it never rains in california

Another Monday at work and work continues to be a source of anxiety – I had a dream one night last week where my whole family had gone to Paris and as we were leaving, like getting into the security line at the airport, I remembered we’d brought Luna with us and we’d forgotten her at the hotel. So we had to go back to the hotel, where she escaped the room and was running down the hall of the hotel and I was panicked because I was like, we’re never going to catch her now… woke up with my heart pounding out of my chest. That dream was not about Luna.

Anyway. Let’s talk about the weather!

Tuesday we turned into Silent Hill.

The ice has slowly been melting. Thursday and Friday the mail we’ve been waiting on finally started trickling in and we got most the stuff we’ve been waiting on – I got my new glasses! More on that later. It’s going up into the 70s today so the last few ice mounds in the shadows should hopefully die off today.

Finished the Phantom Menace puzzle:

This one was fun, very enjoyable. Started on my other new one, a Lake Tahoe travel poster.

Been dividing free time between the puzzle, reading and sewing. I wanted to reread the book series I just finished, but also wanted to move on to my new books, so I was torn. Then I realized the book series I just read is on spotify! So I started listening to it while I did puzzles and sewed, and my reading time was for my new book. By Feb 2 I was out of audiobook listening time on spotify for the month LOL So I knew Chase had a bunch of audible credits, so I went and bought them there and it’s been nice just having a constant stream of entertainment while I do other things.

The new disneybound dress is coming along – and what a pain it has been. So of course I had to shorten the whole thing at the neckline because it was all way too long.

Got the sleeves installed but it was so hard to tell if everything was right because it was pretty impossible to try on without the neckline being gathered yet.

Finally got to the point I could gather it and tried it on, all seemed good. I went to put the collar piece on expecting it to also be way too big like every other piece, but this one was not – and it made me realize I had the neckline sitting too low. I got it re-gathered to fit higher up and got the collar sewn on, tried it on, and the sleeve openings were now way too small because I’d raised everything up.

Sewed the sleeve connections lower to give me some more room and that helped, but it’s still pulling the collar on the (viewer right, my left) side funny. It’s not so noticeable if I don’t have closed up all the way, which I’m never going to wear it snapped all the way to the neck, so I think i’m just going to live with it. Having to unpick anything on this fabric is a nightmare and I already took the collar off once because I sewed it on wrong the first time (I did interfacing just on one layer of the collar, and I sewed the interfaced side as the inside layer. It did not look right so I had to take it off and redo it.)

I’ve got about half the snaps sewn on. Chase is 3d printing buttons for me, and I’m just going to sew them on top of the where the snaps are to hide the threads. Still got to add snaps at the cuffs too.
I’ve got one side of the dress hem pinned up shorter, I want to put it on tonight and see if that is about where I want it or I went too short. It’s still WAY too long. It IS supposed to be about ankle length, but that dressform is sit to my height right now and you can see the longest parts are just brushing the floor.

(Also the lighting in my sewing room is making it look really yellow in those photos! It’s natural white!)

Biggest thing left really is the belt. I was going to hand embroider some stuff to mimic the conchos but I found an embroidery file that would look really cool, so I’m going to experiment with doing it on this fabric. Not sure how this fabric will handle the embroidery machine but we’ll see. Picked up some stabilizer for it yesterday.

To-do:
-finish sewing on snaps
-cut belt
-test fabric with embroidery machine
-do embroidery whether its by hand or machine
-finish belt
-hem dress
-add belt loops?
-buy shoes

Not bad.

I’ve also kinda narrowed down what costumes I want to make the rest of the year. I’m going to be looking while I fabric shop in LA. Not going to put it here and commit to anything until I find fabric.

Last night for the super bowl, we made nachos. We were at my fav Mexican place and got extra of their yellow queso to go — we used that as the base, and then added everything on top of it, cooked it in the oven and then dumped everything on top of the waiting chips. It was so good!

So yeah my new glasses. I like them but they also are much larger than my old ones, and they reveal a little bit of a recent insecurity about my face that I don’t think I’ve talked about here. BUT I think I found a solution — if this solution continues to work I’ll post more about it here next week.

This week – hopefully finishing up Leia, fighting the urge to make new Minnie ears I don’t need, start making a packing list…. is it too early to make a packing list? When I’m stressed I want to make packing lists LOL