I have just 8 more days of work before Disney.
In those 8 days I am scrambling to have everything ready for work for me to be ABLE to go out of town without being stressed about it. I blocked off some time one morning this week to focus only on making sure all of the info for my coworkers is correct and make sure they have all the files they need. This’ll be my first time going out of town since becoming the only one in my position (used to be 3 of us), so I’m a little worried. I keep having to tell myself “NO you are not taking your work phone with you to Disney absolutely not.”
Don’t really have a lot to show sewing-wise this week, except for the ton of masks I’ve made since last weekend:
Some of these are Chase’s, some are mine. I’ve tried to make a mask for each outfit we’re planning so we have a backup in case the clear masks are too hot. So I’ve got a Dale mask (made out of the VERY LAST scraps of my shirt material, I just barely had enough for a mask – and it’s not in this pic for whatever reason, it must be buried under my pile of Minnie ears), a Padme mask, a Stitch mask – and Chase has a Han mask, a Chip mask, a Stitch mask. I’ve got 2 more I need to make – both Leia related, a white one to go with my regular Leia disneybound look and a red one for the dapper day bespin look. I think I have leftover material from the dress I can use but I haven’t dug into the scrap box yet.
So a little bit of sad this past weekend. We had canceled our plans for Huntsville Expo a while back, ie – canceling our hotel reservations and all that, because we didn’t think we’d be vaccinated in time. But after we got our shots earlier than expected we realized we could go – so we planned to just drive down for Saturday. Well Friday night I got cold feet about going around that many people 2 weeks before our disney trip, even fully vaccinated and masked. I didn’t want to jeopardize the disney trip in any way! Even to scratch my convention-itch. If it had just been 1 extra week away from disney (3 weeks vs 2) I’d have felt better about going. But the anxiety was enough that we decided not to go. I cried a little bit. But the con is very kindly mailing me our VIP stuff. So that’s really nice. I’m hoping we can go next year.
So we ran errands Saturday, went ahead and did trip shopping. And Chase cooked a really good dinner. To assuage my convention-grief I decided to get into costume, record some tiktok content and do a fashion show with all of my disney outfits.
The tiktok content was a total failure. After recording for a nearly an hour (a Bespin Leia detail video), I mistakenly hit “back” and deleted everything I’d recorded. So that sucked. LMAO.
So I switched over to disney fashion show, which was partially to show stuff off but mostly to check everything. I didn’t take pics but here’s some stills from the videos.
Padme disneybound – overall thumbs up, new bra works great with the shirt. Only issue I foresee is the shoes are uncomfortable and rub the back of my ankle. I bought some little stick on shoe-pads just for that purpose so hopefully that helps. Last resort – duct-tape.
Bespin dapper day – new bra also worked good for this one. But I noticed when I was checking the back that the upper back where the zipper ends is too big. I could pinch it in a good inch. Explains why I had issues with the shoulders slipping down. So Sunday I partially took the zipper out to move it inwards a little in to take it up. But when I went to go repin it I realized I couldn’t move it inwards – it messed up the fold-out sections in the back if I did that. Changing the shape of the fold-out sections or trying to take the dress up anywhere else would mean disassembling lining, removing trim and was WAY more than I wanted to deal with. So I just put the zipper back like it was and left it. It’s fine.
Black Widow – nothing needs to be done here. It’s all finished and fine. Only thing is I still don’t know what I want to do with my hair. I think I’m going to wear this Friday night to dinner. I’ve been playing with pin curls the last couple of weeks everytime I wash my hair, and I’ve determined that day 2 is the best look – but I dunno about how they’re going to fare with Orlando humidity. Last couple of times I’ve curled my hair for Orlando it’s been pin-straight within an hour of being outside, even with setting lotion. I’m thinking what I should do is put my hair up in pin curls thursday morning – keep them wrapped in a cute scarf for the drive to GA – sleep in them that night – and then take them down once we get to Orlando. We plan on going to the pool that afternoon which is the only thing I worry about – maybe keep them up for that? I dunno. Man this is why I do wigs for everything at cons LOL the logistics of real hair suck!!
Ok where was I. Power went out and knocked out my computer. Glad for auto-save! LOL
Stitch outfit – the hem of the shirt still sucks and wants to roll up. I really should redo it. But not going to press myself on it. If I get the urge to fix it before the trip I will -if not, oh well it’s wearable. I had on my favourite sports bra when I tried this on for the IG fashion show but it showed way too much especially in the back. I went and bought one that’s much less strappy yesterday that will work with this one, and other things too.
Also I really look cute in this screenshot.
Leia jacket – so when I made this jacket last year I made the collar too tall, which I also did for my actual Leia dress. Instead of taking the collar off, shortening it, and putting it back on, I did the same thing I did on my actual dress – I folded it over at the top and stitched it down on the inside. Not super pretty and since this was open in the front, it was noticeable. So after trying this on Saturday I decided I had to fix it. I took the collar off, cut about 3/4in off the bottom and put it back on. I also put the hook and eye back on a little further apart so there’s no gap.
