"If you can't be pretty, you might as well cause trouble" – Florence King
Apr 26th, 2013 by Meetzorp
Comes away with:
In order to re-charge the Baby, make sure that the charging equipment is plugged in firmly. Failure to ensure a proper junction between charging equipment and docking station can lead to insufficient charging and damage to charging equipment.
Apr 18th, 2013 by Meetzorp
Ahem.
One day you may be very hungry, awash with strange hormones, and absentmindedly considering what in the cupboard you could eat at the moment.
In that moment, do not get any blinding brain flashes which lead you to concoct a beetroot smoothie.
It will not be nice. It will not be good. You will feel obligated to consume it, because you were raised not to waste food, and it will be kind of awful. Sort of vaguely salty for no good reason?
Seriously. Do not ever make a beetroot smoothie, no matter how hungry, dazed, adventurous, and bored you may be. Without “green” aide, this is not the sort of thing you will ever guzzle with gusto.
Apr 15th, 2013 by Meetzorp
Some years ago, Christi and the Saturday Crew and I had been digging around in dumpsters, as you do, and I found this hat:
It was completely ridiculous. I thought I might use it in a costume context or wear it ironically or something, but I never did. I’m a bit too old for ironic fashion, and I just don’t have the right look for the “curled-up-straw-cowboy-hat” thing anyway. I think one needs to be a bit pixieish and insouciant, neither of which I am.
However, as sunny days and warm weather threaten to put in a creditable appearance, I have been thinking that I could sure use a sun hat for the garden and Dirty Kanza, especially. Which got me to thinking that maybe I could remodel that old dumpster-find cowboy hat into something a bit more “me.”
So, I filled up the bathroom sink with warm water and plunged the hat into it, weighting the crown with the shampoo bottle, as the hat wanted to float about. After about half an hour of soaking, the straw felt fairly pliant, so I drained the sink, and stretched the hat over that old stockinette hatblock I have. I pinned it in place with some long drawing pins and hand-shaped the brim into a down-turned dome. I left it to sun-dry in the backyard.
Once the shape was right, I needed to address the fugly blue-and-red embroidery which meandered around the lower edge of the crown. I realized that if I picked the stitches out, there would be a bunch needleholes in the straw and the whole hat would likely be materially weakened, so I decided it would make more sense to place some sort of decorative band over it.
A dig through my trim-and-lace box turned up a wide band of red gros-grain ribbon, a scrap of machine-made “crochet” lace, and a selection of plastic flowers.
Conscious of avoiding a Minnie Pearl effect (since I already have a Minnie Pearl hat for when the occasion requires), I selected just a few blossoms which I figured would help tie together the red hatband and the blue plastic piping protecting the outside edge of the straw-braid brim.
So, this is what I ended up with:
If I decide the streamers at the back are too long and annoying, I will loop them up into another layer of “butterfly wings.” That way, if I should ever want that gros-grain ribbon for some other purpose, it will be easy to take it back off, iron it flat, and reuse it.
I think this gives me a reasonable sunshade for my eyes and snoot without having to dismantle the masterpiece that is the old Minnie Pearl hat, and when the cheap straw gets too tatty, I can take the trimmings off and re-use them at a later date.
Apr 11th, 2013 by Meetzorp
When do we get a baby belly picture?
So asked an old school friend back in Nebraska on Facebook the other day. The short answer is “probably never” but I didn’t reply thusly, because I try very hard not to be an asshole, even if I fundamentally am one.
In fact, I never did reply to her because the answer is lengthy, complicated, stupid, and probably doesn’t make much sense. This is about as close as I’ll get to a proper answer, so Sarah, if you’re reading, this is it.
I hate having my picture taken.
Under the best of circumstances, when I’m in a really good mood, wearing becoming clothes, and in all other respects primed to look as nice as I ever will, I photograph badly. If I sense somebody’s pointing a camera at me (and I have amazingly tingly spidey senses for lenses) I get tense, I get a suspicious look on my face, and I somehow manage to comprehensively fuck it up. In almost every photo of me that lurks around Flickr and Facebook, I have a wild-eyed and hostile expression, my arms look all weird, and something about my posture indicates a vague pain somewhere.
And given that I’m a little bit funny-looking to start with, a sketchy facial expression simply guarantees a catastrophic photographic image.
