How is February almost over? I mean I’m not complaining because it’s one step closer to disney but also I keep getting further and further behind in my projects.
I am actually nearly done with Utena. FINALLY.
My new shoulder trim came in last weekend so I spent last week sewing the tassels together to make big tassels. Finished that up Friday and Saturday Chsae helped me get them glued in. I waffled on how to attach them to the jacket but ended up just doing velcro.
Also got the little jewel thing in the front finished up and the cord attached, and the little triangular pieces on the collar finished. They snap on because I did not want to glue anything to the jacket.
As I mentioned before the jacket does NOT fit the dressform at all, why is my neck/upper chest smaller than all of my dressforms? I can’t close the collar on this at all and this is my smallest form.
Anyway, all that’s left is to try it all on, making sure everything is working and fitting ok. I still have my sword to do – bought a 3d file – but Chase wants to print it on the new resin printer which he hasn’t set up yet, so who knows when that will be.
Going to try it all on tonight, didn’t have the energy yesterday. I figure I’ll have to adjust some things but hopefully not much. I do also need to sew my rose and rose holder back on.
Closer look at the shoulder thingies – originally I was twisting them and sewing them in place twisted (or twirled I guess is a better term). I liked the look of that better but they always ended up slightly wonky from one to another. Just doing them like this looked a bit better, and I was tired of fighting with it, so this is it.
I don’t really have anything to show of the Leia dress right now except that I finished hemming the skirt, got the petticoat and skirt sewn together, and I kinda left it at that for last week while I worked on finishing Utena. I did mess with a bit this weekend, mostly pinning the skirt on to try it all on. I need Chase to mark the excess on the back panels so I can cut it off – it’s too big right now. I also realized the top is still too long – I had trimmed off about 2 inches to get it closer to ending near the natural waist, but it’s still like… another 2 inches too long in the front and like 3 in the back. So I was trying to get a line of pins put in to show the line it needs to be cut at… I needed help with the back of that too so I didn’t finish it.
Luna watching her own tiktok
Speaking of Luna she’s been so chill and good lately, outside of a few times where she seems to get a little anxious whenever Chase and I are both doing something in the kitchen. A few weeks ago while we were trying to both cook dinner she started acting weird and went and peed in the living room. Thankfully not on the rug, it was in the corner so it was easy to clean up. But that’s the only weird thing that’s happened lately, until yesterday.
Yesterday morning Chase and I were both in my sewing room finishing up some Utena stuff and Luna came in there too. She likes being in my sewing room if we are both in there. Since it was a nice day I thought I’d open one of the windows by my window seat for her, since she loves to sit up there with the window open. (it has a screen so she’s safe)
The window was stuck so Chase came over to help me with it. I was holding the screen, she was standing next to us watching, and for whatever reason she suddenly crouched and hissed at me. She backed away and we left her alone for a minute, I got the screen back in the window and Chase went back to sitting at the table. Seemed like it was just a random weird moment but then when I squatted down and reached out to her, she went psycho, screaming and spitting. She ran and hid under the chair Chase was sitting in. So I just sat on the floor and talked to her calmly and flipped one of her favourite yoyo toys at her. She came out from under the chair after a few minutes and it seemed like whatever happened has passed, and Chase reached down to pet her and she went psycho again, and got him good, he was bleeding from his pinkie finger pretty bad and she got him on the leg, too.
So we left her alone, we just went downstairs and left her there. She made her way downstairs eventually. Walked around in a high state of anxiety. Growled at Chase who was trying to clean the kitchen. We finally just sat down in the living room to try to let her calm down. After about a half hour she kitty-loafed a few feet away from us. I was tired of not getting anything done because of her so I got up and went and got some of her fav food, mixed up her medicine in it and sat it out for her. At this point she was acting normal, she ate ALL THE FOOD WITH HER MEDICINE IN IT and then went and laid in Chase’s lap. She was totally normal the rest of the day.
We decided she’s got to get the anxiety meds in her – because we have no idea what set her off this time. The meds are going in her food and she can eat it or not. Whenever she gets picky over food she’ll turn her nose up at it for a while but then she gets hungry and eats it so we’re just going to go off that.
I have had some good results in the last month trying squirting liquid from her dropper directly into her mouth (thanks for the tip Saffity!) – I’ve done it twice with chicken stock and while she didn’t LIKE it she also didn’t fight it. But with her in yesterday’s state I don’t really want to try manhandling her right now. And the fact she scarfed down the food with it mixed in yesterday is a good thing. She hasn’t eaten much of it from this morning but just going to leave it until she does.
Anyway.
I made some Muppet ears while avoiding working on anything I was supposed to be doing last week. I picked this up at Joann last time I went and the sequin fabric is leftover from Jupiter. I wasn’t really feeling the green at first – I mean I picked it for Kermit, but it’s not really Kermit green. I just wanted to use what I had. But in the end I really loved how it turned out.
I also decided I wanted to redo my Padme lake dress ears. I was never happy with the bow (colours too pale because it was poly blanket binding), and I figured now that I’d made the new lake dress and had my sequins and stuff leftover from it, I could bling it out a little more. I thought I had some silk charmeuse leftover from the trim, but after digging around I couldn’t find it. So I looked for some leftover eliza silk and no luck there either. I ended up with some poly stretch satin I decided to try. Nearly used up all my leftover dye and it looks exactly the same as the original bow (too pale). So that was a bummer. And then I couldn’t find my sequins anywhere. So this project may get shelved for a while.
In other frustrating news, my spoonflower swatch has still not even printed much less shipped. Right at 2 weeks since ordered it. I hope the swatch looks ok because I’m going to need to turn around and order the actual fabric immediately to make this project happen for the disney trip.
Speaking of spoonflower, I started digging around for fabric for the Lady jessica dress again last week and after hours of pulling satin swatch photos into photoshop to compare I could not find anything close. Well ok I did find one that was pretty close but at $70/yard no waaaaaay. So I ended up just uploading a chip of the sampled colour from a screenshot to spoonflower and ordered a satin swatch. See how it turns out. Otherwise I have to dye it and I really didn’t want to do that.
Saturday we picked up Kevin, he helped us move some branches to the street.
Then we took him to Target for some mask-wearing practice.
He did really good. The last few times we’ve taken him somewhere and he’s had to wear a mask, he very nearly has a panic attack. This time beforehand we talked about “jedi breathing” and how Luke Skywalker would use measured breathing to calm himself to be able to wear a mask. And that’s all he could talk about in target, and by the end of the trip he was talking about how he’d “mastered jedi breathing” and he really had. He really did well wearing the mask without issue this time!
On that note I am sooooooooooooooooo relieved Disney dropped the indoor mask policy. I know some folks are hesitant and worried about it and I get that. But I was really worried about getting Kevin to keep a mask on in the queues, etc. Now we really only have to worry about it on the monorail, etc. Like, huge weight off my shoulders.
And finally we’ve got somebody here removing the downed tree today. We’ve still got an absolutely massive pile of branches at the street that I watched one of the city pick-up trucks drive right past. They picked up our neighbor’s pile but not ours. The tree guy we have here today said it’s been like that everywhere, usually after a storm the city has a fleet of trucks out picking everything up but not this time, they are just kinda doing a bit here and a bit there. He’d charge us $300 to haul it away, but said we might as well wait and see if the city comes first. I doubt they will but at least we have a back up. Or we’ll just start breaking it all down into small enough pieces to put in our garbage cans LOL
this next week, double check utena fit, finish up the base Leia dress, and my fabric for the shawl piece is supposed to arrive this week too. Would love to have this totally done in the next couple of weeks.