And then I also took 2 of the conchos off – the ones at the sides, only leaving 3 on the jacket all together. They were just kinda in the way, and I felt like they made me look wider from the front.
Leia dress – nothing to say here, it’s fine as-is. My buns were awful that night LOL
I said I probably wasn’t going to wear the ears with this but now I’m kinda thinking I will. I feel like it needs something “more” if I’m only wearing the dress. I’m also wondering if when I make my Leia mask, if I should make the straps really long
so I can put them around the buns instead of my ears LOL
Dale – ok so Dale still needs a few little things.
Number one is – where’s the wig? Remember the wig I curled for this? Initially I felt like Dale needed some fun curly vintage looking hair. So I bought that wig and curled it. But after I finished it I left it on the stand with the hat for weeks, so I stared at it a lot. And I started to think it really doesn’t go with the vibe of the rest of the outfit. I felt like something sleeker like a low bun or a french twist would look better. So the “fashion show” was a good time to try both and see what IG thought.
Here’s a screencap of the wig in action:
And yeah like… it’s no contest. The wig is OK but the low side-bun of the first pic just has more of the Dior New Look vibe I wanted.
Also – no wig will be SO MUCH more comfortable.
I’m sure the wig will live on in some other project in the future.
I finally sewed a comb into the hat so it won’t fly off. I STILL need to glue the acorn onto the belt and finish my ears, but I wanted Chase’s help with both and haven’t had a chance to pull him into my sewing room for that.
So my to-do list now is:
1. acorn on belt
2. ears on headband
3. finish the last 2 masks
4. hem Chase’s Han pants
5. Do the embroidery on Chase’s Han socks
6. PACK!!
I’m off Friday this week to get lash extensions and then Sunday I get my hair coloured (going way lighter than I have in recent years)…. and then it’s going to be a mad dash to figure out my Leia extensions for the buns and the Bespin look. I’m hoping my lighter auburn extensions will work ok. I plan to come home, check and see if they do, and then dash to the beauty store if they don’t.
Speaking of embroidery, Chase and I finally sat down with the embroidery machine this week and figured out how to load custom designs in. We got the Han bloodstripe stuff set up for his Han socks – I’m just going to do them on a piece of blue fabric that I can hem, and then hand-stitch onto the side of the socks.
And while we had that set up I experimented with a Naboo symbol I also had on my computer, just with whatever thread was loaded on the machine:
NICE
Was super tempted to try to do this on my Padme lake dress mask but it’s so little I decided to not mess it up, since I did actually dye that mask after finishing it LOL
And now for a little bit of everything else from this last week…
Chase finished painting the little boxes for my makeup storage in my bathroom! It’s not a great picture of them and I’m going to move 2 of them down to the sink, but I’m excited to have one more step of my LOTR bathroom finished.
Now to get the light up.
In exciting news, I was included in this month’s Craft Center Magazine‘s Final Frontier issue:
So cool! Though I haven’t been able to get the issue to load yet. Gotta go try again.
I’ve been moving patches around again, just like I do before every disney trip. When we shut the office down a couple of years ago, I saved 2 of these big giant rolling Poster Garden bags from the trash:
They went with some old trade show booth pieces that I don’t even think we had anymore. I ended up getting rid of one of them but keeping the other because it’s HUGE and has wheels. It’s gonna be my disney bag this year. But — I didn’t want that Poster Garden logo on the front so I covered it up with this Leia patch from our park bag:
I only had 2 patches big enough to cover it, this one or an old Southern Outpost one. Decided to go with the Leia one.
We’re not planning on taking the park bag much this year but just in case I moved a 501st patch over to it to take over the space the Leia patch had been on.
Nana and Kristie brought us a chair yesterday. Luna thinks it’s hers. Eventually I’ll be re-covering it in new fabric and it’ll be Kevin’s chair for his room. For now it’s in the living room until I can get somebody over to help me get it up the stairs.
And in one bit of Disney news – I GOT A SAVI’S RESERVATION! I’ve been checking multiple times a day since realizing I missed the 60 day reservation window hoping somebody would cancel… and Saturday morning laying in bed I checked again and suddenly multiple times available for both our DHS days! I think they released those times that day – I really don’t think they were available before. So I picked one for our second day when hopefully we’ll have already gotten done with all the rides we want to do.
Tiktok stuff:
Not going to go through every video but here’s the recap.
I mostly did a lot of reply videos this week, all but one of which were total flops. One about my fav and least fav costumes did OK. I also started doing a series about my least fav costumes and those flopped too.
Most disappointing is that a video about my Minnie Ears I’ve made did HORRIBLE. 600 views after being up for 3 days now. I reposted it 3 times after the first 2 attempts didn’t even cross 100 views after a few hours of being up. The thing is is that I know if I’d posted that same video a year ago, it would’ve done really well. After 20 years of being online I know my content – I know what people respond to – and when I see something like this do SO BADLY I know it’s the platform and not my content. So it’s frustrating.
Yesterday’s video of clips from the saturday try-on session did fairly well, so that’s nice.
I’ve got a bunch more reply videos to do this week so that’s all I’m going to focus on.
That’s all for this week! Next week will be an absolute disney hype post.