First off OMG I had a migraine ALL last week, monday thru friday and friday I made myself sick taking way too much pain medicine (because I was out of migraine medicine). So that was fun. Especially while trying to get the house ready for moving this weekend!!
But tuesday I was surprised with another package at work:
Chase got me the Belle AND the Leia Nendoroids!!
I’m not opening until we “move move” because I don’t want to lose any little parts.
I was really trying to finish all my major sewing before we moved out of our house. I got close.
I finished up the bodice for this orange thing early last week. I had a lot of problems with it though, for whatever reason – despite all being cut from the same pattern and sewn with the same seam allowance- my outer fashion fabric layer was WAY wider than my inner layer. It was just a mess, I had to take it up at some of the seams to make it fit the lining. Got the grommets set in… and then I discovered that the problem wasn’t that the outer layer was too wide — the inner layer was TOO SHORT. I should’ve been letting out the lining instead of taking in the fashion fabric layer. So I have a giant gap in the back where it laces up. And of course by that point it’s closed and the grommets are set in so there’s not much I can do without doing MAJOR surgery. The gap isn’t so bad from about the waist down, but up at the very top it’s… pretty bad. I had to make a GIANT modesty panel to put behind it.
And then to top it off, it doesn’t look great because I’m a chunk right now and I’m “chunking” over the back of it. I’m hoping I can still have time to lose weight before Dcon, now that we’re done with the move, I can swim every afternoon and watch what I eat. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to make an extension to cover some of it up out of my leftover satin 😛
ANYWAY. Complain time over, now to the fun part. I started sewing on the fringe at that point which I was really looking forward to! The fringe on the bodice had to be handsewn, but I was able to machine-sew all the fringe onto the shorts, so that went faster than expected!
A bit blurry but here’s the bodice and shorts together. I ended up having to shorten the shorts a little more and taking the lowest layer of fringe off – once I had the whole thing on together I realized they were SLIGHTLY too long and it was throwing the proportions off.
Got the straps added, too, and it’s basically done and wearable at this point. Going to wait and see what I need to do about the chunkiness of myself closer to dcon.
So the only major sewing I didn’t get to before the move was Amidala – I had wanted to get those panels sewn in before we moved, BUT… we moved OUT a day earlier than I thought we were (which I’ll get to in a minute), so I wasn’t able to do it. So I’m hoping to knock it out tonight. (I think I’m going to have to hand-sew it because it’s just too much to get thru the machine without catching any of the pleated sections.)
SO! Friday I got home and took a nap. Luna decided to nap on the curtains I’d taken down:
And I did get the last touches on the orange thing done that night… and ended up sitting around moaning about how it was my last night in my sewing room.
Saturday morning we got up super early, went ahead and took our bed apart (the mattress is super heavy and wouldn’t have fit in the back of Chase’s truck, hence why we couldn’t stay Saturday night….) and then went and picked up our moving truck. Dad came over to help move the heavy stuff, my aunt uncle and Kevin all came over to help too, and once mom got done with her own stuff, she also came over.
Since we’d already emptied out the guest room, I put Luna in there with her cat condo by the window so she could watch us in the front yard.
That way she’d be out of the way and we wouldn’t have to worry about having the doors set open.
We got all the major stuff moved out Saturday. It was exhausting. I know it was way more exhausting for dad and Chase than any of the rest of us. Chase and I loaded up his truck with stuff to take to Nana’s – including Luna! – and we headed over there for the night.
Back in my 2009 sewing room!
This is their big bonus room over the garage, which they already had set up as a living room, so it’ll be “our” living room and my sewing room for next couple of months. And it’s also currently where Luna is staying – we have a big folding room divider blocking the staircase and the door closed at the other end. Hoping that soon we can get a baby gate with a door to put at the other set of stairs so she can have the whole upstairs to explore. (We don’t want her going downstairs because Nana’s dog Daisy is down there. Daisy will not go upstairs. And I figure once Luna knows there’s a dog down there, she won’t want to go down. But we want to keep her from even thinking about it!)
Saturday night I slept on the couch in the big room with Luna, just because she’d JUST finally crept her way out of the kennel and was behind the couch. Around 1 AM she appeared and sat on the couch with me for a bit.
And then proceeded to keep me up for the next 3 hours. First she started popping her claws on the couch and chairs. Then I could hear her messing with stuff where I couldn’t see her. So finally I got ahold of her and put her back in the kennel. She started chewing on the bars and then YOWLING. So I thought if I draped a towel over her kennel to make it “dark” she’d go to sleep. Nope, she reached one claw out one of the openings of the kennel, pulled the towel off, and continued yowling. So I let her back and said do your thing, I’m going to sleep. She was, of course, fine the rest of the night.
Sunday morning we got on up and headed out to finish up at the house.
We had our first meal in the house sitting on the floor because we didn’t have the furniture in yet. So we had our last sitting on the floor, too.
The ugly, scratched linoleum in the laundry room. We never got around to replacing this – it’s original to the house (It’s also what was originally in the kitchen when we moved in.) I will miss it!
We did two runs with both cars to take stuff over to Nana’s – mostly our personal stuff (clothes, etc), and Chase’s office things. And then a storage unit run.
Empty bedroom.
Mom, dad and Jean came over to help again and did the storage run with us, which was helpfully because we didn’t have room for like 3 things, so they were able to bring those over so we didn’t have to make 2 trips.
Empty living room
Once we finished getting the last of the trash out and cleaning up, we went and ran a few errands, including to Best Buy for a treat (get to that in a sec), and to pick up 2 more outlet covers we discovered while moving furniture that had never been replaced. And we picked up a gift card for the pizza place on the corner in front of house to leave for the new homeowners, along with a list of contacts for the services we use (pest control, HVAC, lawn guy, etc). We went back to drop that off and leave our keys.
We said goodbye, I cried a little bit, and then we left for the last time. Well, last time for me, Chase has to go back by this morning and disarm the alarm, since technically today is our last day there, but obviously it made no sense for us to wait til a workday to finish moving LOL.
I spent the rest of last night getting my sewing room a little organized.
Quickly realized that having my sewing stuff AND Luna staying in the same room is going to be a problem LOL. Because she loves to chew on certain fabrics (netting, organza), and thread. I need to find the cover for my machine so I can cover it up when I’m not using it, and get all my fabric put away.
So my treat I got at Best Buy was a new camera!
Chase promised with his summer bonus we’d put a bit away to get me a new camera, since my old blue point-and-shoot is giving up the ghost (it wants to take every photo as a panorama photo…). This one has a neat little flip-up screen so you can take selfies with it and it can send photos to your phone over wi-fi! (though I’m not sure I’m going to use it, it has terrible reviews of that part… may try it out and just see.) But yay real camera! I need to take some pics with it before Dcon to get used to how it works.
A big reason I wanted a “real” camera was because last year at Dragoncon… most of my pics of my new costumes were taken on my crappy Iphone 6. Which looked awful and dark. (We did have the blue point and shoot with us, but like I said… panorama problems.) So this year I’m hoping to have better photos after the con and not have to do immediately do a white backdrop shoot again just so I have good photos.
Art time!
I’ve moved into the concept Padmes!
Both of these are based on concept art by Iain McCaig.
Rushed this one a bit since I was trying to get it done before the move. But it’s ok.
Tonight – more organizing stuff to make it livable and workable. Hand-sewing on Amidala. You can see it all in my instagram story as usual 🙂