Now I don’t really have a problem with being homely. Lord knows I’ve had years enough to get used to it. I was a funny-looking kid, all ears, teeth, and with a prominent facial birthmark to push it all over the cliff. It took a long time to grow into my features, nose and ears, especially. I remember, when I was about 11 or so, realizing that I was never going to be much of a beauty, realizing that I wasn’t ambitious enough to be part of the honor-roll crowd, and determining that if I was to offer much of anything back to the world, I’d damn well better be funny.
(around the time of that epiphany)
As I caromed from klutzy, homely, awkward childhood into homely, klutzy, awkward adolescence, I obviously didn’t develop a whole lot of grace, poise, and finesse. I was also a damnably late bloomer both physically and emotionally, and it wasn’t until I was nearly entirely an adult that I realized I could look pretty nice in the right clothes and with the right attitude. For far, far too many years I presented myself as a class-clown in deliberately weird clothes, with deliberately odd hairstyles, because I sought to distract people from noticing that I was awkward, homely, and klutzy. My schtik was that of the “goofy girl” and I did it very, very well.
Of course, no boys fancied me, and I was kind of a walking punchline around school, and it was just another avenue into which I could drive my self-consciousness, but at the time, it was the best I could do with what I had.
Now, of course, I’m a grown-assed woman, and am pretty comfortable with being homely and klutzy, so most of the awkwardness has dissipated. I can, and often do, dress nicely, in clothes that are contemporary, that aren’t deliberately far-out, in nice colors and in silhouettes that make the best of my wide-shouldered, straight-hipped, athletic figure. I do my best to do what I can with what I have, knowing that presenting myself as freak-of-the-week is not the best I can do. It’s kind of a good to know that I can circulate amongst normal people without arousing undue comment or discomfort.
However, honestly, my looks are not in the top ten things I enjoy about myself. I still think that I’m kind of an odd-looking woman. I’m totally okay with that, but I don’t really seek to glorify it, nor do I have the give-a-shit to try to mitigate it. And in that lies my reluctance to be photographed. I know I’m not disastrously, traffic-stoppingly ugly, but I also know that I’m not very photogenic, that I have kind of weird features, and because of my self-consciousness, I will somehow contrive to look even weirder on camera. And that’s under the best of circumstances.
Now add in the pregnancy, the oddity of my changing body, and an increased level of self-consciousness as my abdomen expands, and you might be able to see why I’m not taking photographs of myself every week.
Hell yeah, I think it’s insanely cool, the whole process of making a new person. I’m rather fascinated with whatever’s presumably burbling along inside of me, but on the other hand, I don’t love being pregnant. I don’t hate it either, but I am just not that revved up about the whole deal. Another friend said she felt extremely feminine while she was pregnant. Myself, I don’t feel that different from “normal” except that I have to use a bra now, and am wearing some really horrible trousers with a wide, stretchy knit waistband which are somewhat comfortable, but which try to fall off my ass about 167 times a day. I’m more conscious of trying to be careful, of, say, not gassing myself out while spray-painting a bed frame. Or not going mountain biking, or having a beer. I have been riding my bike more cautiously, not heaving myself into corners with reckless and scab-forming abandon. On the whole, I’ve been trying to live as normally as possible, to not let being pregnant become a handicap. For me, pregnancy has largely been a waiting period. Just holding out, waiting for this kid to gestate. I’m more interested in the end result, the baby, the kid, the person he will eventually be.
I think the combination of my not-especially-romanticized attitude toward pregnancy and my essential dislike of being photographed culminates in the result of no intentional baby-bump photos. It’s likely that I’ll get caught in somebody’s i-phone crossfire on Facebook or Flickr eventually, and one or another of my gaily-colored pregnancy-tents will be recorded for posterity, but I can’t promise any deliberate, posed, and progressive photos of my condition, because I can honestly state that I won’t be providing them.
Apr 3rd, 2013 by Meetzorp
What prevents a Buffalo Shot?
So, I’m a bit remiss in not posting this like IMMEDIATELY after I got home on Friday (or live-tweeting it, if I were an obnoxious mommyblogger with an i-phone) but on Friday last, I went in for the 2nd trimester ultrasound where they investigate whether the baby’s spine is in good tick, how the blood-flow is looking, if all of the brainmeats are forming, etc. This is the ultrasound wherein they can tell you if you’ve got a son or daughter pending.
The way I chose to announce it on Facebook is as follows:
“I know what I’ll be up to in the very near future.”
So yes, the sailor suit will have shorts rather than a skirt. Joel and I are completely excited to bits and pieces and are totally looking forward to all of the family adventures ahead of us.
Anyway, you may wonder what lead me to open this entry with a MST3K clip. Well, when the ultrasound tech said that she could tell it was a boy (she said, “Whoa! This baby is definitely a boy and not shy about it.”) She took a photo of the ultrasound while the lad was quite casually exposing his scrotum for all viewers to admire and then, the kindly ultrasound tech superimposed some text just above the baby’s thigh which reads, “it’s a boy!” and printed it out for us. I wasn’t really bucking for a photo of Baby’s First Fruit Basket, but I have it, so, um, yay, I guess. In the first ultrasound wherein they did the Nuchal Fold Translucency exam, he kept mooning the camera. So, what I’m thinking here is that he may take after his father in a humor-laden attitude toward his nether regions. Oy.
Anyway, as we were walking out of the doctor’s office, I mentioned something to Joel about, I wasn’t sure what to do with the “buffalo shot” image, and then had to explain to him the term “buffalo shot” which culminated in my singing the Pants song for further elucidation after I provided the formal, technical definition.
I’m not going to post that ultrasound pic, as I consider it in highly dubious taste to begin with, and I figure it can wait until this kid has his own Facebook account before blurry and unpleasant groinal photographs hit the Internet. (Actually, I hope to train this tendency out of him before it could become a worry!)
In any event, I am going to share one ultrasound photo with you, because this one was the one I thought was the coolest of the lot.
This, as you might be able to discern, is the baby’s spine. You can see some of his tiny little rib bones, and the back of his head. This was what I went in there to see. I went in there with the thought of “Let There Be Backbone.” I wanted confirmation that everything had formed and sealed up correctly, and here it is, one perfect, intricate little spine. So. Freakin’. Cool. Yeah, it’s a little creepy, but it’s also pretty damn fascinating.
Just some little twirls of DNA have been bossing around a whole bunch of proteins, minerals, and whatever other fantastic elements into making a whole new human, which, though it can be explained and described scientifically, strikes me akin to a sort of magic nonetheless.
Apr 2nd, 2013 by Meetzorp
I was on Flickr yesterday (a regular online stop for me) and was checking out the Home-Made Maternity group, because at the moment, it is relevant to my interests. This one woman had posted a really cute smock she’d made for herself of an olive-green diamond-printed fabric with orange, floral appliques. She had noted that she had taken the “Seamless Pledge” wherein she swore to not buy any new things while pregnant, but to thrift or make whatever she wanted.
It struck me that I’m doing much the same, though I had never thought nor known to formalize it in such a manner. I’m just tight with a penny and not overburdened with the cash in any event. I also love the challenge of re-purposing castoffs, which probably hearkens back to my teenage years of modifying hand-me-downs to fit my ironing-board figure and whimsical fashion sense.
A few years ago, a friend who left the corporate world unloaded a bunch of his old White Collar clothes upon me. Tailored wool trousers, beautiful silk neckties, and more blue-striped cotton shirts than you could care to count. Since then, I’ve used a lot of the woolens either in cycling caps, or in my own irreverent “jacketshorts” designs. Some of the neckties became a Grand Marshall’s sash for the annual tweed ride, some of the others have been fashioned into an oddball woven tunic, and others yet have been sliced into appliques for trim on various projects here and there.
Just recently, it struck me that some of those shirts will be great for making baby clothes, both for the pending kiddo, and, as you will see below, for gifts.
One of my friends has a fresh, new baby girl, and I thought I could do something cute in cotton for her. Back in “the olden days,” blue was considered a particularly fetching color for little girls, especially delicate pastel shades. It was associated with the Virgin Mary and was considered a particularly dainty and chaste hue.
Because this little girl is the younger sister to a proud, two-year-old Big Sister, I didn’t want Big Sis to feel left out of the fun, so I made another sundress for her, using somewhat similar stylistics, but scaled up, and just a bit different, ’cause every girl likes to have her own distinct style.
I had some little cut-out Strawberry Shortcake figures I’d saved from some scrap fabric, figuring some day they’d make cute appliques. I thought it tied in nicely with the pink ribbon which forms the shoulder straps.
For the back of this dress, I re-used the front of an old shirt, so that it buttons up the back. One of the ribbon ties serves to keep the top of the placket flat.
