I love having to get a new debit card because of the “potential” it could’ve been leaked and having to go through and update my card everywhere. You never guess every single place it needs to be updated. Woke up this morning to a message that my card had been declined on a subscription I’m currently on, never even thought of that. I just went in and canceled it because I’ve been meaning to anyway so I guess that was a good thing.
All right let’s get into it.
My remaining fabric from spoonflower arrived Tuesday. Too late on tuesday to do anything with it though – I got it in the washer and hung it up on the clothes line for a bit but the sun had already set so it wasn’t able to dry very fast. Got it back in around 9:30 and still damp. I hung it over the railing for the night to finish drying.
Also I do have to bitch… the quality of this second shipment was better than the first, which is frustrating. It’s no obvious when you’re looking at the whole costume, only when you’re RIGHT up on the fabric and looking for it. The second shipment is a little brighter and the weave of the cotton is less noticeable.
Anyway, nothing to be done about it, it’s not like I’m going to ask for a replacement.
First thing I did was to get the missing upper skirt panel cut, stripes sewn on and at long last that part was all put together:
I already had the lining layer assembled, so I got that attached along the bottom also. That’s what creates the kind-of “bubble” hem effect.
Then it was a couple of days of sewing more stripes onto every decent size panel I had left for the underskirt.
I needed 4 panels for the underskirt – I can’t remember how tall they needed to be now, but I only got 3 the needed height. (Tall enough to end above my knee – above the edge of the overskirt). The last panel was about 6 inches short. But I had another too-short panel leftover from the first round of fabric, so I pieced them together. The piecing is not perfect – trying to line up stripes vertically, horizontally AND also lining up the already-placed yellow ribbons was a lot of work, and there’s places where they don’t quite match. So that’s just going to be the official “back” of the skirt, since that part will be hidden by the longer-in-the-back overskirt.
Anyway, skirt panels finally sewn together I got them pinned onto the underskirt structure:
At first I wasn’t going to hem it yet, because I’m not sure what shoes I’m wearing yet. But I realllly wanted to finish it, so I guessed at a basic heel height and went ahead.
Got the panels sewn onto the upper section, and then created an internal, partial lining layer out of some scrap PINK lining fabric (lol – I was out of red and it’s not going to be visible!) that attaches to the bottom edge of the plaid fabric and pulls it back up to the stitching where it’s sewn to the upper section, again creating the bubble hem effect.
This was a little tricky since the elastic waist of that skirt did NOT want to stay level on my form, even with pinning it in place, so I’m never going to say it’s perfect, there’s probably areas where it’s longer and areas where it’s shorter. Oh well.
Next I could finally move onto sewing the upper dress parts together.
I’d been putting this off because I knew the upper section was too big but I wanted the excess to be marked on me and not my dressform. I got it all pinned together and Chase was able to mark it for me – based on that cut off the excess. Then sewed the top and skirt together (outer layers first), checked it and it looked good, so got the lining layers sewn together too and the zipper installed.
It’s a littttle tight through the top of the zipper, but I still have some wiggle room left if I need to let it out.
So she’s like 95% done – the dress at least. Here’s my remaining to-do list:
1. Finish sleeve edges – I started on this, got the bias tape partially sewn on one sleeve Sunday. Will finish this tonight.
2. Think about the shoulder puffs. I wanted to sleep on this – I’m thinking I might need more tulle shoved in there for shaping now that I’m able to zip the whole thing up and see them sitting in the proper spot. Wouldn’t be hard to do but I don’t want to do it if I don’t have to.
3. Figure out the sash. I don’t think I have enough fabric. So I won’t get this done until whenever I go back to Joann.
4. The hat – I did start messing with this Sunday. Did some sketches trying to understand what it looks like because there are no good references. It’s blurry or at a bad angle in every screenshot and the exhibit photos, it’s on the far side of her head, no clear photos of it, AND I think it’s on the mannequin backwards, LOL. But I got a base pattern piece cut, started messing with the shapes in paper. I have some buckram that I’m hoping is enough to make the basic parts and I don’t have to buy anything more except decorations.
5. The shoes, the wig and the bag
I did pick out some shoes, while I was debating hemming the skirt. I just need to order them.
I ordered my wig Friday! Yay.
And i’m waffling on the bag. Yes I want to have a bag because she has it on her the entire scene, it would be nice to have a bag at con, I just don’t know if I want to MAKE the bag or find something “close enough” – this is probably something I’ll wait til closer to dragoncon to decide on.
Tonight I am going to finish the sleeve cuffs, and mess with the hat shapes a little more – but by the end of the week I’ll officially be moving on to Breha. We have no plans this upcoming weekend and hoping to keep it that way so I can maybe get a loooot done? Fingers crossed.
Ok that’s enough of sewing corner, let’s talk about everything else from this past week.
