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!!

Hallowe'en Costume - Tardis From Simplicity

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I posted, I was in KL for a couple months and all I did there was work work work and sleep, then work some more! I also started getting excited for Hallowe'en and planning my costume. You see many months ago I had stumbled across a very gallant Tardis themed dress in progress and I always thought it was really beautiful. I saw the work in progress and most recently I found the finished product, I honestly thought it was a lot prettier without the ball gown style bottom but to each their own :)

I thought it might be pretty cool to do my own Tardis dress, believe me there are many many many variations on this, some simple, some complex like the one previously mentioned. Some closer and some further from the Dr. Who inspired theme. I've been sewing since I was roughly 12 so I'm not intimidated by many a sewing projects but I have little experience in design, so my initial plan was to take a dropped waist dress and sew on some pocket "windows" and call it a day. That's when I came across this beauty:

I did some more digging and discovered this was a Simplicity pattern! I went to Fabricland only to find they don't sell Simplicity anymore :( I looked online then and ordered it but was extremely sad when I received notification that shipping was going to take 7 - 12 BUSINESS DAYS!!! This was for sure going to arrive after Halloween.

So I all but gave up and figured I'd have to do the simpler version I'd designed and run with it when one day I received notification of a package at the post office. I was a bit confused because I wasn't expecting anything at that time but lo and behold it was my pattern only 4 days after I'd ordered it, not 4 business days either. 

Two nights ago I picked up the material, a polycotton, the pattern recommended pure cotton but the polycotton was on sale and it holds both it's colour and shape better. The pattern also called for canvas for the bodice and 12 packages of double fold 1/2" bias tape. 

There were a few other simple notions called up, ribbon, elastic, lace for the bodice (haven't bought this yet because I don't know what kind of lace or where it's going on the bodice), bones (I wasn't sure if I needed cased or uncased so I opted to wait) and grommets. Now the pattern calls for 5/8" gromments times like 42. 5/8" ID grommets is gigantic.... 5/16" looked more like the photo but Fabricland only had that size in white so I'll check Michaels on the weekend. As for the bones I read the pattern and it says cut strips of material to case the bones, now the difference in prince for cased vs. uncased bones I think was 1.5$/m. I'm going to wait buying this because I need quite a few metres so if it so I may wait till I need to install it and see if I have enough remaining bias tape and use that instead of cutting cloth strips. Then I can use uncased bones. 

I got all the cloth home and pre-washed it and pre-shrunk it :) I also cut all the pattern pieces out (took a little two hours but I watched TV as I cut, hello Being Mary Jane!)

I'm curious to see how this pans out because it calls up a canvas for the bodice.... it looks pretty wrinkled after I washed it which means IRONING :(

Kitchen Sink Paleo Roasted Sweet Potato Soup!

Hey everyone! I've been meaning to do an article on the freezer exchanges I've been holding for awhile. Monthly me and some other folks get together with a bunch of the same freezer meals we've made and then trade for some variety. Saves money and time and kicks my butt into gear to make meals ahead! There's a whole article on it here so I won't repeat but this month I'm going to share a recipe I whipped up the other day. I call it kitchen sink soup because the first time I made it I used everything I had in the kitchen except the sink!

Let's get started, the ingredients are as follows (bear in mind I made 6 in one go for the freezer exchange but you can scale it back for a family sized portion, proportions are not a science here!):

• 4 costco bags of sweet potatoes
• a giant costco ham
• 2 boxes of almond milk
• 3 boxes of beef broth
• 2 jars of pickled jalapeno peppers (these are to taste, I didn't use all of them)
• cauliflower (because it was in the fridge)
• goats cheese (garnish)

So if you're looking at these ingredients this recipe is cow dairy free, grain free and sugar free! You could easily substitute the almond milk for some cream if you wanted it to be smoother or use regular cream cheese :)

I seem to have deleted all my photos so I'll have to remake this in the future to retake the photos, please bear with me for now! Bear in mind also that I cooked this up half at a time because of the size of my stock pot, but if you have a bigger pot you can do it all at once.

To prepare the sweet potatoes I smothered them in coconut oil then baked them on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet at 400F for 45 mins like they say on Nom Nom Paleo.

I let those chill in the fridge  overnight because it was late, not because it's necessary. The next day I peeled the skins off (they just slide right off by hand, which I guess it's good I chilled them after all!) and tossed them in my stock pot. I also put in my almond milk, beef broth cauliflower and jalapenos and cooked it on medium to high heat until the cauliflower was cooked. You can play around with the ingredients, honestly I don't think the cauliflower did much for the recipe except act as a "done" indicator.

