I can’t think of a title.
But here we are with another low-effort week. I really have nothing much to post today.
I finished my hat.
I ended up having to take the top part off, take it apart, cut it in half (height-wise), put it back together and sew it back on. It was just too tall and made the hat look pirate-y. See last week’s picture.
Also the inside isn’t perfect. The pattern instructions said to clip the inside edge of the brim (the part against the head) to the stitching line, which I did. Then it said to either glue or sew those notched pieces to the upper part of the hat, and then cover it with ribbon. OK. I decided gluing would be easiest so I did that – and it made the upper part of my hat wrinkle up really ugly from the stress of the notched pieces pulling against the upper part. So I had to pull it apart. Then we were near a Michael’s friday so I got some yellow ribbon. Got it about halfway sewn on before I realized the ribbon was just ripping apart everywhere i put a needle in. So not wanting to go back to the store, I instead used a piece of red bias tape to cover up the ugly notched insides. It’s not perfect but at this point I’m tired of it and I consider it finished.
In good news, the waistband material came in for Chase’s jacket way earlier than we expected! It showed up Saturday. Unfortunately it way way lighter than the cuff material, so Saturday night I threw it in some graphite RIT dye and darkened it up. The tone is slightly off but from 5 ft away they look pretty close.
So I got the lining and exterior pieces sewn together, and the waistband attached to the outer layer. It’s pinned on at the inside – I’ll be doing that part by hand.
I should have taken a pic of this on Chase because it looks super sloppy on my dressform LOL
I got the collar cut and was going to attach it last night but for whatever reason I just could not wrap my head around which way it needed to go so I gave up and I’ll look at it again tonight.
Yeah yesterday was kind of a wash. I got up around 9 and literally just laid on the couch til 2. I made myself get up and mess with the jacket a bit, then we went to run a couple of errands and pick up dinner. After dinner I tried to sew a bit more but gave up and back to the couch. I just felt like crap yesterday overall.
Saturday we did a bit of running around too. We ran out to pick up a pie for Nana’s bday present. While we were out near the pie place we dropped by my parents’ house and dropped off our HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN!! It’s still in good shape and they’re going to break it up in the back yard for wild life. Then to Kevin’s house to drop off something for them and then to Nana’s to drop off her bday pie.
Kevin is getting his second shot TOMORROW! Hooray! Planning on him to come spend a weekend with us in the next couple of weeks. Watch Wandavision, play some battlefront, eat some pizza. Also thought we could set up the white backdrop and do some Luke/Leia shots.
Random Padme Lake dress sunrise photo because I have nothing else to post today.
And now here is my monthly tiktok rant.
So as I’ve mentioned before – the main reason I get frustrated with tiktok is that it’s literally the only social media I’ve EVER specifically made content for. Every other thing (posting on cosplay sharing sites, myspace, tumblr, facebook, instagram) – I’m only posting content I was going to be making anyway. That is, I’m always going to have photos of my costumes. From events, photoshoots or in-progress, I will always be making that content for my website, so it’s no skin off my nose if those posts of those photos don’t do well when I post them to whatever is the social media of the moment. I didn’t waste any time creating that content because the goal of the content was met (having photos for my site).
Tiktok is the first platform I have ever actually set time aside and made content specifically for it. So when tiktok’s algorithm decides my content isn’t good enough and it goes nowhere – that’s frustrating.
So recently I sat down and went through all of my videos to try to figure out where the breakdown happened. For reference – I don’t have a pro account. When I left the creator fund (mid-September last year), I also went back to a regular account. So I don’t have analytics, this is literally just looking at each video and noting the amount of likes. I decided to use amount of likes vs views because I feel like it’s a better gauge of engagement.
I broke my videos into 3 segments:
1. Videos posted in 2019. I only started posting in September, so this covers Sept-Dec 2019.
2. Videos posted in Jan-August 2020. I know Jan-August is a strange amount of time – but August marks when I joined the Creator Fund. I wanted to see before and after Creator Fund. (I joined Creator Fund August 17 2021 and left mid September.)
3. Videos posted September 2020-January 2021.
As I mentioned, I counted likes. So, as of when I was doing this last week, I had 385 public videos.
33 of 385 of those had over 10K likes.
24 of 385 of those had 5000-9999 likes.
206 of 385 had 1000-4999 likes.
122 of 385 had 0-999 likes.
Of the 33 videos that had over 10K likes…
36% of them were posted in 2019.
60% of them were posted Jan-August 2020.
3% were posted since September. Or 1. Literally 1 video since September 1 has gotten over 10K likes. That’s it.
Obviously you say the older videos will have more likes and views – but I say the amount of likes is negligible especially on less-liked videos. Typically the most engagement I’m going to get on a video is within the first 2 weeks of it being posted. After that it falls into the abyss – UNLESS it was a viral video. The only older videos I see still occasionally getting likes are the ones that were over 10K to start with, and then it’s maybe like 1-2 likes a month.
In the other end of the spectrum…
Of the 122 videos with 0-999 likes:
8% were from 2019
24% were from Jan-August 2020.
67% were since September. 82 of 122 videos.
Looking back at the data I collected, it’s easy to see that prior to August 2020, I would have natural peaks and valleys. There would be times where I had a lot of engagement, everything doing really well, and then I’d dip into a couple of weeks of lower engagement. But then something would do really well and everything would come up again. Since joining and leaving the creator fund – I AM still seeing the peaks and valleys but on a MUCH smaller scale. Whereas a peak earlier in 2020 would be videos doing between 2K on the lower side and 10K on the higher side, a peak is now 1K-2K.
As an experiment, I started posting my tiktoks to instagram as reels. I had said I would NOT use reels but it does work much better for reposting tiktoks than posting them as regular posts.
So to compare:
My Black Widow dressing video on tiktok: 546 likes (with 94,700 followers)
Same video on instagram: 1,180 likes (with 15,800 followers)
That makes no sense.
Yesterday I decided to switch my tiktok account back to a pro account so I could start watching analytics again. I’m equally frustrated and fascinated by this. I have no desire to create new content that takes more than a minute or two to film at the moment since my engagement is so low – but I want to keep messing with things and seeing if anything I try fixes it. So I’m torn on whether taking this week off posting or posting all reposts with new sounds and new hashtags in a theme. I may try reposts this week. Let’s experiment. It’s so bad right now it can’t get much worse. If it does… I’ll just make a new account I guess.