WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE...
Current mood: curious
Category: Writing and Poetry

...between a sign and a signal?  How about between lust and horniness?  Nothing ulterior to the question.  I've just been wondering about nuances lately.

In other news, I'm about to leave for the Clarion writing workshop.  Co-mentoring the final two weeks with the amazing Geoff Ryman.

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SEWING: DRESS FOR MY MOTHER
Current mood: overstimulated
Category: Fashion, Style, Shopping

Made my mother a dress from some hand-dyed indigo fabric she gave me and another piece of vintage cotton I had.  I used the New Look pattern above.  Added a bit of blue machine-crocheted lace trim to set off the two fabrics, and it was done:

I think she looks great in this picture!

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SURREALER AND SURREALER
Current mood: bone-weary
Category: bone-weary Travel and Places

Yes, that is indeed a pair of kiddy underpants forlornly circling in a baggage carousel at the Toronto airport.  I had time to take a quick pic before the announcement came that a lot of our luggage hadn't been put on the plane from Denver with us.  Then it was off to fill out forms in triplicate and one-and-a-halfplicate (difficult to explain) that will hopefully help them get my two bags back to me.

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SHELTER FROM THE STORM
Current mood: Bemused
Category: Bemused Travel and Places

The washrooms in the Denver airport are designated as tornado shelters.

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WHA...?
Current mood: amused
Category: Travel and Places

I'm in the boarding area for my plane back home from Clarion.

They just called Shamu to come up to the desk for her seat assignment.  Is that a science fiction moment, or what?

I just hope she's not my seatmate.  Not because of her girth, but because she's, you know, a killer whale.

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SEWING
Current mood: happy
Category: Fashion, Style, Shopping

I wrote today, so I gave myself permission to spend this evening finishing up a sewing project on which I've been working for a few weeks now:

Take one 50s dress sewing pattern, Simplicity 4354, which makes a classic one-piece, full skirt dress with humongous pockets.  (I've wanted a vintage-style dress with pockets like this since I first saw them in an aunt's old fashion magazines when I was sixteen):

For fabric, use one second-hand thrift store curtain for a child's bedroom, fashioned after a Disney animated dinosaur movie:

Trim with dinosaur buttons (and boy, are my buttonholing and stitching skills ever rusty):

And presto; Carnotaur, the dress:

The collar took me much cussing and ripping out of stitches to figure out, but I got it eventually.  The rest was pretty easy.  Next I have to make a petticoat for wearing under it.

(Many thanks to wonderdread for doing documentation duty.)

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SCORED AT THE TEXTILE MUSEUM'S ANNUAL SALE
Current mood: awake
Category: Fashion, Style, Shopping

I do own some clothing with images of people on it (Emily the Strange and The Power Puff Girls come to mind), but generally, I avoid it.  But in May, I was at The Textile Museum's annual More Than Just a Yardage Sale, where I saw the skirt in the picture, going for a song.  It caught my eye because a) it's a circle skirt, and I'm all over vintage styled clothing at the moment; b) it was so delightfully kitschy; c) the people in the images painted on the skirt are dark-skinned, and depicted in ways that don't make me shudder; d) it's hand-painted and hand-crafted from calico, using a combination of hand-sewing and what was probably an old industrial sewing machine that only does straight stitching.  It was the only one of its kind there, a designer piece by Paul M. Ropp, who gets his fabric hand-woven in India, then ships it to Bali to be made into clothing there.  The skirt was catching a lot of people's eyes.  But when the volunteer told them that the waist size was extra small, they'd shake their heads and walk away.  So I grabbed it.  My waist is most definitely not extra small, but it was actually pretty easy to adjust the skirt to my size.  I cut the waistband off, along with about 3/4 inch off the top of the body of the skirt.  That widened the circumference of the waist enough to fit me.  The waistband was pretty wide, so I cut it in half lengthwise and joined the two resulting pieces edge to edge, giving me more than enough for a new waistband in my size.  Then I re-attached the waistband to the skirt.  The altered skirt is barely an inch shorter, and the alteration didn't mar the hand-painted design; didn't even clip the top of the gauchos' sombreros.  In fact, the skirt was a bit too big when I got done, and I had to take it in with a couple of small darts at the waist.

So now I really need a big, pouffy petticoat, to wear under this skirt and for the dress I finished last night.  If I do more writing today, I'll get on that.

Currently listening : Monk's Moods Release date: 2002-02-20

06:20 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Writing: Change is good?
Current mood: silly
Category: Writing and Poetry

I'm in a pub with a glass of Gamay Noir and a plate of herbed frites with gravy.  (This morning I didn't have the price of breakfast and hadn't for a few days, but there was a paycheque in the mailbox when I checked this afternoon.  Paid my bills, put some aside as savings, and now I'm treating myself.)  I have my laptop with me and I'm writing.  My plot is changing more quickly than I can rewrite, so I'm simply plunging forward.  If anyone were to read what I have so far, it'd seem hopelessly disjointed.  I'm taking a break to blog while I try to decide whether to make some plot notes to make sense of it all, or whether I just keep writing.  Keep writing, I think.  Don't look down.

08:18 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Writing: Donkey, August 15, 2008
Current mood: fermented
Category: Writing and Poetry

Novel-in-progress Donkey is up over 13,000 words.  I had to slow down while teaching at Clarion for two weeks.  Almost every waking hour was spent doing Clarion stuff.  I'm getting back into it now, though hindered a bit by the process of trying to wrap things up in Toronto and prepare to go on the road for a good long while (more on that later).  Yesterday I wrote a pivotal point in a scene while waiting for a lunch meeting to begin.  This morning I used some techniques from Don Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook to tease out some ideas for ramping up the stakes and tension in my plot.  That's coming along nicely.  Don's my agent, and he once spent a few days taking me through some of these plotting techniques when I needed to write proposals for two novels.  It really helped.  The questions are pretty obvious ones to ask yourself once you have any experience writing a piece of plot-driven long fiction, but I still find that sometimes having someone else ask them helps to undaunt and inspire me more quickly than sitting in silence with nothing but my brain and the blinking cursor, trying to figure out what should happen next in the story.  This afternoon I transcribed what I wrote yesterday, did a quick rewrite of it, and laid some of the groundwork in the plot for some of the ideas I came up with this morning.

snippet:


Suddenly, the bottom fell out of my belly, as though the car had dropped into a hole.  But we were still on level road, travelling smoothly.  Jenvie didn't seem to have noticed anything.  I swallowed my gorge back down.  “It's beginning,” I said.


“Yeah, we're getting close.”


“Couldn't you have warned me?”


“Don't need to, do I?  You keep telling me you don't need my help.”


“Eat shit, Jen.”  Sisters.  Who needs 'em.?

08:16 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Sewing: trashion linen circle skirt
Current mood: animated
Category: Fashion, Style, Shopping

(My mirror at home has water damage -- leaking ceiling -- which explains the streaks in these pics.)

I've become fond of recombining pre-existing linens, clothing, etc. into my own fashion mashups.  This circle skirt took a couple of hours.  It's made from a printed linen tablecloth I found at a yard sale, and trimmed at the hem with a couple of pieces of vintage crocheted lace.  You can see in the pic where I joined the two pieces of lace.  Not sure what I'm going to do about that.  I may just iron it and leave it be.  When I let the skirt hang naturally, it's not that visible.  And I'm not especially invested in hiding the skirt's frankenstein-esque origins.

Haven't made the petticoat yet, but I think I may have found some wonderful fabric for it.

08:12 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment