My Weakness

My weakness?  A fabric sale.  Admit it, costumers, fabric sales are wallet-slimming fiends! 

Fabrics-Store.com had a sale on their medium weight linen last week, so I demanded that Sven pick out a few colors for tunics.  He picked out the royal purple and autumn gold.  I'm told the autumn gold is for a "Kirk" inspired tunic *snerk*.  I picked up some black and white for the stash  That stuff is always handy to have around.

The darks are in the wash now, for pre-shrinkage.  I still hope to have a new undershirt done for Sven for Quest, but I haven't even started it and it's two weeks away.  Where has my time run away to?

I have sadly gotten in the very bad habit of sitting in front of the TV after work, and it is draining all my time away.  We're tempted to cancel our Netflix account to curb our potato-ing.  Tonight we have guests coming over, so I may not get started yet again.  But tomorrow, I have no excuse!  This weekend will be full of shenanigans at the Utah Renfest and other social obligations.  

In other, completely unrelated news, I have been playing with different braids/braiding techniques lately.  The hair is back down to my waist again, and it's been a ton of fun to play around.  Today's adventure is two dutch braids that are wound around each other to make a braided spiral in the back.  Excuse the poor photo - it's surprisingly difficult to take a picture of the back of your own head with a smart phone.  Also, it's nearing the end of a sort of crazy day, so I have loose wild hairs.

Hair Clips

Yes, I am still alive.  The last few months have been a whirlwind of preparations and insanity as my beloved and I planned our wedding, and ultimately tied the knot.

Due to all this amazingly awesome chaos in my life, I haven't done anything creative in a while; something that is changing post-haste.  I have quite a few projects lined up that I'm very excited about.  I won't be spilling the beans on them just yet though.

For now, take a look at these hair clips I made for my wedding day.  They were quite easy, and the overall effect was both whimsical and elegant - contradictory in all things, as are my dear husband and I.

I started with a simple alligator clip, which I inserted a scrap of plastic or foil, depending on what was available at the time, inside the clip.  This was to keep me from gluing the clip closed.  A piece of paper would also work, though might be harder to pull away from the dried glue.  You may end up with a tiny bit of it permanently inside the clip, depending on the kind of clip you use, but it won't show.

I then cut apart some fake flowers I purchased, and removed the heavy plastic bottom receptacle/sepal combo piece, and trimmed the stem as short as possible.  I then hot glued the flowers to the alligator clip.  As the sepal and stem are what keeps fake flowers held together, I had to put tiny dabs of hot glue between the layers of the petals, to keep everything from just falling apart.  But hot glue works wonders!  (I recommend a low-temperature hot glue gun - burns are no fun.)

The Crystal branches were a bit of a strange brainchild.  I found some clear crystal drops at Michaels that were already shaped onto branches, which would have easily been glued on, but I wanted to add some ruby red Swarovski crystals into the mix.  This meant untwisting the wire branches, pulling all the clear crystals off, and slowly rebuilding it my way.  It would have been much simpler starting with fresh unused jewelers wire.

I made four clips in total - three were used in my hair, and one was clipped to the front of my red wrap dress as an accent on the sash.

The Scroll

My portion of Serafina's scroll is complete. I tore through it this week, despite frustrations with it not manifesting itself the way scrolls in this style often do. Squirly darn thing. Bethany has her work cut out for her, bless her. I'm not sharing images just yet, but will do so in a few weeks after it has been presented.

I will be celebrating Theresa/Astrid's nuptials this weekend, and I'm super excited for her. She seems deliriously happy, and this is AWESOME. So this week is full of planning and prepping for that. I'd like to pick up some hot rollers (mine appear to have mysteriously disappeared, but then they were from the 1980's so it was probably time for them to go). Does anyone have any recommendations?

After the wedding, I'll be back to finishing the chocolate linen sleeves, and hopefully a quickie linen partlet for Baron's War. Then, I'm on to the ACC.