Friday, November 19, 2010

My new home

I'm still here, I promise! I moved to my new place a week ago and haven't had internet until last night so I have been watching tons of DVDs. Here are the pictures of my new place.


Entering downstairs
Upstairs. There is a dresser off to the left

Sorry for the sideways picture. It refused to rotate. But this is off to the right of the above picture

Tiny bathroom. I was pretty much sitting on the sink to get this picture.








So welcome to my new place!

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Going bonkers with interesting results

So I am still working on getting ready to move and haven't been able to procrastinate and be crafty recently so I've been going bonkers! I had to do something fun and creative before I went completely off my rocker. And thus the decision to attempt to curl the anti-curl hair. My hair seriously just won't curl, I've even had stylists attempt to curl it and the best they could get was slightly curled under ends. Well, recently my friend told me about a way that she had done kind of a modified rag curl and last night I decided to try it. So here is are the pictures! Pardon the mess in the back...it kinda looks better now.
Rag curls
After removing the fabric strips


It really wasn't a frizzy as it looked
10 hours later

I think they held decently well with no hair products and not having started with damp hair either. And to show my little helper again during the cleaning process.


She also took a nap there later


I'm also holding out for the most part with Nano, I'm only about 3,000 words behind where I should be. I'm going to have to catch up quickly!

Friday, November 5, 2010

Regency dress

Before going to bed the other night I decided to spend an hour starting to scale up the pattern. Now I haven't ever had problems with scaling and even did a scale project about two months ago helping my old high school grid up a pattern for one of their sets (and go figure didn't take a picture). Easy as pie right? Somehow the concept of scaling eluded me at 10 pm. So to solve my dilemma I google how to scale up something. And the proceeded to feel like an idiot. To make it worse I kept blanking so I had to keep going back to the net, but I eventually got three pieces scaled up, one being a rectangle.

Bodice pieces


Under sleeve
Tuesday I managed to scale up both sleeve sections and all the little edgings and such. It took me 30 minutes combined to do all four pieces. Because the skirt pieces are so huge I decided that I'm not going to create a paper pattern for them or the bib front, but I did figure out all the measurements so I'm pretty much good to go and start on my mock up. Right now it looks like it is going to fit with just some minor adjustments. And just because the back piece makes me giggle.

Center back is 4 1/4 inches!

I'm also hoping to be able to make regency style stays and am trying to decide between long stays or short stays. I'm leaning more towards the long stays because I like the look of them, but short stays might be more comfortable. Meh. Maybe I'll just make one of each and that will solve my problem of deciding which one.

I'm also still in the process of cleaning and packing (ugh) and Tangie keeps trying to help. So here is her helping (getting massively in the way while I'm about to drop my record player)




And after the visit to the vet the other day, we decided to have them surgically remove the cyst and it's lining. So fingers crossed that it doesn't come back after that. Sadly, it looks like I'm moving before it happens.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Yikes!

So yesterday was only the second day of NaNo and I'm already falling behind. I think I wrote something like 100 words yesterday so I have...er around 3,000 to write today if I don't want to fall further behind. So...YIKES!

I'm going to warn you now there is a kind of, but not really, icky picture a bit further down of my dog's cyst. It isn't really graphic, but I just figured I'd warn you.

I was also going to try to post some about the Regency dress because I've finished the patterned pieces (not patterning the 60 inch by 40 inch skirt piece and then 60 by whatever back skirt), but I am off to the vet later this morning with my poor little elderly Australian shepherd dog. She has had a cyst the size of a large grapefruit on her side for somewhere close to two months now and it is pretty large. The problem is we have had it drained around 5-6 times by now and it just keeps filling back up so we have to keep going back. It isn't bothering her as far as we can tell, but then you run into the possibility of it bursting (when just makes me gag to think about). Apparently it is common for older dogs to get cysts and they can be caused by just falling and hitting something kind of hard. We are starting to get to the point where we have three choices: keep draining it which there is a risk of infection every time we have it done, surgery to put in a drainage tub (again gagging over here) or surgery to try removing the cyst pocket. So when we take her in this morning we are going to discuss it with the vet.