I had enormous fun making these, and foresee this as a future favorite for baby-shower presents. This simple bell-shaped tunic lends itself very nicely to embellishment via applique or other applied trim.
And speaking of re-purposing, I have made myself a second white blouse for work. I was getting really tired of having to wash my uniform top every day (because invariably I get something horrible on it while I’m working) so I decided to modify an old Simplicity middy blouse pattern to an A-line shape to accommodate the baby.
The results don’t suck, I don’t think.
As you can see, I modified it to short sleeves and topstitched it rather than using ribbon or braid trim, because I didn’t have any.
Joel considers it to be in questionable taste and perhaps slightly unsavory, but hell, I’m pregnant. Maternity clothes are often stupid looking and undignified. At least I’m doing this under my own free will, rather than just having to cope with whatever I find at the thrift shop or on the sale rail at Old Navy.
I have concocted my own “Sailor Moon” superheroine moniker to go with this blouse. “セーラー スーパーマーケット” (Sera Supamaketto, or Sailor Supermarket)
Also:
Mar 26th, 2013 by Meetzorp
So said McCall’s back in 1973, and you know what? They weren’t kidding. This little frock was easy to make and should be easy to wear. It’s essentially an a-line from armpit to hem, given shape by the crossover sash which is integrated into the neckline binding.
I made it a bit more complicated than originally designed because the sleeves that came with the pattern originally were no longer with the pattern. Somewhere in the passing 40 years, they went AWOL, so I measured the armscye dimensions of this dress pattern against some other patterns I owned and ended up commandeering the flirty split-sleeve design from a mid-1990s New Look blouse pattern I’ve owned since college.
This sleeve is a bit more complicated than the one that had been designed with the pattern, but I think it is a good pairing stylistically, and it fit into the armscye with no modification required.
The total look is as follows:
I am so pleased with this fabric, I can hardly express it. These colors are just so cheerful, and it has a very nice drape to it. The floral print was from some fabric Mom’s friend Vi was clearing out of her workroom, and the goldenrod yellow contrast fabric is some crepe that I inherited from one of my sister’s friends’ mother. Complicated, no?
The pattern was one from my Grandma Helga’s stash – I think it might have been used for a dress for one of my aunts, but on the other hand, it might have come from Grandma’s cousin Brigitte, who is also a keen seamstress. Cousin Brigitte lived in the southwest at that point in time and made a lot of lightweight sundresses to help cope with the climate as stylishly as possible. One does, if one can.
And this one should help me cope with a summer pregnancy in the best of sunny, flowery fashion. And it is going to look ever and ever so cute with my red patent-leather sandals!
Mar 18th, 2013 by Meetzorp
…to keep cocking it up this relentlessly. But I managed to persevere through my incompetence and produce what turned out to be an actually pretty dress:
This finally turned out very well. The fabric and the pattern combined almost perfectly.
This pattern was intended specifically for moderate stretch knits. This fabric is not a knit at all, nor is it even a little bit stretchy. It is a basic, plain-weave Rayon challis which does have a nice drape and flow to it, so I figured it would work well for the gathered sleeves, bodice, and skirt. I sized it up two sizes to accommodate for the lack of stretch and for my expanded bust size. And do you know what? It works. Perfectly. It is a nice fit with sufficient ease for comfort, movement and a graceful bodyline. Given that I eliminated the back zip for a number of reasons which mostly boil down to extreme laziness, it’s actually not difficult to put on.
Pretty much every review of this pattern has commented about how extremely low cut it is, and I concur, this dress is damn near indecent. No problem, though. I have several pretty camisoles that I can wear to fill in the neckline a bit, and with it being black-and-white, I can put just about any color beneath it. I did trim it with red topstitching, but it is very subtle, and also fairly versatile. I have a gorgeous saffron-colored lace cami that is going to look really great with this dress, I think.
The pattern has a shaped waistband that comes to a point at the lower back and provides waistline shaping in what would otherwise be an Empire line dress. I really like this feature and plan on making other versions of this dress, eventually in Jersey knit, as originally designed. There are options for making the neck and waistbands in contrast fabric, which is probably how I’ll style it for the next time I use this pattern.
From the side, you can see that there should be plenty of room for expansion. And the gratifying fact is that I seem to be carrying low and pretty much all in front, so I can still wear clothing with some waistline definition and carry on with my personal preference for fairly structured garments.