First I finished clearing out Kevin’s room in prep for painting. One of the things I cleaned out was a big under the bed container of just a bunch of my old stuff.
I did find this hidden in there though! I’ve got to get this framed and added to my sewing room wall! I completely forgot about it, but when I saw it I remembered carefully packing it away to be framed for the future, years and years ago.
I found this tucked in a very old box of Prismacolor markers. What is this you may ask?
Back in the 90s when my cousins and I all rode to school together, it was like a 20 minute drive so we would come up with games. This was a card game I made – I made a card for every single X-Men character on these index cards. We’d shuffle them up and evenly divide them, face down so you didn’t know who was who. Then we’d all play our top card – and then argue about which of these 4 characters would win. The 3 “losers” were discarded, then rinse and repeat until you got down to the end. This was Lilandra card… which it looks like possibly had some extra doodles added over it at some point.
I threw away a lot of stuff that was in that bin – made room for some of my loose drawings I had stored in my sewing room so that was nice. One of the things that got tossed was all of my college notebooks and notes I’d held onto.
I did keep 2 things – this folder (everything in it got tossed), and my architecture flashcards I’d made.
So Saturday while I was sewing, Chase was out mowing, he got a call from my uncle (Kevin’s dad) — my uncle had fallen in the driveway at his house and needed help. So we rushed to get out of the house and in the car, and in the rush I ran down the stairs in my flip flops which made a lot of noise. That loud noise made Luna lose her damn mind and go psycho. She was hissing and coming at me in the laundry room – I had to slam the door in her face and go around the other way. We just left her there to stew in her own little freak out.
All this right after we got her a new toy at tractor supply – which she completely destroyed LOL
Anyway some backstory – that day we were painting Kevin’s room here at my house. I’d planned to get him that morning and have him help. Just to make him feel included in the process. But I changed my mind and decided we’d just get it done — he wasn’t going to enjoy having to move stuff and paint anyway.
Well thank goodness we didn’t because otherwise Kevin wouldn’t have been there to help him get up and back in the house. When we got there he was propped up in his computer chair, blood everywhere. He’d fallen right on his face on that gravel driveway they have. He’d also hurt his leg, and thankfully Kevin had been able to get an ice pack out of the freezer and on his leg. We helped him clean up a bit and then my aunt got there – she’d rushed home from work so we were able to leave him in her care. Felt bad for him but thankfully doesn’t seem like he broke anything.
Got home and Luna was back to normal, though she did have another smaller freak out sunday. No clue what triggered that one but of course it would happen just as friends are showing up to my house.
Anyway let’s talk painting..
I do realy appreciate that the former owners of house went to the trouble of painting literally everything in the house before putting it on the market but gosh I wish they’d just given us a painting allowance in the contract instead LOL. Every room is either pastel blue, pastel green, or pastel yellow. All with yellow trim and doors. Kevin’s room got the pale green treatment which looks even worse under the very bad, yellow lighting from the ceiling fan light.
We’ve been planning since moving in to do his room in a Star Wars theme. So we picked out some greys for his room, things that be like a death star interior grey, and picked up the paint Friday night and got started Saturday.
I REALLY like this grey, it’s “Serious Grey” from Sherwin Williams.
Please don’t look at how dusty the back of his TV was LOL
We got the walls done Saturday and it was looking really good. I wanted to wait a day before taping off to paint the trim so we didn’t damage the freshly painted walls – so I started taping off Monday and we started painting the trim Monday afternoon.
We picked out a darker grey for the trim – but in person vs online/the swatch it looks way more like a dark teal than anything in the grey family. I mean look at it in that pic, it’s just straight up a blue teal. Which is a little disappointing and not what I wanted. But we’re just going to go with it because I do really like the colour in general, and we’re not spending money on different paint. It’s still a pretty “space-y” colour.
I’ll still be painting the trim throughout the rest of this week. We took the doors off so we can paint them eventually too – planning on doing them in a black, but don’t have that paint yet.
A lot of this weekend was taking up by a very exciting activity – Cath’s wedding festivities!
Sunday night Melissa was in town for the ceremony Monday, and she wanted to do a little something for Cath because we both knew Cath was SUPER stressed. It was kind of last minute, but we got some cake and some fruit and some wine and watched “Only You” which was a movie the 2 of them apparently loved back in the 90s.
Monday morning they had the little private ceremony – this was sort of a “courthouse” ceremony because she’s moving down to live with him this summer. Then early next year they’ve having a big blowout wedding with everybody invited – which I’ll talk more about later because it is very exciting.
They had a lunch afterwards for the family:
And after all that “peopling” i was completely exhausted which is why we didn’t get a lot of painting done that afternoon. We had dinner and watched Dungeons and Dragons, which was ok. It was cute but way too long. Maybe that’s just because I was so tired and my head hurt.
So today going to try to get a little painting done and that Nadja stuff like I said. Going to miss having a 3 day weekend this week though.