Thursday was my birthday! And it was a rather important birthday in relation to my blog — this is the 20th birthday I’ve blogged about here.
And funnily enough, I celebrated this birthday the exact same way I celebrated it in 1998 – we went to Molly’s with my family and we sat in the exact same place and they brought out a birthday dessert and everybody sang and it was embarrassing, LOL. Some things don’t change.
But let me back up to my actual birthday on Thursday first. I was tempted to call in to work sick but I didn’t.
Nana had left me this on the garage door!
She also had a card taped to it for me to find, and Chase had sent me along with a package to open when I got to work. So that was a fun start to the day.
The package from Chase ended up being a new copy of the Dark Phoenix saga, which I had found on ebay and asked for – it’s the exact same version from the 90s I have somewhere buried in the storage unit. I wanted to have Chris Claremont sign it at MCX, then realize there’s no way I’m going to find it before then… so I just found the exact same thing and bought it so I had it for him to sign LOL
And inside Nana’s card was a fun present!!
Nana and Kristie showed me these a couple of months ago, they found them cleaning out a drawer… they were Nana’s when she was a kid, and I loooved the art on them, I told them they should have them framed! And they gave them to me for my birthday. So as soon as we get moved I’M going to have them framed, I love this gorgeous space art, it’s so Epcot!!
Chase brought flowers and dinner and cakes home that evening. We watched Star Trek and then I got to open presents.
First up he got me 2 books I’d been looking at at the book store a few days before.
And you guys know I’ve about given up on the LOTR blind boxes because I literally just keep getting hobbits. I probably have all 4 hobbits 3 times over now. But he got me one more blind box aaaaaaaaaand
GANDALF!!!!!!
I can literally stop buying the now. I’d still like a Gollum and Galadriel but Gandalf was my end goal.
AND!! omg
So I hadn’t mentioned it here, I don’t think, but lately I’ve gone down an absolute rabbithole of watching doll repaints on youtube. I’m completely entranced with it. I really especially enjoy Dollightful‘s videos and repaints, and she uses a lot of Monster High dolls, so I asked for a couple of beat up ebay dolls I could maybe try repainting one day soon. (And I’ve alllllways wanted to make doll clothes so there’s that, too.)
He got me TWO 17in Monster High dolls! They are HUGE!
And omg they are so freaking cute I’m terrified of messing them up.
So I am starting with making clothes first. I got out some costume scraps and starting playing with it Friday night. I think I may go to goodwill sometime soon and look for something else to START on first.
Anyway I love them and they are my precious bebies.
Saturday we had auditions for the church Christmas play. Mom is the director so I already knew I’d have a part. (Chase usually does too, but he’s too busy traveling with movie work stuff this fall he won’t have time.) It’s a cute little play – it’s basically A Christmas Carol but with fairytale characters – Scrooge is the Big Bad Wolf, etc. So mom told me she was making me be Cinderella (AKA Mrs Cratchit), and so as I was sitting there thinking, what could I make, I thought of Cinderella’s peasant dress from the live action movie, showed it to mom, got the OK and right after auditions went and bought my fabric LOL
So… SURPRISE! New costume. I had to go to Hobby Lobby anyway to get that interfacing for Leia’s collar, so I was just going to grab a close enough cotton to make a quick version.
I got 8 yards of this (it’s only 45″ wide so I wanted to make sure I had plenty.), was able to use a coupon so it wasn’t expensive at all! It’s a nice colour for it, it has little white dots instead of the pink floral motif – I think it’s fine for this project. I’ll get back to more talk about it in a minute.
We had to run to Target too and I found THISSSSSS
OMG they had a BUNCH Of them!! They had some of the first wave earth ponies, then the unicorn/Pegasus set, and then some of the rainbow set too!