I tried it on with a white, lace-trimmed camisole, a pair of mustard rope-sole espadrilles, and my latest thrift-shop score, a little raffia handbag with black patent straps and a lining of black-and-white polkadot cotton. There’s quite a bit of potential for chic with this cheap-n-cheerful summer dress.
Mar 16th, 2013 by Meetzorp
Yesterday, when I was taking the dog on her run, I caught scent of a smell that took me right back to elementary school.
No, it wasn’t kindergarten paste, mimeograph ink, or cafeteria Sloppy Joes. It was, in fact, the aroma of sun-warmed tires.
You might be wondering what the hell sort of school I went to that the smell of old tires would be a memory trigger. Well, it was this one:
Just a typical little one-room rural school in Northwestern Nebraska. One of a dying breed, though at the time, we didn’t know that. It was just our school. The student body ranged anywhere from eight to twenty kids depending on if any of the local ranchers’ hired hands had school-aged children. Typically, we had one teacher and a teacher’s aide, and if any kids needed something like speech therapy, a specialist would be scheduled to visit the school to work with him or her.
Since it was a small school serving an area of low population density and no especial prosperity, we were not exactly rife with all of the latest equipment, technology, methodology, and excitement. Which, I think, may explain why we children treated a bunch of old car tires as part of the playground equipment.
Sure, we actually did have a proper playground with the old-fashioned, exciting, kids-could-get-hurt sort of toys.
Monkey Bars, from which we all vigorously hung upside-down, did daredevil jumps, and generally treated with a casual lack of caution.
A teeter-totter, which all of us kids learned to walk across and balance, as you see me doing here.
Merry-go-round, which we used to see how fast we could get going. Also, kids would stand up on the seats, grab the top support struts, and let their feet fly out from beneath them. We called this feat “flying” and it was widely popular. Surprisingly, nobody ever was badly hurt doing this. The one actual traumatic injury I remember from my school days was when Kelli jumped out of the swings (seen behind the merry-go-round) and somehow managed to fall backwards and break both of her arms. Which could happen to anyone.
Anyway, as you see, we had things to play on and with, but we also had a bunch of old tires. There were some old truck tires, some very old-fashioned tall, narrow bias-ply tires that must have once belonged to something like a Model A, and there were a few more modern radial tires. I’m not sure why there were a bunch of old tires at the school; perhaps someone had once donated them thinking the kids could use them as planters. In any event, we used them for many purposes the manufacturers never intended.
It makes us sound like a bunch of pathetic urchins, but I can assure you that we were in the main, a crew of well-cared for, reasonably-mannerly, ordinary kids who did as kids do, and found a way to make just about any mundane object into a toy.
Here’s a mass photo of the student body (very badly taken, as I was the photographer) circa 1986.
Here’s another, slightly better one, from the spring of the same year, taken from the top of the monkey bars, again by me, with my old Instamatic.
Mar 13th, 2013 by Meetzorp
Yesterday, I was grousing on Facebook about having an episode of numptiness wherein I assembled the sections of a shaped waistband upside-down and stitched them to the bodice that way, then wondered why the waistband looked like the top of a tent.
So, this morning I sat down, fixed the cursed waistband, re-installed it, did the decorative topstitching, and then proceeded to screw it up from another direction:
Would that I could say this was an isolated incident, but I have photographic evidence working against me:
And because I had arrogantly assumed that my upside-downsy problems were behind me, not only did I stitch the sleeve in the wrong way up, I also zig-zagged the raw edges (in lieu of an overlocker, which I continue to refuse to buy) so now I have to pick out a row of normal stitches and a row of zig-zags. Which is still probably less of an ass-pain than undoing a serged seam.
Anyway, what I’m trying to make is a modification of the dress seen below.
I’ve added a bit of length to the skirt front, as it will be used for maternity, and sized it up a size-and-a-half because I am not using a knit fabric, nor am I installing a back zip, because I don’t have one of the right length and also I cannot be bothered.
The fabric, as you can see, is a black-and-white abstract floral print rayon challis, and I think it will be very pretty when I finally get my head around what direction is up. It reminds me a bit of some of the more restrained Marimekko prints. I’ve opted to highlight the shaped neck and waistbands with red topstitching. If I ever manage to overcome my current wave of incompetence, it could end up being a nice spring/summer dress.
If.