Autumn Zebra

Well, on Saturday we went to my sister's halloween party and BBQ. It was good, except we aren't really that keen on parties, so it was ok :) . If we were keen on parties I'm sure it would have been great. Since there was a bbq it started early to have dinner, and there were a lot of people there, even though normally people don't bother to actually go out anywhere until after 10 or 11pm, so that was pretty cool. There were decorations on the walls and hanging from the ceiling and they were good to - cut-outs and spider webs and black and orange streamers and so on. No pumpkins because a) it is not pumpkin season, and b) you generally can't get orange pumpkins here. (I love to here that kind of fact about other places - you just go "What? No orange pumpkins? How weird." And it is not a big thing but some wee fact that makes you wonder what other, bigger weird things might happen there.) Now - pictures. I love digital cameras. I love being able to take a mi...

Today I decided to wear my corset to work, over a shirt and under a jacket to see how it was. I also had to show some people who wanted to see it. I thought it would be a good test as well to see if it was wearable before having to wear it for several hours with no opportunity to remove it if I dressed up in costume. So far I have found out the following; see the list below arranged in order of comfort and convenience, from most to least: standing, walking, eating, drinking - perfectly normal walking quickly up slight incline, running up a flight of stairs - want to breathe slightly more than average sitting in normal chair - slightly more restricted breathing tying shoelaces - have to do something bizzare to reach foot sitting in bucket seats in car - rather more restricted breathing that annoys me, but not enough to make me feel faint or anything putting on socks - hard to get foot high/close enough to both hands to put socks on (both hands because not to hard to get foot to one hand...

Pretty picture that I took in our garden last year, they should come out again soon - they have buds again. Click to see bigger. This is my picture, copyright to me. Don't steal it. What if you searched google for things about lilies and you came here and I say nothing about lilies? Actually, I know hardly anything about them anyway. I don't know what type this one is, so if anyone knows, leave a comment. I spent a long time looking at all the lily images on google trying to find the type, and I think I found something that is at least close, but I forget now. This was last year. The cool thing about lilies is that you plant some bulbs, and then the number of bulbs gradually increases over the years. The bulbs split and make more or something. It would take many years to get lots, but it is nice all the same. Shortly after they had finished flowering last year, the leaves went slowly all brown and ugly and I thought they had been poisoned by the dish washing water I threw ove...

Current music - Matchbox 20. Currently looping on "Long Day". Although when I made this I think it was Iron Maiden. This is my black dress I made in less than a weekend a few weekends ago. It is for halloween where I am going to dress up Elegant Gothic Lolita (EGL) style for no reason other than I decided it for no reason. Yes. The dress is actually not really the right kind of style, but I was also using it as a test of the pattern for part of the wedding dress, although the wedding dress would be longer and have sleeves and so on and so on. But the basic pattern for what is there is the same. But now I have another idea that I need to make a test dress of, because I don't think this is really going to produce the desired shape; bias cut dresses are too clingy and tend to fall in at the hem rather than spread out. Anyway, the material is crepe-back satin and is quite static-y. I don't know the point of giving it a crepe back, but if it is to reduce static, for insta...

Well, I wanted to know how many people were looking at my blog, if any, and the only thing I know about to do that on a blog is ClustrMaps, which is the little map at the right hand side there. Apparantly 6 people have visited in the last 6 days. I'm pretty sure that at least 2-3 of them were me on various days after posting something. I didn't actually want to display the information about how many people came, I just wanted to know because I love that kind of information. But part of the agreement you agree to when signing up for ClustrMaps is that you will display one of their little maps - you aren't actually allowed to simply use it to gather information, I suppose you have to show it to help them advertise. Maybe if you pay for the upgrade then you wouldn't have to show it, but that would be kind of pointless. Anyway, apparently someone came to my site from Auckland-ish. How do they even know that? How do they trace to the correct location? If anyone knows or has ...

You will no doubt be gald to know that the Victorian dress continues to go well. The bodice is progressing nicely, and I have pictures - at home. I was also sort of testing out the skirt and overskirt by just pinning the length of material to see how much I would need and if I will have enough to do all the ruffles and everything. I have tonnes and tonnes extra. Hopefully next week I will have some stuff written to put up. There are many minor dramas, caused mainly by the fact that I can't be bothered to change anything and would rather just make the wrong thing work and become the right thing. I think this adds interest to the creation process, as the end result can't possibly be like what you planned if you can't be bothered actually making it turn out as the plan does when it is easier to adapt whatever actually seems to be happening at the time. Ummm, yeah... This is a really terrible photo of a not-very-good drawing of kind of what it might look like. I am doing the sm...

Where can I get online information about flax-weaving? I have searched and searched and only found endless school reports about children who did flax weaving and about courses that one can do to learn it - but there are no courses at this time of the year around here, and I just want to try it out at home with my flax that I have, not go to a course right now. I have wanted to do a course in the past, but never quite enough to get around to paying for it. However, at this particular time, my meeting with a flax weaver in the weekend and seeing some awesome stuff has coincided with my current desire to keep vegetables in some different way because they go off within days if kept in a plastic bag. So - make flax containers and put them in there. Perfect. Even badly made ones would be alright because the holes would allow air-flow. I found one site that gave useful information on how to cut and prepare the flax, but I knew most of that anyway from my chat with the guy making kete and so...

