day post and put it next to the pic of mom in her WW costume.
Third, a couple of Leia I dug up. These are all from the white backdrop shoot back in like 2011 and are just ones I’ve never uploaded or used for whatever reason.
I’ve never liked this one much but just recently I’ve started using for my RL/501st profile pic and ended up really liking it, I was surprised! So I uploaded the full thing.
Just a minute, let me finish my text…
I think this one is funny, Chase was doing test shots to get everything set up right and I was just playing on my phone. Never used it because I realized at that angle my part was NOT good and my buns look uneven. But oh well. It’s cute.