Back!

Back in the office for the week, and it's kind of like an oven. Maybe that's why I rarely spend time here... :) They turned on the heat on Thursday, and it's had plenty of time to warm up now. I think I may have to switch to water instead of tea before too much longer!

St. Louis was a blast, and I got to spend time with just about everyone I wanted to see. I never did see Uncle Joe, and Thor was too ill to make it up on Sunday, and I got a message from Shawn wanting to hang out AFTER I got back to Seattle, but otherwise, good trip. We got to do Laumeier and the City Museum, as well as the Schlafly Brew Pub and Johnny Brock's Halloween Dungeon. The picture is from the City Museum, taken from the ferris wheel on the 11th floor of the building. Megan, Vanessa, Bryan, and I all rode it, while Jeremy and Cindy took pictures of us crazy people. :)

We proceeded to spend most of yesterday running around, trying to get everything that we would normally do on the weekend done. We also made a couple of extra stops so I could start getting things for my Halloween costumes. I'm going to have 3 or 4 costumes this year. One of them, Columbia from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I'm borrowing from Megan (assuming she sends it to me on time), and only needed to buy a new pair of fishnets for it. Another is the Twisted Belle costume, which I am piecing together from a yellow homecoming dress and some other yellow fabric.

I'm still a little up in the air for the last one or two. I want to wear my Ice Princess costume, which I've done in various iterations in the past, but I'm not sure when I will actually want to wear a corset for my Halloween activities. That costume may also get remade into a Tin Woman costume (think Wizard of Oz with a twist), since it's shiny and silver. We also saw a cute "Wednesday Addams all grown up" costume at Johnny Brock's, and I'm pretty sure I can reproduce that mostly with stuff I already own. And my Dark Lily (from Legend) costume from a couple of years ago was super fun (and I still have the dress).

Between SteamCon rapidly approaching, then Halloween, and then AmberCon NW, I'm just full of excuses for costuming. Good thing I like doing it! :)

I made stuff!

So I managed to squeeze in a quick trip to the studio on Saturday, while Jeremy tried to get some rest at home. He's still fighting off a cold, and it was making us both pretty miserable on Saturday. Of course, I still haven't taken pictures of the studio, as I arrived there with a nearly dead camera battery, and a ton of product pictures to take!

Aside from my photos, I made a couple of big fleece blankets. On bringing those home Saturday afternoon, Jeremy was astonished. "You made those today?!" Apparently he thought that the pattern on the first one I showed him was something I had stitched or woven or some such. He has not seen me with my bags of remnants. Clearly. :)

I also altered a dress that I had found at Goodwill a while back. The dress itself was cute enough, but it had an elasticized waistband which was not very flattering on me. So my solution was to take the dress apart at the waist, reattach the top to the bottom, and end up with a long vest. I also added ties to the back, because the dress was kind of shapeless both before and after my initial alteration. The photo that Jeremy took before I went out on Sunday isn't great (especially because I accessorized heavily OVER the skirt of the vest), but there it is. In addition to the alteration of the line of the dress, I also replaced maybe half of the buttons (taking the rest off entirely), added a patch to one pocket, and put star buttons on the collar points. Oh, and part of the waistband (the non-elasticized part) became my headband. :)

(For the entire outfit: altered vest/dress over an old belly dancing top (which you can't even see), with my black skirt (so worn it looks blue now), and a gorgeous velvet scarf with burnout panels at the ends draped over my military belt. And sandals, because it was bloody hot last night. This is one of my many steampunk gypsy variations.)

The whole reason I worked on the vest, of course, was for the Abney Park show on Sunday night. Jeremy wasn't well enough to attend, so instead I dragged our friend Katie along with me. She was reluctant to tag along until I told her she could dress up out of my steampunk collection. She ended up going with a tan button-up shirt and a long rust colored vest/dress with a grommetted belt, over her jeans. She also borrowed one of my flight helmets, and Jeremy's goggles. Super adorable. :) (And she had a blast. :) )

Oddly, I didn't see even a moment of the show, as I volunteered at the merch table, as per my usual. I get paid with hugs and thanks from the band, and it means I didn't have to brave the heat and crowd in the venue. I had a chair! :)

Monday again

Well, at least it was a super good weekend. :) The Abney Park show on Friday was a blast, and we were SUPER busy at the merch table, which made me happy. :) I ended up hanging out after the show so that Nathaniel could give me a ride home, which meant I ended up at The Hurricane at about 3 a.m. Even though I hadn't been drinking, it just sounded like a fabulous idea. :)

Of course, this made me pretty well dead on Saturday, though I ran what seemed to me to be a pretty good Werewolf game. And then I crashed out for as long as I could on Sunday, followed by running errands and doing chores and other fun stuff.