I was torn between Twilight and Firefly. Firefly was my FAVOURITE. And mine has a stamp on her butt. (I realized one of our rubber stamps fit perfectly on her butt under her tail so 4 year old me was like… perfect! So her butt says “Good job!” or something like that because it was one of mom’s teacher stamps…. LMAO) But out of the ones they had on the shelf, Twilight is the only one I never had. So I got her.
I was SO excited to get it home and open it. I’ve always craved that moment of opening one of my old 80s toys again. But… as soon as I got the box open and took a big whiff… it didn’t smell right. Is that weird? LOL I was expecting a very particular plastic smell, which it didn’t have. I have to assume they used a new kind of plastic on these new ponies.
But I was still very excited to have her.
Anyway got home to some mail…
Mel sent me a LIGHTSABER PIZZA CUTTER for my birthday! We picked up a pizza at target so sometime this week we’ll be able to break it in!!
Chase got me this hilarious pin (we say this all the time)
And back into the costume realm for a moment, my first set of swatches came!
The pinks are for Ariel.
The pink on the top is a very cheap polyester charmeuse. The one on the bottom is a silk charmeuse. While the colour of the poly is closer to what I want, I think I’m probably going to go with the silk, it looks so much more elegant. I can always dye it.
Although… if I do this beadwork on the skirt I’m thinking of it… it may do better to do it on poly then constantly be worried about messing up the way-more-expensive silk. Hmmmm.
And then the green is PERFECT for Belle’s library dress underskirt so I’m definitely ordering that soon.
So then we had an early dinner with the family at Molly’s, like I said at the beginning of this post. One difference 20 years later, I got to wear the sombrero.
Then we went over to Jean’s house and played 5 Minute Dungeon. That was fun!
Sunday was a lazy day. It was rainy, I wasn’t feeling great, so I spent most of the morning laying around listening to podcasts and dozing.
That afternoon I finally got up and got to work. I prewashed my fabric and once it was dry, went about finding a pattern to use.
I had 3 patterns pulled as a possibility, but I ended up going with Simplicity 5041. I liked the pattern shapes for it better than the other 2. Only problem? For whatever reason my copy of this is sizes 16-20. So I had to size it down.
SO HELPFUL
I got all the pieces cut. Changes I made (besides sizing):
Eliminated 2 of the darts on the bodice.
Cut all of the skirt pieces out using just the front panel piece. The side/back piece was way too wide, I didn’t feel like refolding it, and they’re just big squares anyway. I cut 4 of front skirt panel for all of the panels.
took some of the width out of the sleeves.
Skipped the facing and fully lined the bodice
Here’s all my pieces cut out.
I did my usual thing of cutting 3 sets of bodice panels. 2 are lining, with boning sandwiched in between. I didn’t do a ton of boning – just 2 at the front bust seams, and 1 at each side seam. So 4 all together. Just for structure more than anything.
Lining panels with boning:
After I finished that I started playing with the outer layer, including that front panel piece…
So since I’m only using the cotton which is a lot thicker than what they used for this in the movie, I thought maybe I’d just do the upper part ruched like this? I was worried doing it all the way down the center panel like hers would look too bulky, especially on me considering I’m a bit larger than tiny Lily James. And I actually ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel with my fabric – I don’t think I’d have a big enough piece to do it anyway?
I could sacrifice one of my skirt panels to try it. But I’m pretty dead certain it wouldn’t look great.
And this isn’t supposed to be a dead on screen-accurate recreation. It’s a quick version for a church play LOL I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Either way, I do think I need to open up the neckline a bit more. Probably lose at least an inch and a half on either side.
I’m now thinking I will sacrifice half a skirt panel and cut the front panel wider… and attempt the fully ruched front panel just to see how it looks. Who knows, might look good…
Anyway, ART
Only got one this week.
This one was really Jedi-ish!
The original concept art didn’t have a lot of colour on it, it was mostly black and white with some toned shading, so I tried to keep it that way in mine, because I thought the pale tone worked.
Happy be-lated Birthday! š
thank you!!