nobody got time for that

Once again I come to you all with costume updates, because I spent the entire last week doing chain stitches on the skirt and there’s nothing more to see yet.

If you want to skip on down to actual content, I have new art at the bottom.

But as for costume venting – I AM frustrated because last week I thought I had 3 panels left. It takes me about 3 days to do a panel, so that would mean as of last Monday I needed around 9 more days, which means today I should be close to be done. Alas, I actually had FOUR panels as of last Monday and I just miscounted – I realized that Tuesday night. Saturday I barely got to work, and I had something I had to go do after work almost every single day last week, so it really slowed me down. As of today I have 2.5 panels left, so almost in the same situation I was in a week ago.

The good news is that this weekend is a 3 day weekend and we don’t have to be anywhere. Most of my family is out of town, so not even in a cookout. May go swimming with Ash at some point and go see Supergirl but I’m really hoping to have time to do one big last push and have it MOSTLY done when I come update next week.

I’m not upset about it. My goal of being finished with the chain stitch by end of June was very lofty and I was actually thinking it’d be mid-July. So if I can still pull off having it finished only a few days into July, it’s still actually ahead of schedule.

(Please note the drop of drool)

Monday after work we had dinner with friends who were in town for the week, that was fun. Tuesday was the only day I got to stay in my house clothes and take a nap after work LOL Which was good because Tuesday i had an absolutely awful work day, it was SOOO busy and multiple problems that looked like my fault even though they weren’t, I was still the one who had to answer for them. I told Chase I was about to quit and walk away.

To add to that stress, Wednesday after work was the dreaded doctor’s appointment. I told Chase my dentist only wanted blood work to make sure all was OK, so Chase called for me and told them I didn’t need a full appointment, only blood work. That made me feel better, knowing I was just gonna go in and get a blood draw and get out of there. When he called, they confirmed – since that’s what I had noted when I made the appointment – it was only blood work.

Well guess what, I get there and no it’s a full blown freaking appointment, I had to go into the room and talk to the doctor and get hounded about a colonoscopy (the bowel prep from surgery last year about ended me, I’m not doing it again anytime soon – seriously it was the worst part of having an ORGAN REMOVED) and my blood pressure (i’ve been taking it regularly for the last month, but it’s still high, so they increased it), they wanted to do a whole work up, EKG, chest x-ray, everything. Uuuuuuugggghhhh.

I got through it. It’s over. Got all my lab results over the next 2 days, ekg, x-ray were fine. Blood work only showed dehydration (no big surprise I was too nervous to eat all day which means I also didn’t drink anything all day) and inflammation (no big surprise either since that’s what I’m dealing with at the dentist).

With that over and behind me now I could focus on fun stuff for the weekend. Thursday night we had a belated Father’s Day dinner at Tonica. It was yummy. My parents picked me up way early (Chase was coming straight from work), so we drove around for a half hour just looking at houses and other things in midtown. It was fun.

Saturday we got up and went and met them for breakfast then headed out to their house to help them in the garage for a half hour. We got a good sized corner cleaned out for them. I found 3 interesting things in that corner:

This box I used for shipping in 2005 – the shipping label was too faded to read, but it still had my “arriving 9/1/2005” note on it, so I used this box for Dragoncon in 2005! It’s a 21 year old box! LOL. One of the other flaps had a date for SDCC 2005 on it (I always reused them). Both of them denoted Box 1 of 5, geez LOL I miss those days but I don’t. It was easy to just stick everything in a box and off it goes to the con, but also having my costumes out of my hands was terrifying. And the hotels were getting really bitchy about it. When I first started doing that (2001-2004), they were all totally fine with it, I tipped well, had my own shipping labels. Towards 2005-2007, I was regularly getting extra fees added onto my stay for it (not like a handling fee which is fine, but like them trying to charge me for the shipping cost when I already had a prepaid label), hotels telling me they would not handle the boxes for me and having to walk it to a FedEx station, hotels telling me they didn’t have my boxes when I had the tracking show it was delivered and signed for. It just got to be an absolute pain to deal with.

Anyway, I also found my little case of homemade tapes. I had a case of them out there in the garage because I’d listen to them on my walkman as I rode my bike back in the day. Some of the tapes were things I recorded off the radio in the 80s into the early 90s. I would’ve kept it but there were batteries down in there that had corroded, and a lot of the tapes had cracked and broken in the heat and the tape had been pulled out of a lot of them and broken (something must’ve gotten in there at some point). So it all got tossed, but it was nostalgic to see.

And finally we brought home a table! I’ve decided that my work office upstairs is going to become an activity space. We’re going to get rid of the guest bed in there and my work office set-up (that I don’t use anymore) and turn it into an open crafting space. My parents had their old dining room table from when I was a kid, so we took it to put in there. Once we’re able to get rid of the bed. Probably after dcon at this point.

After sweating it out in my parents’ garage for an hour and a half we were all DONE. Cooled off and then Chase and I ran errands, came home and crashed. So no embroidery until that evening! But Sunday we didn’t have to go anywhere so I was finally able to work all day.

Anyway, let’s move onto the new additions to the Leia project:

This Hoth variation. Yeah I know she was just messing around on set in this, but it’s cute and I wanted to include it.

The poster dress. I didn’t want bare feet (drawing toes is worse than drawing hands), so I gave her some gold shoes to match her gold belt.

The “Harbinger” outfit – blue vest/brown pants combo from the comics. I sure hope this is my last Hoth variation. At least I didn’t have to draw any quilted patches on this one.

This is apparently a look you can put together in SWTOR. Rebel Legion has the images of it incorrectly loaded on the Harbinger entry. I thought it was cute so I included it.

Jedi Leia from TFU… TFU2? I don’t know I didn’t play it.

Splinter of the Minds Eye Leia

Then I realized I could get 2 Splinter of the Minds Eye Leias out of the same art

Ok so now I have left:
1. The comic “adventure” variation with the fancier hair (ugh I was wrong, another hoth variation)
2. Mal’ary’ush dress (in progress)
3. White dark side armor
4. The other TFU Leia outfit with the Bespin-esque hair

I’m at 45 done and after those 4 done I’ll be at 49. I need one more!! UGH. I think I may dig into my copy of The Princess and the Scoundrel and look for a few of the costume descriptions and try to do them. I do have it on kindle so I should hopefully be able to find those passages with a keyword search, since I don’t have time to read the whole book again right now (alas).

But that’ll put me OVER 50 and my brain hates that it won’t be even, but oh well, it’ll be what it’ll be.

I need to make a decision on stickers this week. I think I’ll break it up like this:

6 Leia stickers from the new collection:
1. ANH Leia
2. Bespin Leia
3. Wedding Leia
4. Jedi Leia (white dress)
5. Ceremonial Leia
6. Huttslayer Leia?

6 Padme stickers from the updated collection:
1. Picnic Padme
2. Lake Padme
3. Tatooine 2 piece Padme
4. Liberty Dies Padme
5. Red Senate Amidala
6. Parade Amidala

And 8 “chibi” ones + non-Star Wars:
1. chibi Padme Lake dress
2. chibi regular Leia
3. chibi bespin Leia
4. chibi Dr Crusher
5. chibi Scarlet Witch
6. chibi T’Lyn
7. A completely noncostume/non Star Wars idea i had i need to draw
8. Maybe that Uhura I drew back in 2023 that I still love.

So I need to take a break this week from new Leias and get the one Padme simplified I haven’t done yet (red senate and may also do funeral and see if I wanna do that instead of Liberty Dies) and draw that one idea I had above. Finalize this and get it all uploaded and sent off for production this week.