I then took my immersion blender and blended it until it was a smooth silky consistency. I then poured in the ham and mixed it up. This was a lot of ham BUT it gave the soup some weight and made it more of a balanced meal. From there I scooped it into freezer bags and froze them.

What's your favourite make ahead meal? 

Bad Night Can Bring Good Things

So I had a bad Night Friday. I was tired, my boyfriend had been working the evening shifts testing at work and coming home around 2 am which totally messed up my sleep. To top it off I was trying to increase the amount of cycling I was doing last week and Friday night it all caught up with me.

I stopped at no frills to get the last few ingredients for my dinner and a bag of chips and a container of dip. When I got home I was TIRED. I'd biked a total of 49.5 kms in one week up from 16.5 kms. I sat down to the bag of chips because it didn't need to be "prepared" and I ate. And I ate. And I ate. And I looked in the bag and all that was left was crumbs. I mindlessly ate an entire bag of chips. I felt awful and quickly realized what I'm trying to do isn't working. I felt like crap.

I turned to the internet, youtube to be specific. I arbitrarily searched "Mindful Eating" and what came up was a video by Dr. Melissa May. Honestly I'd been on her website and saw that she mainly catered to her US patrons with only one Canadian doctor posted on her site from Winnipeg so I wrote it off. Well wrote it off until I watched these two talks she gave:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2W0-nsGy0
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSDaqBwG6e0

They're long but well worth the watch! I honestly cried a little at one point because I felt like she was talking about me. I went to her website and was about to order the Mindful Eating Toolkit until I got to the till and shipping was 33$!!!! This is a 43$ dollar package we're talking about. In Ameribucks. So I trekked on over to amazon.ca and found just the book for 25$ and roughly 4$ shipping. It's not the whole kit but it will do for now. You need to read the reviews for this book, with people not really giving it their all they're reporting losses on the order of like 5 lbs a month. Not a massive drop but clearly sustainable!

I've talked about The Thin Womans Brain before and how as much as I love that book I felt like she walked you up to a cliff and told you to fly but you had no wings right? Well I feel like Dr May takes it so much further. I took from Mindful Eating that I was to eat only until I was full and only when I was hungry otherwise I was BAD. Really it's not BAD to eat when you aren't hungry, the point is to think before you stuff your face mindlessly. You'll see clarification on that in the second video and hopefully more in the books, which I shall report accordingly :)

Have you tried mindful eating? Have you read Eat What You Love Love What You Eat? 

How do I eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full?

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about mindful eating and I think I can definitively say that I see two main categories of mindful eating behaviour: over eating in a sitting and eating when you're not physically hungry. For me what it boils down to is that most of my eating is procedural and habitual and as such I'm not thinking when I eat.

I remember way back to my elementary school gym teacher who told me "it takes 3 weeks to make a good habit and only a week to break it!" This is a little devastating because when I think of vacations I think of at least a week so in a week I could undo all my efforts. But I guess this is the point. I'm not supposed to be on good behaviour, I'm supposed to always eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full. Which means I'm allowed ice cream. And potato chips.

Anyways, I got a little off topic thinking about the poutine flavoured potato chips I left behind on the kitchen counter this morning when I left. At the time I wasn't hungry and consciously knew I would not get hungry for several hours after the fabulous smoothies I made Alex and I this morning. I'm regretting it now but not because I'm actually hungry. It's a craving. Which is not real hunger.

Back on track (I think I have EDD - Engineers Deficit Disorder, like ADD but it's untreatable because being an engineer is so awesome!) So I need to break my habits, but how do I do that? A quick google search brought me to this: 3 Easy Steps to Breaking Bad Habits. For the record I don't think knuckle cracking is a bad habit.

A quick summary though:

1. make it conscious, 
2. put it in writing so it really sinks in, and 
3. bait and switch. 

The last one I think you need to be careful with. You and I need to substitute eating for something healthy and productive. (Refer to the Before I Eat app for suggestions!)

I like steps and tangible things I can do. I also like a schedule so I'm going to draw on a challenge I saw on Pinterest not too long ago called How To Become A Mindful Eater In 10 Days, it was a mindful eating challenge. I see a lot of parallels between this challenge and the Thin Womans Brain steps for mindful eating, which reinforces my faith in it! I also saw something similar on Psychology Today so booya!