Cyst (on the left) from above
Slightly hard to see, but you can kind of see the lump of the cyst











Rita, my dog, has been through so much this summer and it is just kind of sad that she has. We almost had to put her down earlier this summer, but she is one strong little girl. I thing Rita's personality was switched with a cat a birth because she is terrified of water, even if it is just sprinkling she will go and hide under the grill cover to avoid getting wet. Well, that makes bath time rather hard. We generally take her to a self serve dog wash place since they have the raised tubs and the dog fur dryer things. She has always tried to escape the water so we go in pairs to wash her so there is a backup person to help keep her in the tub, but in early June/late May the only time in a long time my dad went without me she managed to twist away from his grip while he was switching back to Rita's collar and she jumped out. She slipped and hit her head and didn't get up, even for a treat. Heck she didn't even or rather  couldn't even wag her tail. She was paralyzed from her neck down. So my dad rushed her to the vet. They did x-rays and ran tests, but nothing was very conclusive. We were told that there was the chance that she would recover, but they couldn't tell us to what extent. So we took her home and I sleep in the utility room on the floor next to her so if she needed to go out I could carry her because my mom can't pick her up by herself and my dad had a really early shift at work. When I had to take her out she could move her front legs and kind of support herself on them, but her back legs still weren't moving so I had to hold her up and sort of waddle around the backyard with her. We went back to the vet the day after the accident and they were amazed by her being able to move her front legs. So again we went home, this time we had an appointment a week later that Rita walked into to the shock of all of the people working at the vet's office and us as well.

Sorry for the longwinded post, but if it wasn't this I probably wouldn't be able to post one until Friday.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Shhhhh! It's a secret!

I know we all have our little (big) guilty pleasures and some of us might even have quite a few guilty pleasures. I won't deny it, I have quite a few including chocolate, books, fabric, spinning fiber, fabric dye, Klutz books.....just to name a few. But I'm going to let you in on just one of mine today.

Klutz books!

I don't know about you, but I grew up with some of the different books like the juggling book (which I kind of failed at, but I'm still determined to get it down one day), the friendship bracelet book, the sewing book, etc. All these books are fun and one of them made a reappearance for one of my college classes senior year and it saved my bum by getting me a passing grade. I own that grade to the Juggling Book, mind you I still only juggled silk scarves while reciting a self written comedic monologue and keeping the scarves in the air for three minutes.

Dear Klutz...Thank you very much.

So this post is mainly because I just got another Klutz book today. It is the Paper Fashions book.



I have the fantasy paper fashions book and have been enjoying it for a while, but I had seen a few things that used some stencils that the Fancy one had that Fantasy didn't. Sure they have quite a few similar ones, but this one also means I have more tiny hangers and fun paper to play with. So with my inner child (who is somewhere around the ago of 2/3ish) begging and begging for it, I decided to splurge and get myself a little treat. I'm also going to blissfully ignore the fact that I am treating myself to fabric for the Regency dress.


My copy doesn't look so nice any more
I'm glad I splurged, I didn't have a chance to play with this one yet, but I have looked through the entire book and all the papers that came with it including the evil glitter ones (glitter= herpes of crafting supplies, it never goes away). And am planning on playing with it tomorrow between packing, writing for Nano, clceaning and procrastinating on all of that by watching documentaries (watching After Innocence right now). Yep, sounds like one good plan to me. When I've had a chance to play I will post pictures of my creations *mwahahahaha* (<- supposed to be my evil laugh)


On another note, NaNoWriMo started today and I have written 1,411 words so far and have 48,589 words left before the end of the months. It averages out to about 1,667 words a day. So I'm going to say that I did pretty dang good today, but I will admit I have no idea really where my story is going. The way I write is kind of jumpy. I'll have an idea for one little section and then run out of where it was going, but then I have an idea for another part later in the story so I'll go and write that until I'm not sure where to take it and so on and so forth. Eventually I go back and connect it all together. Works for me.

One problem I'm having right now though is names for the main characters. My main female character is Lexi which I like, not 100% sold on, but it will do for now. The main guy is Nicholas or Nick for short. The names don't really seem to fit together as a couple which irks me to no end. I'm also trying to figure out a name for a set of twins, but the problem there is I haven't decided if it is going to be two brothers or two sisters, but I'm leaning more for brothers, it seems to fit better. Meh, hopefully something will come to me soon. Any suggestions? I'm going to keep thinking on it, but any suggestions would be welcome and I thank you in advance if you have any.