Today is Chase’s bday yay!!
Well I don’t really have much of interest to post this week. I’m sure I’ll talk a lot anyway.
I did do a bit of sewing last week – mostly, I worked on the little corset-bra thingie. Which I have no photos of it, because it’s not really for public consumption.
I finished it up on Saturday and was really pleased with it. It was nice and neat looking. Tried it on, worked decently well. Tried it on with the Dale top – which is what it was made to go under, that and my Bespin Dapper Day dress, and… kinda hated it. It did it’s job of acting as a strapless compression bra, but because I had it end at my natural waist, it just kinda squished everything downwards and made the shirt not fit well below my waist into my hips. I hard a hard time getting my skirt on with the corset-bra on. It was fine without it. And it was not very comfortable. Like… at all. UGH.
I figured I either needed to shorten so it wasn’t digging into my natural waist, by like 2 inches, which would’ve been do-able, or I should have made it full length. Either way at that point, I really wasn’t feeling wearing this thing in the parks for hours on end.
So back to the drawing board. (I’m putting the corset-bra in my bin of “generic” items, I’m sure it’ll come in use in the future with other projects). I dug through the drawer where I keep my swimsuits and found a mid-2000s bandeau style top with convertible straps. I decided to see how that looked – and it was a lot more comfortable though the mid-2000s top was not big enough for my 2020 boobs. (Fine band size of course… just not cup size. Ugh I hate my boobs.)
So I’m doing 2 things – first I used that swimsuit top as a basis to cut out a top using some leftover jumbo spandex I had on hand. Just playing with it. Got it basically put together yesterday as a trial but stopped for Chase’s bday party. Will keep working on it this week. And I also shopped for some strapless bandeau tops and found a couple of affordable options I may try as well.
Anyway – I also made an acorn purse to carry with Dale:
It’s a little messy because I literally just threw this together in a night. It’s all leftover fabrics. All that’s left is to tack down the buckram I have acting as shaper along the inside bottom edge, and Chase is 3d printing a little acorn for me to put over the closure tab.
And I did make a decision on my disneybound Leia belt, tho no pics to show yet. I decided to nix the belt and put the conchos on the jacket. Just need to paint them before I have anything to show.
Here’s some random stuff.
Chase got me this PIVOT bath fizzers LMAO
I updated the Padme art for a new magicband so I could peel the old one off the red magicband and put Wanda on red. I put the new Padme one on the pink one. Yay.
Wednesday last week I had my oral surgery for that tooth. Surgery itself was fine and quick. I’ve had basically no issues healing and haven’t really ever been in pain, and I think that’s due to the dentist telling me to start taking the pain meds right away to stay ahead of it, which I did. I took one every 4 hours the night after to keep ahead of it. But I think all the pain medication in my system made me feel AWFUL. Thursday I was dizzy and kinda pukey and ended up working from bed with my laptop. Felt better after I ate and drank a bunch of water to try to get it out of my system. Used ibuprofen the rest of the day until that night, I went ahead and took one of my RX pain pills before bed just to make sure I was good through the night. And I think it just kinda stayed in my system because off an on over the whole weekend I’d just get randomly dizzy and pukey feeling. That sucked. Especially Saturday morning when we were running some errands and I had to just leave Target in a hurry because I though I was going to barf. (I didn’t tho)
Everything seems to be mostly back to normal today.
Saturday and Sunday we really focused on cleaning the garage. We organized the shelves, made a big garbage pile. Gave away some stuff on a “free stuff” facebook group for our area. We’re close to about halfway done, will do some more this weekend.
Last night we had Chase’s bday party!
I didn’t take many pics! But first time in a year we’ve been able to all get together for a birthday because we are all vaccinated now!! Yay! We had a cookout and cake and it was really nice.
While I was at my parent’s house, I snuck up into the attic and grabbed 3 bags of old clothes and fabric scraps. I’ve decided I’m just going to start grabbing stuff everytime I go over, so I can get rid of it and try to chip away at as much as I can up there so when they do finally get to cleaning it, at least a small portion is done.
The clothes were all stuff I wore in the late 90s.
So much Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibes.
Why is everything SO SHORT
That’s the main reason I’m not keeping any of it. I mean, besides the fact I’m too big for any of it now, even if I could fit in it, they’re all just that baby doll short look. I can’t. Never again.
One item out of there I AM keeping – this sweater that was probably one of my parents’ that I adopted at some point. It totally fits the Twin Peaks fashion aesthetic that is my goal for this winter.
So now let’s talk about the weirdness that was Tiktok last week.
First up I did resend my letter to tiktok through the help chat last week. Did not get a response. I ended up going back through my stats and pulling up some more interesting numbers. Look at this – this is total views per month, keeping in mind that mid-August 2020 is when I joined the creator fund (and left mid-September):
Jan 2020: 1,455,100 views
Feb 2020: 2,275,600 views
March 2020: 684,200 views
April 2020: 531,935 views
May 2020: 609, 831 views
June 2020: 909,172 views
July 2020: 1,189,689 views
August 2020: 441,202 views
September 2020: 179,082 views
Oct 2020: 349,551 views
Nov 2020: 167237 views
Dec 2020: 194,588 views
Jan 2021: 182,656 views
Feb 2021: 90,566 views
What the FUCK.
Also note that in February this year, I had LESS VIEWS than I have FOLLOWERS.
So I compiled that info into another message to the help chat on tikok, and this time I DID get back a response – a totally generic bot response that basically said “Creator Fund doesn’t affect views/check out our Creator tools for some tips/participate in trends!”
I replied back that that is total bullshit (In nicer language of course) and if the creator fund isn’t involved then why did my views drop to a FRACTION of what they’d been previously? Explain please. No response.
Anyway that was all late last week. Here’s how my videos performed last week.
Monday – no post
Tuesday – no post
Wednesday I posted a dressform video of Padme Lake dress and Bespin Leia.
172 likes/809 views. Traffic Sources: 61% Following, 28% FYP, 9% Profile
For comparison, I posted the exact same video on instagram reels on thursday…
1,821 likes on IG with 16K followers.
172 likes on tiktok with 93K followers.
Thursday – no post.
Friday’s post – a slideshow of costumes I’ve remade.
512 likes/2,216 views. Traffic: 61% Following, 36% FYP, 3% profile
Saturday’s post – just a quick dressform video of my lake dress with Chase’s Vader helmet on it. See pic further up. It made me laugh and I did a throw away video of it.
Well I posted it Saturday morning and after about 4 hours, it only had 120 views. So I decided, if tiktok is going to be a dick, I’m going to be a dick right back. I deleted the video and posted it again. After another 4 hours, it had done even worse. So I deleted that one too. And posted it for a 3rd time, later at night and just left it. Here’s where it gets interesting.
1513 likes/5,678 views. Traffic: 74% FYP, 24% Following.
Something shook that loose. I don’t know what. It’s still not GREAT, compared to pre-August 2020 data, but it’s better than it was doing earlier in the day. It was a slow roll too, with most of the views coming in on Sunday. Each time I posted it, I changed up the caption/tags. The final version that got the most engagement had NO tags and NO caption. Interesting.
Sunday’s post was just a twin peaks clip about my reaction when people tell me to smile. Didn’t expect anything here and didn’t get it, either.
87 likes/780 views. 84% Following, 13% FYP, 2% profile.
I do have a post for today, for Chase’s birthday. Going to post it later in the day again but I hate not using captions/tags soooo we’ll see what I end up doing there.