Chase has JURY DUTY today!! I’m so relieved somebody OTHER than me finally has jury duty. But at the same time hoping he gets done quick and doesn’t have to be down there all week. Because going downtown for that everyday sucks. Especially today, it was raining all morning and he had to walk a couple of blocks from the parking lot.
Anyway, we’ve actually been downtown a lot the last couple of days. Thursday, we were celebrating Kevin’s birthday!
After work we went down to eat at South of Beale; it was pretty good. Kevin was getting over a cold and partway through dinner he said “I think this cold is zapping my energy” so I told him I had some secret medicine in my purse I could give him that would give him an energy boost, did he want it? He said yes, so I dug one out and gave it to him. A few minutes later I asked if it helped his energy, and he enthusiastically said yes, it did! It was a Bob Ross breath mint shaped like a happy little tree. LOL
Then we walked down to the Orpheum to see Weird Al!!
It was so much fun! We had the front row on the very end of the grand tier, and had all this empty space next to the last chair.
Kevin made up a new chair.
Also really proud to see my Twin Suns friends onstage for “The Saga Begins”!
Although I wished they’d asked for troopers earlier so I could have done it! That is literally the main reason I’ve been wanting to get my TK wearable again. One day.
Saturday Chase wanted to go down and scope out the parking situation for Jury Duty, so we decided to make a date night of it. Went to Rizzo’s for dinner (yum!) then over to the brand new Powerhouse Malco movie theater to see Toy Story 4.
Nice theater but not much different than the theaters closer to us, so not really worth driving downtown for unless you got another reason to go down there. Toy Story 4 was cute but… I honestly didn’t like the ending very much. I think my feelings may have been clouded by the toddler sitting directly next to us who got bored about a quarter of the way through the movie and started yelling every few minutes. His parents kept shooshing him but he slowly ramped up and got more bored and was up jumping around, yelling and playing with keys for the last half hour of the movie. It was SO distracting, and frustrating. Like I know when we go see “kids” movies there will be kids in the audience, and they’ll make noise, and I’m ok with that. But this was overboard and the parents should have taken him out of the theater INSTEAD OF LETTING HIM PLAY WITH KEYS.
Anyway. Other than those things we mostly spent free time working on getting the house ready for the shower this weekend.
I did get quite a bit of stuff in the mail including:
A wig I bought on Arda’s clearance sale… it’s for Hera but thinking it might be a bit too dark, but it might work based on my makeup. Which I haven’t ordered yet, so once I get that I’ll figure out if I need to buy something else. (Kinda wishing now I hadn’t sold my Gaga yellow wig!)
Also got some of that Foam Clay! Excited to play with it! Thinking about using it for my Padme lake dress hair bands.
And stuff I didn’t take a picture of – silk chiffon and dye from Dharma, and another wig and extensions from Arda. (For lake dress wig).
So house-wise, the downstairs is pretty much ready for the shower. I still have one spot I need to patch some paint where the old alarm system was removed. Going to set up the folding table we have in the dining room tonight, and I may move some more “stuff” out of the dining room. I went to mop with our swiffer wetjet only to discover it was dead, so I ordered a new one and it should be here tomorrow, so still gotta do that. And a few other small things in our bedroom. Not that people are going to be in there – just still fallout from moving the big white bookcase out of there and into my sewing room.
With Chase’s summer bonus we’re going to get a new dresser to go in there to take it’s place. Picked one out the other day. Yay,
Anyway, upstairs, my sewing room is mostly ready (going to be doing arts and crafts up there during the shower). Everywhere else is a disaster. We did get the other black bookcase assembled in the guest room, so that helps a LOT, but then I started moving stuff out of kevin’s room and also unpacking some of the boxes and now the guest room is just… bad. I’ve got to Kevin’s room cleaned back up for Scott so that’s current goals.
So with all the house stuff, I didn’t really get a ton of sewing done the past week. But I did do some.
First off I got the top section of the final lake dress taken in to fit better, had to take some bigger darts. Unfortunately they’re not wanting to line up great, I may have to redo 1 of the 4 (2 on the lining, 2 on the outer layer). Then I may tack them together. And as much as I trimmed out the excess the edge of the top just isn’t wanting to lay flat, so I may tack it down too; I don’t want to fully top stitch it and make it lose its stretch, so I’m thinking just tacking it in places may work.
Issue: I didn’t have enough spandex to double the inserts like I did the main body of the dress. Didn’t think that would be an issue until I started trying to do triangular inserts into 2 layers of dress. Kept looking super messy. So I took them out and just attached it to the outer layer, and I was going to just sew the inside layer in place, covering the raw edge on the inside… but everytime I tried that with the machine, it made the fabric lay funny. So I undid that and then decided to see if I could just cut insets for the lining too… nope definitely not enough fabric. So for the moment the lining is just hanging free on the inside at the insets until I decide what to do, because I raelly don’t feel like hand-sewing them all in place. I did ONE hand-sewn and it was ok looking but I think overall I’d be happier if I just went and got 1 more yard of fabric and add the insets to the lining so everything is even.
The previous homeowners left most of their window treatments in place, including this lace piece that was draped over the laundry room window. I have adopted it. On IG miss.blue.costumes said it looks like a Padme wedding and picnic mashup… I was like OMG YES. Anyway I have no plans to do anything with it other than twirl around with it in my sewing room like Stevie Nicks.
So I wanted to think about the underdress a little more so I switched gears to work on the outer dress. I had some panels of scrap fabric I was trying to pattern it out with, but they were too small…. (my actual patterns I sacrificed to make Mon Mothma in 2017. They were done in crinkle fabric I bought for $1/yard in 2005 and I had notes written on the corners. I decided I didn’t really need them and the fabric would be great for Mon Mothma… thus no more patterns LOL). Then I realized oh wait! I still have the 3rd lake dress’s outer panels in a bag, I just saw them when cleaning my closet. So I drug those out… I’d already started disassembling them, when I was thinking I could MAYBE use them for the underdress of the next version? (But the colour placement wouldn’t work for it).
Got them ironed and pinned on. — this is 3 pieces, front, side back, and center back. This fabric is a little heavier than the silk chiffon I’ll be using so it’s not gathering exactly right, but it’s enough I can get a good look at it and figure out what needs to be updated. The biggest problem I had with version 3 (fixed in version 4), were the side back panels were too long creating a kind-of “bat wing” effect, instead of the back hem being all the same length, and that the drapes between the front-to-arms and arms-to-center-back were uneven and sometimes too large. So those are things I’ll be fixing here.
Also just the beauty of having great photos of this on display now. SO HELPFUL!! I wish I’d had them for all these earlier versions.
So I think what I’m going to do is lay these panels out on my scrap fabric, trace them, then make my alterations there. Then I’ll use the scrap pieces for pattern guides.
These panels from version 3 are destined to be some kind of disneybound dress one day. I dunno what I’m going to do with it but I figured a quick redye to correct and darken the colours and I’ve got 6 great panels to make a summery dress with.
So yeah next step will be tracing. But I dont want to make too big a mess in my sewing room this week. Steady as she goes.
No new art this week! No time for it. Hopefully back at it next week! Instead of art corner this week I’m going to do PRESENTS CORNER!
Ash just randomly came over with presents for me yesterday! WHAT!! She picked up this Rupaul’s Drag Race colouring book for herself and got one for me too, and then these 2 PERFECT Beauty and the Beast/Han and Leia mashup prints! SO EXCITE! I needed some more Leia stuff for my Leia wall. I had one 5×7 frame on hand so I got one of them put up yesterday but I need to get another frame for the other one.
And Chase got me a Leia sticker! I don’t know if I want to put it on my new bin that I got for dragoncon last year (that I’ve been putting every sticker I can find all over), or on my car – my old millennium falcon sticker has faded really badly. I gotta think about it.