Welcome to the Monday-est Monday of them all.
I’m trying to remain optimistic and put in my Disney and Dragoncon vacation days today. I feel better about Disney than Dragoncon at the moment but I am chugging ahead with all my plans for this year as though they will happen. It’s really almost a repeat of my 2020 plans – I need to finish Jean’s skant for Huntsville Expo in April, finish all my disneybound/dapper day stuff for Disney trip at the end of April, and then Dragoncon projects I didn’t do last year. I haven’t updated my white board list of projects since around early April 2020, so it’s all still accurate LOL.
Just to organize things in my head, projects I need to do before April:
1. Finish skant for Jean
2. Finish my dapper day Dale (top needs hemmed and a back closure. Need to make my hat and belt)
3. Make Chase’s dapper day Chip jacket (pieces are cut)
4. Finish new disneybound Leia – jacket is done, need to make top/shorts and park-friendly belt.
If we do end up going to Huntsville Expo, I’m not making anything new. Except probably a matching mask. Poe Dameron Leia was supposed to be for it last year so I’ll just keep that on the docket. Oooh I can make a glitter mask.
I was lazy most of this weekend which was much needed. I had the goal of either starting on Liberty Dies Padme again (at least, re-familiarizing myself with my plans) or finishing my ceremonial Leia sleeves. I did neither.
I did, at least, get ceremonial Leia on the dressform to start on it, but I ended up working on another project out of the blue….
Basically when I went to put away our christmas trees on New Year’s Day, I had to pull some stuff out of the attic space to make a path to get to the tree boxes. Among the things I pulled out of the attic space was my garbage bag full of old t-shirts I’ve been saying I’m going to make into a t-shirt quilt for like a decade now. Seriously I started putting them all together at the old house, years before we moved, and the garbage bag made the move with us. It got added to as I unpacked at the new house in 2018. I have to move that dumb garbage bag everytime I need to get into the attic and the bag itself is tearing up.
So while I had it out I was like… you know what, 2021, let’s do this damn thing.
I ended up using 70 t-shirts – 35 on each side. Wow! Out of the bag there were about 8 I ended up not using. A couple of those were just in too bad a shape (the graphics cracking and starting to peel) and in one case I decided I just couldn’t cut it up (my first Her Universe shirt, the grey Han and Leia one). I decided to organize them by colour.
The more colourful side A – though I changed it up a bit after this photo:
Of note, 3 of my fav Beatles shirts including the obnoxious hot pink and glitter one in the top row. I loved that shirt but it was too small for these. So many of these were “baby doll” style t-shirts from the late 90s/early 2000s that even if I were still as skinny as I was then, you couldn’t pay me to wear anymore.
Two sides of The Dented Helmet shirt I got for doing table duty at Dragoncon 2007.
The Han and Chewie/Calvin and Hobbes mash-up shirt that I swear every Star Wars fan owned in 2010. Chase still has his version LOL.
The yellow Han Solo shirt on the far right. I paid way too much for that on ebay back in the day. It was supposedly vintage but I don’t think it actually was. I did like it because it was glittery.
“Elvis is dead, Sinatra is dead, and me I also feel not so good” one of my favourite all time shirts, it was a reprint of a Japanese shirt with funny english on it.
“Runs like a girl” – my mom got that for me because it reminded her of the Phoebe/Rachel Friends episode where Phoebe runs crazy, she and I had laughed so hard at that episode.
The Merry/Pippin shirt, I loved that shirt, though my main memory of it was forgetting it in my car in a bag with my wet swimsuit and then having to wear the smelly shirt as an emergency change… it’s a long story.
My Giant Size X-Men shirt – wore that when I met both Patrick Stewart AND Stan Lee (the first time).
