Conventions, Medication and Decompression

I live!

I feel like I fell off the face of the planet for a bit though that's not unusual for me while prepping for an anime convention. Yay Shuto Con! Yay Decompression post Shuto Con!

That's mostly what's been going on with me lately. I've been a sewing fiend and when I wasn't a sewing fiend, I was a wig styling fiend. I was a few other types of fiend as well but to a much lesser degree.

Shut Con was a blast. I made some new friends, learned a ton from Kristie in her lovely panels as well as hung out with her at Art Jam (greatest panel ever for drawing/hanging out with fellow artists!), and had a somewhat successful cosplay experience. And I finally got to see our friend's panel that we missed last year due to limited space/VIP pass issues, even if he did get technology-screwed and had to smash his whole presentation into about twenty minutes. Equestrian Embassy: Condensed was still just as good as it would have been normally and was probably funnier because of the time crunch.

Expounding upon the cosplay experience, the reason I call it somewhat successful is that I was still not as identifiable as my husband and friend and creating the costume just about gave me a aneurysm. Here is the break down:

Successes:
* I finished the outfit the week before Con week and the bags two day before rather than a race to finish line that my previous costumes have been.

* I was able to use a commercial pattern without killing my brain.

* It was comfortable to wear, aside from a wig cap issue. Apparently I have a large head.

* There was no catastrophic failure of any pieces. My shorts did pop a stitch or two, but I expected as much since I sewed them with the wrong tension but didn't figure that one out until it was too late.

* I was far more recognizable than in my first Fluttershy cosplay. I even received an attack hug from a Discord cosplayer which made my day.

Less than Successes:
* Sewing my dress and shorts was incredibly hard, mainly because I merrily jumped into the world of knit fabric. I mostly knew was I was getting into and the shorts weren't bad. The dress fabric was a very thin, fine jersey though, and I swear it was doing the hula while I tried to sew it. It still turned out well though.

* I trusted Burda too much with the gathers in the dress and not a fabulous sewing blogger (http://www.makeit-loveit.com/), who had already helped me with my shorts. Burda's instructions for the waist gathers were to zigzag over lengths of elastic thread, while the lovely lady at Make It and Love It manually winds the elastic thread into a bobbin.

 I did test the Burda method and it seems to work. OVER SHORT LENGTHS! I am no tiny person, so the width of the fabric was daunting. Sure you can still pull it to gather but your elastic thread will probably break and it will be nigh impossible to keep it at the right length you want. I ended up having the remove the back gathers because A) the front gathered too short so it wouldn't fit around me if the back was also gathered and B) it is very hard to sew over elastic thread on thin jersey fabric and maintain straight lines. Bad call Burda. Bad call Me.

* I placed my Cutie Mark on the right side of my dress, which was promptly covered by the front of my wig. I ended up playing with it constantly so that people had a chance to notice it.

* My bags were okay except that I had to carry more than a hip-slung bad on a thin belt could handle. I hadn't planned on carrying two small sketchbooks but my friend didn't have the space in her carrying device (she was Twilight Sparkle, so she carried a hollow fake book for a purse). The bags kept slipping down and they weren't even in weight so it was always off.

* Again, I was still not as recognizable as my friend or my husband. To be fair though, they are doing more closet cosplay than me. The only things handmade they have are their Cutie Marks and my husband's Smarty Pants doll (which I made...). Also, I take a different view of Fluttershy than a lot of other cosplayers do. I think Sweet Lolita Fluttershy is cute, but the pony works with animals. She has chickens and a host of other animals. Loli is impractical for taking care of animals, so I went with something cute and breezy but with a practical side, hence cute but sensible boots and "saddle" bags. Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but I don't want to feel I have to be LoliFluttershy to be recognized.

There is also another aspect to this. I do wonder if it's partially because I'm a large woman. I'm not trying to say that everyone who recognized my friend (who is a stick) didn't notice me because I'm fluffy and they all are jerks. I just wonder if I'm deemed "not cute enough for pictures" because of it. Aw heck it's probably not that. Some people did take pictures of me, though it was always with my friend a/o husband. Well, best not to over think this one!

This does made a good transition though. In regards to weight issues, I've finally kicked a factor out of my life for good. No more hormonal birth control for me! Maybe I won't have to think about that paragraph above this one ever again!

Bye for now!

Failure and Success

I blog about a lot of weird things but I was prompted to really think about what I'm doing with the time I have right now. I often act like I'm swamped with things to do. In reality, it's more that I have a lot of things I want to do, so many that it leaves me paralyzed, thus unable to do any of the things I wanted. And my mind starts screaming "FAILURE!"

Then I read a recent post by Amy of Raising Arrows. Here's a bit of it :

"We’ve all heard the phrase “Busy as a Bee” and more often than not we probably feel like that phrase fits our lives perfectly.  But today, I want to ask you,

"What are you busy doing?

I hear a lot of women lament their lack of time.  They don’t have time to get the homeschooling in, the meals prepared, the house cleaned.  They have all sorts of reasons why and most of it boils down to not enough hours in the day.

I’ve said it myself…

“I just don’t have enough time to do all the things that need to be done in a day.”

But, I’m wrong.

I do have enough time.  God gave me 24 hours a day just like everyone else.  But, I’m not prepared" (read the rest  here)

And then I started mentally screaming " OWOWOWOWOWOWOW!" because that stung. Here's a homemaker with six kids speaking about how she can get things done if she prepares properly.

Here I sit, a married woman with no children yet whose mother does the evening dishes (mostly, I still end up unloading, reloading and running the dishwasher most of the time. As I type this, she's asking me to unload it for her so she only has to do the ones that don't go in the dishwasher. Most of the time she just ignores the dishwasher and does it all by hand...at least she thanked me for it! ).

 I have a ton of time on my hands and I accomplish next to nothing in a day. Some of it is the hours I keep. I don't like to fall asleep when I should (around 9 pm) and I don't stay up after I finish my husbands breakfast and lunch (at about 5 am). I usually don't get up again until 9:30 and by then most of the day has been wasted. And on the off chance that I did stay up, I don't start doing things until my mother leaves at 7 am, mostly because I'm a grouch in the morning and my mother tends to set me off. No body wants that. So clearly some of my preparedness needs to be about being awake to do things...I'm trying again in the morning.

So I'm going to do what Amy did as an example and write out what I think I don't have time for during the day and see how preparation can remedy this. I have the perfect opportunity to gain a organized and prepared life before we have little ones so I'd better get crackin'!

One a better note, this past Sunday, my aunt, my cousin and I stripped their herb garden so that the colder temperatures that we've had the past few days wouldn't kill them all. My aunt handed me some bags and told me to take all I wanted. Boy did I ever!

This is part of a huge Lemon Verbena bush. I'm going to have sooo much tea!

Lots of herbs from Back to Front: Sage, Rosemary, French Thyme, Oregano and Chives.
Please ignore our exploding basement.

Ultimately the success for me is not that I have the herbs but that they aren't still riding around in the back of the car. I will say it did improve the smell of the car though. We call it The Goat for a reason. This is why used cars can be an adventure. But yeah, I'm very excited to have them up and drying. Hopefully we will be able to afford the quart sized mason jars I would like to store them in when they are done. The lemon verbena is currently drying on top of the fridge after my cousin and I plucked the leaves from the stems.

Pardon the weird highlighting...I couldn't get it to stop.