Another Phone Rant

I know I just posted but I wanted to express my frustration at the recent phone updates. December 2014 I received an offer from Rogers to "upgrade free" 6 months before the end of my contract. At the time I was thrilled but I'm not regretting it. I upgraded from the Samsung Galaxy S3 to the S5 and I regret it. My main regret: memory.

I don't know what happened but every time I turn around I'm out of memory. On top of that I feel like I'm getting constant updates that seem to do nothing but cause problems. In the summer I received an update that required me to delete several photos/apps to make room for it. This October I got another update, deleted again, and now whenever my screen is set to the lowest range of brightnesses or when it dims just before turning off the screen flickers.

On top of the crappy screen thing something they keep messing with is the silencing feature. I used to be able to put my phone on silent and my alarm would still go off. I was late for work the day after I updated because they introduced this new "priority" feature on the sound. Apparently you need to tell it alarms are priorities. Go figure.

Octobers release took away my ability to completely silence my phone, now I can silence the volume but vibration is always on. So now in the middle of the night when I get a WhatsApp or Facebook notification I hear "buzz buzz" from my end table. Not impressed Android, not impressed.

OK, I'm done ranting. Not a bad thing but a strange thing, when I landed in KL in August my background spontaneously changed itself.....

Tardis Costume Part 2

So I believe where I last left you I had all the material purchased and pre-washed/pre-shrunk and nicely folded on the kitchen table. Yay that's half the work right? I wish!

The next step inevitably is cutting the material :( Thankfully my mom helped me with this one, before we could cut the canvas though mom pointed out that it needed to be damp ironed so I got to ironing while she got to cutting. There were many many many pieces to this pattern.... took us at least 5 hours to get it all cut, both of us working at a time!

Here's my moms kitchen table while we worked :) 

So there were quite a few parts to this costume. So many and so unusual to most, I suspect, that near the end of the pattern there was instructions on how to wear the costume. I'll post pictures in the next blog post showing each piece but here's a quick list:

1. Underskirt
2. Overskirt
3. Bustle
4. Corset
5. Shrug

On the bright side the fewer pieces you're lining up the easier a pattern usually is. On the not so bright side the sum of effort required for parts 1, 2, 3, and 5 was less than that required for part 4. The corset was... not fun.

I first basted all the outside blues to a layer of canvas I cut. I then had to baste the black top part to all these pieces. Then I sewed the pieces together. I then sewed just the remaining canvas pieces together while mom slaved away at the appliquer:

Then mom sewed the appliquer onto the corset. Unfortunately I cut it too big the first time and she didn't hem the edges so it was way too big to fit onto the corset panel so she did it twice... practice makes perfect? (I may never live this one down in my mothers house) I have to also confess that instead of basting I used that iron on hem stuff, it's amazing and your material has less probability of bunching or stretching differently on the top/bottom.

The upshot of the appliquer SNAFU was my idea to sew them onto the back of the shrug! Here's a pic of us trying to see if they were lined up.... they weren't by the way so I unpinned it and tried again.

It's hard to see from this picture but all the edges of this pattern have bias tape sewn onto them, this both makes it easier than hemming and finishes the edges very nicely! Thanks mom for sewing that stuff all over like crazy!!! She's a bias tape machine ;) 

Next post I'll share a picture of the dress being layered on and a little more details on how it was made but here's a sneak peek of the finished product when I tried it on:

Nevermind the dishes behind me... I'm a bad housekeeper! I will sew for dish cleaners, hahaha!!