Thursday 31 March 2011

Clean up, clean up! Everybody, everywhere!

Maybe I pushed myself a little too hard yesterday, going up and down the stairs doin' my laundry. My knee is all of the aching now. But Mount Laundry Pile is being cut down to more of a hill, and really for a luandry mining process thats progress. I probably only need a small application of C4 to be able to develop in that area of the bedroom again.

The reason my knee is all achy is because I tripped over a box last week at the old job. I wish I had gotten a picture of the warning sign and the evil box that attempted to end my life, or at least to dislocate it. Some of my awesome coworkers put up a sign but never got around to caging the evil box, so it may be roaming free among the production area looking for its next victim as I type.

I took some before pictures of all the stuf I needed to organize yesterday for some proper motivation. I haven't taken any after pictures yet because I'm not quite done what I want to do with it. I'm probably going to need even more storage I have so much more than I thought.

This is the area in the spare room everything got shoved into. That box is crammed full of fabric.
 This is the filing cabinet Mr. C got me where I keep stuff in. In this picture it's still in the basement.
 This is stuff in it.
When I was working for the pay day loans company a few years back a young lady came into the store high out of her mind carrying that very spool of silver cord asking to borrow a phone. I let her, because she was a customer there, and I didn't really care if she used the phone or not. After asking for a ride she argued with the person on the other end about needing to bring some string. When she finally arranged her clandestine meeting with said person and hung up, she thanked me and said she'd pay me in string and left the spool on the desk. I took it home and it is now my crack string. Even though its cord.
This is fabric hastily shoved into the bottom drawer.

Mr. C moved the filing cabinet up from the basement for me when he got home yesterday. There's no light in the basement, plus a lovely leak from the shower so everything always gets musty down there. Having it upstairs is supposed to help with the motivation to use it again.

I have way more fabric than I thought, and a lot less of everything else. I found approximately 6 yards of a beautiful brown suiting fabric (fibre content unknown) that Mr. C wants me to make him a steampunk inspired jacket out of. I have a pattern here for an historical mens Victorian coat that will be perfect and only requires a few small alterations. And I should have enough fabric left over to make the corset coat I wanted to make for myself. I have 2 yards of some lovely silk brocade that screams overbust corset at me, so I think that makes for a second project. I've got 5 yards of satin blend fabric with a lovely paisley pattern in a bright aqua blue thats going to become a 50's inspired sun dress. There's also about 5 yards of a heavy brown cotton duck with a tone on tone pattern that will make a lovely cloak for use in the SCA (The SCA stands for Society for Creative Anachronism. If you like dressing up in historical medieval garb, sword fighting and other ren-fair type things you should check it out). And I also have approximately 4 yards of fleece with cartoon doggy faces on it that is probably going to become either pyjamas or a couple of kids housecoats for my neices. If anyone can think of anything fun to do with over 5 yards of fire-proof faux suede in both gunmetal and tan let me know. So far I think I'll be making more SCA wear, perhaps a cloak and perhaps some corsets. You never know when a fire-proof cloak might come in handy. I also found some really loose weave cotton that might make a good sheer chemise for the SCA as well.

I found a couple half completed projects, including a nice costume underbust corset made of vibrant blue heavy weight cotton that I decided to do some really nice gold topstitching on. It's very nautical, so I'll probably be making a sexy-ish pirate/ship captain costume to go with it. All I have to do is bone the corset, find some nice white lacing and put a bias edge on the bottom. Et voilĂ ! Pirate posh! I also found a teddy bear that I should have completed by now. It's for my baby neice. I made one for her big sister, so I figured she needed one too. She was born in October last year, and I had intended to have it done before then. That might have to be the first thing I complete out of all the fun things I've found.

So, all in all the attempts at organization are paying off. I have a whole box yet to go through that I know has more fabric in it, but depending on how today goes I might not be able to get to it. There's a job fair thing downtown today that Mr. C really thinks I should attend, and I do want to go too. Although my knee really hurts and I wont be able to walk that much today. So I just might be forced to sit this one out. Damn you productivity of yesterday screwing with my planned productivity of today!


Now I think I have to go make myself a coffee and some breakfast. Yes, this was the very first thing I did when I woke up. Don't you feel special?

Wednesday 30 March 2011

The Morning My White Cat Turned Pink

So today is a new day, the first day of me riding the unemployment train. It's not actually all that upsetting or depressing to me, in fact I'm kind of enjoying the freedom this will provide for me over the next little while as I work out where I'm going from here. So the plan for today, so far, is to do some laundry, inventory my craft supplies, and help my neighbor and bestest friend pack up her house for express moving this weekend/today. So far all I've really been productive at doing is reading web comics, cooking a tasty egg for breakfast to go with my caramel cappacino (Mr. C, my fiancé, got me a cappacino maker for my birthday this year to offset my rising Starbucks expenses), throwing one load of laundry into the wash and calling my big sister.

