i am a material girl

February is flying by. I can’t believe it’s halfway over. Which is nice because normally this time of the year drags.

Finished the Lake Tahoe puzzle. This one was fun.
I got a new one, same kind as the Jane Austen one – Oscar Wilde this time. It’s a little harder because there’s more areas that look the same. And I also found another one of those Star Wars puzzles – the ANH one! But it’s only 500 pieces. But that’ll be a fun quick break after I finish the Oscar Wilde one.

Let’s talk Disneybound Leia #4. I broke the embroidery machine out. Found a downloadable design on etsy I liked for the belt motifs… and it was too big for my machine. Wouldn’t even let me view it on the machine screen to shrink it. Didn’t feel like trying to resize and it was only $2, so I went searching for something else to use instead. Found this sort of celtic knot thing that I thought would look nice as a stand-in for belt conchos. Decided to use a dull blue thread instead of grey – just felt that would look better with the natural white of the fabric than grey.

It was a massive pain in the ass to do this though. First test worked good. Measured it out and figured out where to place each consecutive once. I wanted to do 8. I started at center back and then worked my way to the right and then to the left.

Luna helped measure. I only had one cut of fabric left big enough for the belt pattern piece, so this was very much holding my breath and hoping nothing messed up and I didn’t have to piece anything onto it and have an obvious seam.

I got seven of them done on Saturday. Motif #7 was misaligned and a little closer to the next one than it should’ve been. We’ll live, it’s ok. Started on Motif #8 (the last one!) next to it. Looked away for one second and… the bobbin thread got tangled, and the machine just kept stitching in one place – for probably like 15 seconds, but enough that it was not salvageable. There’s no unpicking stuff from this delicate fabric, especially something like THAT. And to top it off, it broke my needle. And I didn’t have anymore needles that fit this machine. Also I don’t know where the tip of the needle went (Grimace)

So it’s going to have 7 motifs and it’s going to be fine. I cut off the messed up part and pieced in a replacement and once pressed you really don’t see the seam – plus the seam ended up being in the area where it gets tied anywhere, so that’s good.

I got the stabilizer removed and the whole thing pressed and interfaced and sewn together and the belt was done. Got the snap closures sewn onto the sleeves, fixed an issue with the hem, and at this point it’s done except the buttons.

It’s giving…

Let’s try it on.

Now it’s giving…

It does look better (and less like a housecoat) when I’m not wearing sweats and houseshoes under it I swear LOL. I do feel like the belt is a tiny bit too big — because the motifs are also slightly too big, but we’re not redoing this anytime soon. I did make belt loops to sewn onto the side seams to keep the belt aligned, but I didn’t like the look once pinned on, so instead I just tacked the belt to the center back.

Chase 3d printed my buttons yesterday – need to get them painted and sealed and sewn on. I think that’ll help make it look less like a housecoat too. I got my shoes for it Saturday – this weekend I’ll try it all on and test what I want to do with the hair.

I ordered a big haul of stuff that all arrived Saturday – the shoes for this dress, plus a nude tanktop and bike shorts (with pockets) to wear under it. I also got a silvery shawl to wear with it if I want to use it as a cover up while I eat LOL.

A few weeks ago, I had asked Kevin if he could be any Marvel character, who would he be? I thought he’d say Doctor Strange, I had already picked out a Doctor Strange shirt I was going to buy for him to disneybound at California Adventure. Before I checked out I was like… let me check first. So I called him and he said “Longshot” and I said ok pick somebody from the MOVIES (aka a character people will actually get!) and he surprised me and said Starlord. But I was like – ok, that’s easy enough to put together, especially since we still have Chase’s Starlord t-shirt.

Or did we? We just cleaned out and took a bunch of stuff to donate about a month ago. Aaaand the Starlord shirt was in the donation pile. So I bought Kevin a new one, and found him a decent lightweight jacket to go with it, and a little Groot Beanie Baby I’m going to put magnets on the bottom of so he can wear it like a shoulder pal – I wasn’t pay $40 for the official Groot shoulder pal LOL.

