Lady of the Thread's Sewing Basket

Went fabric shopping on Wednesday and things didn’t turn out as easy as I hoped. -_-; I had previously bought matte satin in pink and blue for appliqués and planned to go back to the same store to look for the other colors. But I had a hard time matching the low sheen of the pink and blue and ended up hunting through several stores to try to get the right colors. And I still need to go back another time to find red for the under layer and magenta for the obi.

And I had trouble with the thread I want to use for my appliqués, too. Long shot that someone will have an answer but… Does anyone know where I can buy Gutermann metallic thread in NYC? This stuff:
http://www.createforless.com/Gutermann+Decor+Metallic+200M+Copper+Gold/pid149592.aspx Apparently, it’s also sold under the name Sulky, which confused me in online searches until I found the Gutermann site and saw them referring to it by both names. (The spools I have only say Gutermann.)

I checked a few notions places in the fashion district and none of the ones I went into carried the metallics although some had the regular Gutermann thread. (Would have checked some more stores but ran out of time.) Then, I went downtown to P&S and they only had one spool of the copper gold left. That plus the partial spool I have isn’t going to be nearly enough to do all the appliqués. And if I’m going to have any chance of getting this costume wearable by AB, I don’t really have time to order and wait. :-/ I’m planning to check JoAnn’s on Sunday and I see Sulky metallics listed on Manhattan Wardrobe Supply’s site (although I’m not sure if they’re the one I’m looking for since there seem to be a few different metallics sold under the Sulky name). But other ideas on places to look would be good if those don’t work out.

Despite the supplies issues, I’ve made some progress on painting and cutting out some appliqués. Most of the painting isn’t too bad. Only the water pattern is especially time consuming to do since it requires lots of little curved lines rather than solid areas. I felt like I was painting fish scales when I put in the gold outline! I mixed Lumiere and Neopaque paints for the other colors; I didn't want just flat color like I'd get with Neopaque alone and wanted to tone down the metallic in the Lumiere. I'm excited how this is coming out so far. ^_^




And completely unrelated but I got an e-mail today saying the Tales of Monkey Island disc is now available for pre-order. Plus, some merchandise. I rarely come across merchandise for my fandoms that I’m interested in but I want these! :-D I’ll probably upgrade to the deluxe version to get the extra stuff that comes with that, too. Maybe, I can use some of it as props when I do the Morgan LeFlay costume.

So, I sometimes download casual games to play on the computer when I’m bored or feel like goofing off. I’ve never bothered to blog about it before since most aren’t that interesting but I thought this one might amuse some people.

Last night, I tried out a hidden object game called Season of Mystery: The Cherry Blossom Murders. The game started up, Square Enix came up on the screen, and I was like “Huh? Since when did they do these kinds of games?!” o_O;

It's set in 19th Century Japan, during the cherry blossom season, and you play as the wife of a murdered American diplomat. The plot revolves around trying to solve the murder and the main gameplay consists of finding the listed objects hidden within a scene. It seems pretty short since I apparently made it through the first third of the game during the free 1 hour trial. The trailer, screenshots, and trail version can be found at the link above if anyone’s curious or wants to laugh at how random this is for a company that’s usually associated with Final Fantasy. XD

Hmm… It’s been about 2 weeks since I last updated because I’ve been lazy. >_>; So, this is going to be a huge collection of random stuff… Update for the Anime Boston PSOH group next time.

To selphie84 and ngmaster: Thanks for the call yesterday. It was a nice little unexpected surprise. :-D Sorry I didn’t actually make it into the city to meet up with you guys.


Next, it seems I need to note a correction to something I posted after NYAF. Shortly before Christmas, I wrote to Peter Tatara for clarification about the awards and got a reply a couple of weeks ago. The only award he has me listed for is 1st Place Craftsman and he says there wasn’t a Best of Show for the hall contest, only Best Craftsmanship. I’m not really upset about it or anything but it makes me wonder a bit if I’m losing my mind since I could have sworn they announced a Best of Show tie between me and one of the novice winners at the end, after I went up to the stage. ._.;


On to a more serious matter, I’m kind of questioning how well Chase handles their statements. The other week, they sent a letter saying that they mistakenly listed $0 balances for some accounts on statements they sent out in December (of course, I caught it when the statement first arrived). This is the second time they’ve messed up on one of my parents’ statements within the past half year. -_- And their statements already annoy me because they don’t seem that user friendly. I don’t claim to be a financial genius but I did take finance as one of my majors at NYU and graduated with honors; yet, their statements still don’t make complete sense to me at times! >_<

Since it’s the beginning of the year, my family’s mailbox is being crammed with tax return documents and it’s my job to keep track of them all; it adds up to a lot of mail with 6 of us here. I found it pretty silly that my bank sent me a separate mail for the $1.02 of interest that I had from my checking account instead of just tacking it onto the one from my savings account!


I recently finished watching Le Chevalier D’Eon. ( cut for spoilers )


And I got the 5th volume of the Petshop of Horrors sequel the other week. Not completely sure what’s going on at times since I don’t know any Japanese but a couple of parts were pretty darn weird. O_o; ( cut for spoilers )


I’m finally getting back to working on cosplay stuff now and have been sewing the underskirt for Sarah’s Cinderella costume. I made it with some leftover white cotton and attached a few layers of netting near the hem to make the bottom poofy. Still need to put faux fur over the netting but I’m thinking I should get new material because the fur I have now has a rather short pile and doesn’t look fluffy enough. I’d bought it because I was having trouble finding anything else in white other than fun fur (the stuff I used for my T-Chan plushie) and I thought the backing on that might be too stiff. Don’t know what I’d do with the yard and a half that I already have though since nothing else I want to cosplay calls for fake fur.


And the other night, my siblings and I randomly got onto the subject of old computer games at dinner. The 7th Guest, Myst, Monkey Island, Laura Bow, lots of lesser known stuff and even text games! My favorites from those days had to be the adventure games which didn’t require much combat (if any) and mostly involved collecting items and using them to solve puzzles and advance the storyline. Never got too much into games that involved lots of combat since my coordination is terrible. Like I remember we had a PC version of Street Fighter and I never used the special moves because of my awful coordination with such things. ^_^;; And I think I usually failed miserably when trying to kill the monsters in Alone in the Dark. XD; I wonder if there are still any good adventure games released these days… I don’t play games as often now and I don’t think I’ve played any as involved as the ones from the ‘90s for a long time.

Okay, I’m done. I did say this post was going to be random, didn’t I? :-P