And now I'm probably going to have to bathe my cat.

I have two cats, one is the little black one you see in my profile picture. Her name's Lenore. She's the epidome of feline perfection, the ideal model of the stereotypical cat. With a ton of personality. The other one is named Max. And he's very... awkward. He doesn't always act like your average cat. He sleeps in the bathtub with his head under the faucet so he always has a wet spot on his forhead. He loves food, and sleep, and will often sleep in front of his food dish head in bowl Garfield style. He never eats standing up. He's 20 pounds of solid cuddles, and likes to drag fleece blankets and stuffed animals around the house with him. When I opened the door to our spare room he snuck in behind me so I left it open for him, and at this point I called my sister and made said tasty egg.

The next time I noticed the big guy he was laying on his back in the living room and his entire chest and part of his stomach is pink. I honestly had a momentary panic that he was bleeding. Then I realised he was asleep and purring and content in a happy sunbeam. So I investigated the spare room to find that Mr. C had been drawing with some pastels and had left the picture on the floor. Max loves to lay on paper when he isn't shredding it, so I'm guessing he decided to lay on the picture. Theres not that much left of the picture, all the pastels transferred onto his fur instead. I guess he's more absorbent than paper.

I think this just might put a hamper on my plans. Speaking of hampers, I should really throw another load of laundry into the washer, and speaking of washing... here kitty kitty!!!

Tuesday 29 March 2011

The Incredible Return of...

Well, okay it's probably not all that incredible. But it is a return! I've tried my hand at this whole blogging thing before but I think back in the day I was a little to young to understand that posting every thought of mine online made it entirely public and I reaped the consequences from that. But I'm done blaming the internet for the past, and have decided to make amends and try once again.

So yeah. First post! Woohoo?

For some reason my enter button is acting all screwy. Normally I try to avoid typos, so I appologize profusely now if this gets all bugged up from a screwy enter key! Oh, and about the blog title. I was stumped and couldn't think of anything I liked to call it that wasn't already taken on Blog Spot and was frustrated and decided that this blog would be terribly titled. So  I typed that in. And spelled it wrong. Which, in retrospect added to the awesomeness and I'm keeping it that way!

So there's been a lot going on in my world lately, and I figured blogging might be a way to get some of my ideas out and help me with some of my creative blocks I've been facing. I'm a wannabe writer, and designer, and have many hobbies that take up parts of my attention and don't always get completed. Eventually I might have to seperate everything in this blog into smaller mini-blogs but I don't have the patience for that at the moment. It was hard enough to think up a damn title for one! This also means I appologize for the scattered random thoughts that I'm spewing out right now. I wanted to get this thing up and running, but really have nothing interesting to say right now. I'm sure I will soon. I'm really opinionated and love a good rant.

So, to begin... I guess I've done that.

The meat!

Today was my last day at my job. I've had this job for a little over two years and what sucks is I really liked the work I was doing. I hated the company. I was doing mostly corporate embroidery, operating the embroidery machine and digitizing the designs (self taught and I was getting pretty good too). It was, for the most part, an awesome and creative job and I'm totally happy I got the experience in the industry. I might pursue it further. But honestly, the company I worked for was ridiculous! There were so many problems, I wish I didn't even know. Health and safety regs broken, harrasment and daily emotional freakouts by fellow employees was par for the course. And don't even get me started on the ridiculous business ethics the company followed. As a model for the world of embellishment it didn't bode well. But then again, it was a small company that spread itself awfully thin and maybe some day soon I'll tell you all of the dirty laundry about it. But not now, it's kind of an open wound and unfortunately with all the general insanity of the situation now probably isn't the time to talk about it.

So this was my catalyst. I don't know what I'm doing next for sure, but I really began this blog because of that. Theres change in the air, and I feel I should document it all. I want to start selling some of my sewing designs, or maybe some jewlery or do something creative. Eventually I plan on setting up something on Etsy and going from there. And I'm going to break through this creative block and write again too. Theres a lot of options for me right now, and I see this whole lay off thing as a positive turning point and I want to make sure to document the steps of where this new path is going to take me. And how I got here. Maybe there's something I can use in this, write a novel or something. So thats why it all began, thats why I'm here typing this all out and forgetting that before I sat down for an hour to set this up I started making dinner. Now my sausages that I had started boiling have no water with them in the pot and are sizzling away frying instead. Going to go deal with that now, and I'll definately think of something more interesting to post tomorrow!