When he’s doing his Starlord look, I’m going to be doing a scarlet witch look. I have that Scarlet Witch hoodie, going to wear it some black shorts and my Wanda ears. But I needed a shirt to wear under the hoodie if I get hot so I got this:

Love it. Need to try all that on too, because I need to figure out shoes for it.

Saturday was Valentine’s Day!

Chase got me flowers!

Friday night we went and got a steak and a side at a butcher shop and we cooked it Saturday night. The steak was HUGE!

BEAST!

It was gooood and I’m eating the leftovers for lunch today LOL We watched a movie that might be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen and that’s saying something coming from me. It was so bad it kept me up at night trying to think how to fix the script LOL

Sunday we had a family breakfast!

Susan cooked eggs and bacon, Chase made avocado toast, mom, dad, Kevin and I all watched them cook LOL

It was all good but I paid the price for the avocado with my stomach hurting the rest of the day.

So since I’m finishing up the Disneybound Leia look of course my mind has been on… what’s next? I do have a swatch for picnic Padme coming – one singular swatch for the skirt. But if I like it and I can get the skirt started, that’d be great.

Anyway, last week I talked about my eye issue. Let’s dig all the way into it this week.

So I don’t know when exactly they developed – probably 2-ish years ago? But I developed xanthelasmas under my eyes. I didn’t notice them for a while, because the lower edge of my glasses hid them pretty well. And if I took my glasses off I couldn’t see shit so I never really noticed when doing my makeup. It wasn’t until I got contacts early last year and could finally see a bit better without my glasses covering the area that I realized how bad they looked. Concealer/color corrector helped but it was still very apparent to me and I don’t want to be slapping that much makeup under my undereye everytime I’m not wearing my glasses?

Thankfully they weren’t raised, but they looked like I put on some yellow foundation and didn’t blend it. It was SOOOO irritating. And all of my internet sleuthing said there is no way to fix it except to get your high cholesterol fixed. Having just gone through the full workup for my hysterectomy I knew I didn’t have high cholesterol. Outside of that you could get them removed by a cosmetic surgeon, but that was $$$ and they would usually just come back in a year or two!

But after dragoncon I went to the dermatologist anyway just to see what they would say and if they had any ideas. All I got there was a shrug. Can’t do anything about it. “at least your glasses hide it!” Go to your GP and ask about your cholesterol. Even if it’s not high the xanthelasmas could be a sign that it’s going to GO high/bad so go ahead and get put on something for it.

So off I went to my GP, where I again got “at least your glasses hide it!” but she prescribed me a baby dose of cholesterol meds just to try out, even though she confirmed my cholesterol was fine. I took it for a month and it made me feel like hot shit, so I quit it after that and not seeing any improvement.

So I was like, I guess I’m going to have to pony up some money and go to a cosmetic surgeon and see what they can do to remove this. I’ve read that there are some more recent treatments that aren’t as indepth as cutting them out – lasering and stuff. But I hemmed and hawed because I really didn’t want to do that.

Then I got my new glasses 2 weeks ago. They are much larger lenses that my old glasses… and the xanthelasmas were VERY visible with them on. Like I looked like the fucking cryptkeeper. I haven’t even worn the new glasses much because it made me so self conscious. So now what??

Well, all throughout this process of researching it and reading about xanthelasmas, I kept seeing people say, put garlic on it. So last week… I put some garlic on it. And it worked.

It stung really bad, but after 2 rounds of 10 minutes… the worst of it was GONE. I looked like I’d been punched in the face, the area was all red and purple, and after a few days the skin peeled. But the worst of it is GONE. I had Chase help me do another round last night – I wanted to just lay down and have him carefully lay bits of garlic directly on the areas that didn’t get hit the first times (because I was just slapping it on in the general vicinity because I couldn’t really tell what I was doing without my glasses on) and I’ll probably do a second round on the same spots tonight. But I’m so excited it actually worked. I showed everybody at breakfast yesterday and they were all omg! It looks so much better! YAY.

There seems to be a consensus that they may still come back after a while. But… if all it takes is a little minced garlic to burn it off, that’s much more acceptable than paying a surgeon $1000 to remove it every year or 2!

Anyway, I’ll report back again next week on the progress. But I’m so happy this home remedy actually worked??