The darker side B-
The European School of Manwhores shirt… they had dumped a whole pile of those on the freebie table at Dragoncon 2004. Cath took a couple of them. I don’t remember taking one but one ended up at my house. It floated around for forever – then one day, Kevin showed up at work wearing this shirt LMAO. (He stayed with us so often back then, it wasn’t unusual for our laundry to get mixed up) I was just surprised his mom let him wear a shirt that said that. I mentioned it to her like ages later, and she had no idea the shirt said “School of Manwhores” LMAO she gave it back to me after that. So I had to include it in the quilt.
My “Blue Harvest” shirt that has paint all over it. It was my painting shirt for years.
My Page and Plant concert tanktop – “one size fits all” my ass.
My Spamalot shirt, I wanted to wear that more often but it was just so SHORT.
I think the LEAST old shirt on the whole quilt is the Vader riding Dumbo shirt on the 5th row. I got that on our 2014 trip I think it was? And it was just too tight and too see-through. I should have sized up but oh well.
My Keep On Tolkien shirt! I loooooooooved that shirt. Wore it out. It had bad pitstains. Yeah I’ve read about how to get rid of pitstains but it was another one that was super short so it wasn’t like I was going to wear it again.
The Trot for Spot shirt is from when we took Indy to a walk in Overton Park in 2003. That was a good day.
Anyway, enough rambling. Chase made me a 10×10 wood square to use as a guide to get the images centered and cut. It worked really great and my electric scissors were a godsend for this. Once I had everything cut I laid them out the way I wanted, then sewed them all together.
Once I had both sides sewn together, I pinned double sided lightweight fusible to the back of one side, and then sewed the two layers together, flipped it right side out, made sure all my fusible was still in place and laying flat, and then ironed it all together. It’s still holding up well after a wash but I may still go back and do some stitching on the seams just to make sure the 2 layers don’t separate.
So it’s not technically a “quilt” – I didn’t want to do any batting in it (wanted to keep it as lightweight as possible in terms of heat – I’ve got plenty of HOT blankets and wanted something cooler) and at the moment the fusible is doing the heavy lifting of keeping the layers together. But overall I’m really happy with it.
I went up to my sewing room last night to start looking at my Leia sleeves but instead ended up laying on the couch under the blanket and looking at tiktok.
Yesterday I did also finally try on Eliza!
The wig and shoes were just a stand-in (the wig is my Janet Snakehole wig. It’s not bad just too poofy at the top, and I’m using my Marie Antoinette shoes which were a littttttle shorter than I planned on getting for this).
I do want to sew in some snaps at the waistband of the skirt to attach to the inside of the bodice, just so I can make sure it’s sitting in the right place. And I still need to put a closure on the petticoat waistband. But overall I’m pretty happy with it.
One annoying nitpick is that that bodice is wanting to wrinkle in the front at about the waistline down – that wasn’t an issue I had in the green Georgian I made with the same pattern last year so I wasn’t expecting that. It’s not as bad if I make myself stand up as straight as I can.
I got these pics added to the Eliza portfolio page. now I just need to deal with shoes.
In other news… Nana and Kristie dropped off our Christmas presents and look what I got!
Now I just need Chase to fix the stand of my white display form so I can have all 4 forms in business.
(I stripped the screw of the stand of the white version back in September. Thankfully the white form also works on the pole/stand of my regular dressform, so I’ve been switching them back and forth as needed, but the display form really does not work well on the dressform’s stand. It’s too top heavy.)
Also look at this weirdo:
New Year’s Eve Chase and I had a nice dinner at home and watched a movie (and drank a bit and watched some vines LOL). I tried to stay up but at 11:30 I decided 2020 wasn’t worth it and went to bed. LMAO.
Last thing – my last present from Chase showed up last week:
I’ve had them in my wax warmer all week and I LOVE them! French Quarter is my favourite, followed by Beach Club. I want to get more.
(Also just randomly but I’m pleased to hear a couple of my family members have already gotten their first dose of the vaccine. Based on the current schedule in our county sounds like we’ll be able to get ours in March/April. Fingers crossed)