My only disappointment for the weekend is that no one got a really good picture of my outfit. As soon as I walked in, Robert and Nathaniel were gushing over it, and Robert told me that I won. The main item of gushiness was the steampunk gypsy patchwork skirt, but I thought the whole outfit came together pretty nicely. I will have to recreate it and get Jerome to take pictures... though I won't promise to redo my makeup... there was a serious amount of strange colors going on... :)

I'm looking forward to a relatively normal week. I'm at the archives for work every day, but the evenings are looking vacant and relaxing. Though I may decide to run to Goodwill tonight on a quest for some sweaters and long sleeved shirts...

Where did everyone go?!

So Jerome and I have been calling back and forth today, as we're trying to track some people down and failing. He called the shop where our tattoo artist works, and was told she's on maternity leave. This is super awesome and exciting, and I'd love to make her a baby afghan, but we had no way of getting in contact with her other than through the shop she works at. So I went to see if I could track down her husband (who is also a tattoo artist), and I found that he's still at the shop he apprenticed at, but our piercer, who worked there also, is not!

And I still don't know when she's due or when she'll be back at work, which makes me a sad monkey. I totally want to make her an afghan, and we were planning on getting stuff worked on in October and at Christmas...

Guess this means we have to actually find an artist in Seattle now... Jerome found a shop he wants to check out, and I've seen a few that I think would be good. But then we have to hope that they have an artist we like, and that said artist is taking appointments from new people. *sigh*

In other news, the planned outfit for Friday night just ain't gonna happen. The shoes WERE out to get me, but mostly just in the "we're really uncomfortable to wear while standing" sort of way. Standing on the bus on the way home convinced me to pick an outfit that doesn't involve uncomfortable shoes, so now it's all figured out except for what shirt to wear. And the stuff from Brown Button will have to wait for another occasion.

I think my shoes are trying to kill me...

Okay, not really. But I do apparently need to learn to walk properly in heels, as I've nearly turned my ankle twice today. Trying to break in a fancy pair of Oxford-look heels, that remind me of a 1920s secretary's shoe. (HAH! Google search, and you will be rewarded. Those are the exact pair of shoes I'm wearing over there to the right.) The heel could, of course, be much worse, but this is enough of a challenge for me.

The good news, of course, is that I'm doing okay in them aside from the shoes trying to kill me, so if I practice walking in them a bit more, I should be fine to wear them on Friday night. Hurrah!

And what is Friday night, you may ask? Abney Park is playing in Seattle, and I'm working the merch table as always. I've started referring to myself as the erstwhile stowaway on the Ophelia, in fact. :) I just haven't managed to go with them for any out of town shows yet... :) So at any rate, this means snazzing it up in my steampunk best, which includes the vest and bloomer set that I bought from Brown Button, and the snazzy shoes above.

I'm still working on the rest of the outfit, as I don't want to look entirely like I stepped out of a Tim Burton movie (the vest and bloomers involve black and white stripes). I'm thinking a black skirt and white and black striped tights are a must, but then hopefully get some olive drab into the equation with my shirt or jacket. I also have to be very careful to not get too many competing patterns involved here, which is a shame, because I have two skirts I've made that I really would love to wear... but I've been waiting to debut the vest and bloomers for a good long while now...

*sigh* The perils of the only occasionally fashionable... :)

Blargh...

Don't be surprised if this page suddenly looks completely different... I'm trying to change the template I use, but no luck as of this typing. So cross your fingers with me that soon it will be a lovely pretty new look, with full access to my old posts...

*crossing fingers*

More later.

EDIT: Thanks to the ever lovely Sara of Rekoj Design, I'm back in business, with my pretty new blog design! Hurrah! :)

So yes, is it not pretty? I figured that after something like 5 years of my blog looking exactly the same, it deserved a new dress, so to speak. I like it. :)

And now, perhaps, I can change it up more often. Now that's even more exciting to me! :)

Other than this, I don't have much to report today. Working on some steampunk ACEOs to put up on Etsy, and I have a couple of them done already, but I haven't gotten pictures yet. I'll probably work on some more tonight and then upload all of them at once.

I'm also thinking about writing something up about steampunk costuming on a budget. It seems like I've been getting a lot of searches for steampunk costumes lately, so perhaps I shall give the people what they want. I am a kind and benevolent ruler of my domain, after all. ;)