I thought I would make a new post here rather than simply continuing the old one. In the weekend I drafted my bodice (ie. thing I wear as the top layer on my top half in the Victorian costume). It went well, and pretty much fits straight off. Except it is rather tight around the shoulders and arms, because that's how things are with me. But I will just live with it because it is too hard for me to work out to fix it, and I might get thinner before then... It works if I don't move much, but I think that works, because Victorian ladies probably weren't throwing their arms around all over the place and so on anyway. I made up the lining with pins, then sewing it, trying it on each time and deciding not to change anything. I have some pictures but then the digital camera ran out of batteries. It was a pain trying it on because I had to put the corset on each time too. I have just started sewing the outer layer. It will be awesome. It is based on the pattern from this 1880's...

So, at some time in the last week I finished the corset. Now I will spend some time tediously uploading pictures and trying to make them appear in the correct place, given that the typing place in the blog, the preview and the finished page all layout the page differently. And I have no idea what it might look like in IE or other web browsers. Or whatever else. Anyway, corset lying flat: It is also not clear to me why all pictures that I insert insist on showing up at the top of the page, requiring me to move them, instead of being inserted at the current position of the cursor. That would be handy. I think the corset produces a great shape and looks like a real corset and I am very clever :). That shape at the bottom of the centre-front isn't right I don't think, but never mind. Corset front, back and side: Apparently, I stand funny, as you can see from the back view. Or the corset is made funny. Although the second is most likely true, I think the first one is too. Either thr...

Just in case any other groups of people are spending hours trying to get this to work, here is a possible solution. Boring otherwise. If you are trying to download and install a ClickOnce application off a website, where the server is, for example, an apache server, and it seems to be working but instead you get a webpage of XML, see this page , and others like it. Once you have the .application mapped to application/x-ms-application (I'm not sure if you actually need the other two) then CLEAR THE CACHE in Internet Explorer. Otherwise IE will just continue to use the old settings it received from the server, and will continue to not work. So there we go. Hopefully that will save another 2 people 3 hours of trying some time.

Today, Friday, the high was 29 degrees. The low was 19 degrees so far, maximum wind gust of 75 km/h. On Tuesday, it snowed, the high was 8 or 9 degrees and the low was 2.5. Maximum wind gust of 55km/hr. Cool eh.

I have progressed a lot on my corset and it is now nearly finished. The eyelets were all sewn by hand, getting progressively better with practice. This is what gave me OOS, but they look really cool.... See how much better the second ones are. I wasn't sure whether there should be boning over the hip along the waist cos it looked hard todo, but in the pictures there was stitching along there, so I put some in between the material along the seamI couldn't insert it because it is the seam where all the vertical pieces meet the horizonal hip gore piece and it was too messy. So I sewed some ribbon along the inside and put it in there. It is very messy, but seems to be working, mostly. I couldn't get a busk, so am using hook and eye tape. The eyes are juuuust poking out of the material, with the tape part sewn in between the lining and outer material, with the edge whip-stitched up. The hook bit wouldn't have worked like that. The hook and eye tape kind of folds in half w...

Well, with regards to the costume - I think it is going alright, but due to the amount of sewing, nothing is finished yet. But the corset and petticoat are more-nearly finished. :) Hopefully tonight I will make an entry about what I did in the weekend and this week, and from now on will try and write a dress entry on Sunday or Monday evening and put it up at work the next day. I'm still not sure about the corset. I alternate between how awesomely cool it is and the fact that it is probably not going to fit properly as it is too big in places. Anyway, here is a cool blog entry that is ostensibly about Agile programming and why it is or isn't good, but is actually more about why google would be an awesome place to work . He works at google. :( I have recently found something else fun I want to sew - but can't yet - and I also want to do more on my wedding dress plans - but need to do my Victorian clothes first!! Not enough time and too much to do. I have also found some cool...

Yesterday I discovered that pretty mach the whole time I thought I was a Christian, as a child and young person, I was in fact a Pantheist, albeit, I suppose, a Christian Pantheist. Interesting. See this wikipedia article on Pantheism . Not to be confused with Panentheism , Pandeism or Panendeism . (!!) Specifically, pantheism is the beleif that God is IN the world, that god and the world are equal and one, and not that God is outside of the world. I feel a bit ripped off actually, that all that time I had a valid, named spiritual-religious belief and nobody told me. I struggled to make what people told me reconcile with what I thought to be true, when I never knew until now that what I believed was a real thing, as in, somthing that others had thought, and a recognised idea - although obviously considered wrong from the perspective of some religions. I'm not sure what my position is now. At the bottom of at least some of the pages referred to by the links above (eg. the pantheism ...

On the Dilbert blog, by Scott Adams ( http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/ ), he has been talking about free-will, and whether or not it exists. This was my response in his comments section: Does it even matter whether or not free-will is an illusion, or false, or whatever? I mean, who cares? Does our knowledge of it being a true concept, or a false concept, actually affect our lives? I can't say that since I've read your blog about it that my actions or life has changed. So consideration of the topic is presumably irrelevant in this case. If we are programmed to act in ways as if free-will existed, then presumably it's ACTUAL existence doesn't matter. So that's my opinion. But that started me wanting to write about the following, which didn't seem appropriate for his comments, so I thought, "I know, how about my blog...". I recently decided that differing philosophical views, by which I mostly mean differing perceptions of the universe that prompt philosop...