Well we are over here thawing out after the snow. When I posted Wednesday I talked about how much snow we’d gotten on Monday – well we got WAY MORE on wednesday! It ended up being a record – most snow we’ve had in something like 53 years?? Crazy!
The backyard Wednesday night:
The cove Thursday morning:
So yeah Chase was off work again Thursday. He went in Friday, got stuck in the parking lot and had to be pushed out, then they closed early anyway.
I liked watching the snow build up on the table.
Crazy thing were these monster icicles hanging off the house. This one dripped down and froze this chair on the back porch:
So cozy!
This is just HALF of one of the monster icicles. Chase wouldn’t let me break them off all the way, didn’t want them pulling off any shingles. I SOOOO wanted to go at them all with a bat.
Saturday it started warming up and Sunday it got up to like 58 degrees so the whole weekend was hearing “thumps” of icicles melting and falling off.
These dudes up by the upper window were some of the last big ones left by yesterday mid-day. At one point Saturday I heard this massive thump and thought Chase had fallen upstairs… nope, just icicles.
Today it’s getting up into the 50s again so I bet there’s next to nothing left by the end of the day. Anything left will be gone tomorrow when it gets up into the 60s.
Saturday we did manage to get the car out of the cove and run some errands – target mostly, where I found HER!
Saturday was a happy mail day – these got delayed like 3 days because our mail carrier couldn’t get into the cove.
Disney stopped doing the free magicbands December 2020. Which meant that because we couldn’t go on our trip last year we missed out on our last 2 pairs of free magicbands. Soooo we bought them for this trip. Chase picked the Grand Floridian one (the white one on the left) – it’s got a cute Mickey on the side. I picked a plain one, just in one of the newer colours I didn’t have – it’s the “blue iris” colour and I love it! (the plain ones were only $5. not bad)
Those 2 were all we needed to finally fill in the last few gaps on the magicband wreath.
I think I’m going to make new skin stickers for the trip – I reallllly wanted that limited edition Wandavision magic band but it’ll be long gone by the time we get there and I’m not paying the $$$$ for somebody reselling it. I’ve got 3 newer style bands that are plain I could use – a pink, orange, and a yellow. I think I’ll make a Scarlet Witch skin for probably the pink one.
Sewing-wise… nothing happened this weekend. I still haven’t gotten my elastic I ordered for the bra project so that’s still on hold. Instead I decided to work on masks. I have no pics of any of this, so sorry for the boring wall of text.
Last year I came up with a good pattern for stretch fabrics – I had 2 really cute stretch prints that I’ve used to make masks since but I really needed to tweak the pattern for non-stretch. I took the original knit pattern and enlarged it slightly – mostly vertically – since without the stretch the edge of the cotton didn’t fit over the chin very well.
From that pattern I did a test mask out of some scrap cotton and refined it a bit more. Then from that one did some more tweaks.I got to where I was pretty happy with the fit but the bottom of it wanted to sit right up against my mouth which was annoying. We’ve bought some mask-inserts that are supposed to help with that but they didn’t fit under my masks well (I have a tiny face) and seemed like they’d be really uncomfortable for prolonged wear. We also found a 3d printable one but that one didn’t work well either.
So I dug back into it Saturday because I felt like it was a problem I could fix through patterning. I worked it through 2 more iterations (ended up with 5 patterns overall – each one improving on the last) and finally, Saturday I cracked the problem – it was as simple as changing the shape of the bottom dart. It now fits way better on the chin/jaw and doesn’t sit up against my mouth near as much. I also had Chase try it and it worked well on him, too – though when making his, I will probably enlarge it slightly.
So now that I’ve got that figured out I’m going to make a bunch of masks for the disney trip – stuff to match our dapper day outfits and just other fun geeky stuff. I’ve got only one shot at my matching Dale mask – I literally have one square of the shirt fabric just barely big enough to make a mask out of. LOL. Also plain to make a Padme one, a regular Leia one, a Bespin Leia one and a Black Widow one to match all of my planned outfits. And some other fun stuff. I have so many cute cotton prints.
Speaking of… LOOK AT THIS FABRIC IS IT NOT THE CUTEST EVER
I only got a fat quarter of it – probably enough for 2-3 masks and maaaaybe a set of ears? (maybe just the front of the ears but still). I’m obsessed.
Ok so now let’s have some more photos before the next wall of text.
Yesterday I straightened up Kevin’s room and the guest room, organizing the shelves and just cleaning up. I opened the curtains in Kevin’s room (we keep them closed because that window gets a LOT of afternoon sun and heats the room up a lot)… Luna discovered the sun and very much enjoyed it.
And here is a cat in a hat.
Next wall of text… DISNEY!!!
So last week I was refreshing the dining reservations page every morning to make sure I knew when booking was open to us. Then one day on like thursday I think it suddenly released 2 days instead 1. I dunno if that was a blip on their side or maybe it just didn’t load properly the day before, but it freaked me out and now I wasn’t sure if our booking day was sunday or monday. Or if it released 2 days again, Saturday!! It really just put me in a jumble. So I got up at 4:40 AM Saturday morning to check – because some sites said they released at 4:45AM my time. That was untrue, they released at 5AM. And it was just one day so it wasn’t our window yet. I got up Sunday at 4:55AM to check again – no dice. So this morning was my 3rd day in a row getting up at at the butt crack of dawn to book dining and at least it was fruitful.
I got everything on our list!! I had written down all of our dining picks for our original 2020 trip so I could just kinda copy it again, though I did end up making some tweaks to it over time.
So we got:
Narcoossee’s
Morimoto’s (so excited been craving that ramen since 2019)
Tutto Italia and Rose and Crown, the old favs
Oga’s Cantina
50s Primetime
Raglan Road
And one day we’re going to go over to Universal CityWalk and try something new for dinner over there.
Of course the disney site gave me fits and I had to switch to the app on my phone. Worked fine there.
Also because you guys know I like making lists, here’s my planned outfits:
1. Dapper Day Chip and Dale – for Dapper Day Saturday at MK
2. Dapper Black Widow – prob will wear sat night
3. Dapper Bespin Leia – Dapper Day Sunday at Epcot
4. New Leia Disneybound – still need to make outfit to go with the jacket
5. Padme Disneybound – need to buy outfit to wear under shrug
And I want to make one pair of new ears. And all the masks of course. I need to get started on all that. It’s nearly March.
Next photo break before the next wall of text – art!
I cleaned up and coloured the Wanda market piece.
I don’t just love it though.
Here’s just the cleaned up linework. Even this I feel like lost something in the face. Oh well.
Did a very light pass of colour on this Leia:
And then Saturday drew this Monica Rambeau:
I love her.
And now it’s time for the weekly Tiktok stats.
So I kinda already went over part of it because of the blip last week with my profile pic. Good news – the “ban” on my profile pic only lasted 24 hours so I had a new pic up by thursday.
So to backtrack –
Monday post (not planned) was the Hoth Leia tossing snow video.
451 likes. Traffic source: 94% following, 6% profile. Didn’t get to the FYP at all.
Tuesday post I privated only like 20 minutes after posting it because of the blaster issue. It was a slideshow of the Hoth Leia pics. I didn’t want to take the chance of leaving it up, so no stats to report.
Wednesday I threw up a reposted video with no sound really just to see how the blaster pfp “community guidelines violation” debacle had affected my reach and engagement. It absolutely flopped to no one’s surprise.
141 likes. Traffic source: 58% Following, 22% FYP (how?!), 18% profile
I did not post Thursday.
Friday I posted one of the new dressing videos I’d been sitting on – my Love Shack Kate costume. It did OK overall.
1,621 likes. Traffic source: 53% following, 48% FYP, 1% profile.
Not great FYP exposure but at least I’m not shadowbanned after the blaster debacle.
Saturday was another dressing video – Briar Rose. It did OK as well, slightly better than Kate:
1914 likes. Traffic: 52% FYP, 46% following.
Sunday I just threw together a video of our magic band wreath. For a totel throwaway video it did OK also.
1373 likes. Traffic: 50% following, 48% FYP.
Every other time I’ve posted a video of the disney stairs or the magic band wreath it has gone viral. Both were prior to August 2020 of course.
I’m really starting to feel like anything that gets 1K-2K in likes is now equivalent to the 20K-30K I used to get. My stuff generally makes it to the FYP – but doesn’t stay there, whereas I feel like prior to August 2019, my stuff would get pushed out to the FYP way longer and to more people. Now it’s like “ok you had a sip, that’s enough”
And I’m still losing followers faster than I can gain them. Almost down 300 now. I really don’t think 300 people all decided to unfollow me within a 2 week span. Previously I thought these “losing follower” moments were due to tiktok remove bot accounts, but now I don’t think so. I think tiktok is doing it, and that’s related to a tiktok conspiracy theory I saw recently – that if you look at some tiktokers with HUGE followings (like a celebrity), you can click on followers’ names in their follower list, go that person’s list of who they follow, and that celebrity is not in their following list. I’m thinking tiktok plays with people’s follower counts in this way.
I’m bummed that Kevin couldn’t come over this past weekend because of the weather. We couldn’t get out to go get him and even if we could, we couldn’t go pick up the pizza or anything like I’d planned. I’d had some cute videos planned for us to make. We’ll try again soon.
Anyway, I will post this week but it’ll be low posting again. Maybe Tues and Wed. We’ll see.