I call it a challenge because I tend to be more motivated when it's a challenge, and hopefully not demotivated afterwards. I also want to stretch it out a bit, so basically I want to spend three weeks on not over eating and three weeks focusing on not eating when I'm not hungry. I want to do it in this order because I can spend the first three weeks not actively thinking about but taking into account not eating when I'm not hungry while primarily focusing on over eating. So taking from the challenge the steps in a slower drawn out process that I hope will have more lasting results. I will spend roughly 3 days on each step:

Now I'm cheating a little here because I've been thinking about why I feel like eating when I'm not hungry and been aware of when I'm over eating and in general trying to curb my behaviour. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on until last night was that when I don't overeat I feel like I'm missing something. It's unreal to think that I'm so dependent on the feeling of being over full, which in reality doesn't feel good.

So over the next three weeks I'm focusing on curbing over eating! I will not feel like I'm going to pop from dinner. I will not feel indigestion because I ate too much of something greasy. I will stop and think and feel.

Will you join me in eating only what you need for the next 3 weeks? 

Eat When You're Hungry, Duh!

It's no secret, most people gain weight as they get older, myself included. Typically, women invest the most into weight loss products and plans than men. I have no stats to back this up besides common sense because every LA Weight Loss or Weight Watchers commercial has some lady that's lost 100+ lbs on such and such diet plan. When I started out this blog I briefly talked about my weight and eating habits and mentioned a book called "The Thin Woman's Brain: Re-wiring the Brain for Permanent Weight Loss." I also mentioned that I was going to try that and that I'd get back to you about it later.

Well needless to say I didn't try it. I instead put myself on a rollercoaster, buckled up and hit GO! I tried paleo, I did paleo Monday to Friday, then I did paleo whenever I could and then I just tried to eat healthy meals. In the end all I really did was obsess about the foods I couldn't have, deprive myself of them, obsess some more, then out right binge. BINGE on chips, chocolate, beer, ice cream, all that good stuff.

Then something changed. I realized nothing was working. I remembered as well in the Thin Woman's Brain that they had mentioned these so called "naturally thin women." When I read the book I was like "oh whatever, these people do not exist! Everyone I know that is thin is a calorie counting nazi that does 5 hours of cardio every day. Hrmph." But I have this work mate that I've known for some time and always envied her thinness but told myself that I can't be a calorie counting nazi. But then I talked to her about my weight and she said, and she could have been quoting the book, "I only eat when I'm hungry." She also suggested I talk to someone about my eating habits.

Being the cheapskate I am I instantly started reading and searching and found an app called "Before I Eat" (Android - Iphone). I saw several different apps but I figured I would take the plunge and download this app using my google survey funds. It was like 1.11$ I think? At first I just looked at the app and thought "meh," and basically disregarded it for a couple weeks. Then one day I was feeling fat and unhappy and figured I had nothing to lose and listened to the intro.

I need to take a pause here because as much as I agreed with the book The Thin Woman's Brain I feel like she took me by the hand and walked me up to the edge of the cliff and said "FLY!" but I felt like I knew there was the potential to fly but couldn't rationalize the how. She said "identify if it's real hunger and if it's not address what the real issue is." This is easy when it's thirsty but what do I do when I'm at work and sleepy and going for a casual stroll around the cube kingdom doesn't work? I was frustrated and felt lost so that's part of why I gave up. But this is where this app picks up. It has audio tracks to talk you THROUGH these urges. If you're bored it gives you ideas of things to do instead of eat, stuff like that.

So basically where I'm going with all this is that I'm going to try mindful eating and so far my toolbox contains the book "The Thin Womans Brain" and the app "Before I Eat." What I need now is a plan.

Do you feel like you're riding the diet rollercoaster? 

How to Host a Clothing Exchange!

Ok so I know this article should really be entitled "Malaysia Part 3" and I promise the next section of my trip is on it's way but in the meantime I went to my second clothing exchange on the weekend and thought it'd be great to share :) Also, in all the excitement I didn't take many photos but I promise you next time I'll take photos... in six months.

First I'll start with the pros of the clothing exchange I attended:

1. Great reason to clean out my closets, winter storage box, summer storage box, under the bed, bottom back drawer of my dresser, boxes of pipe dream skinny bitch clothes and the boyfriends similar nooks and storage crannies :) 
2. Get some new FREE clothes in the process
3. Give my old clothes to a good cause where they'll be much more loved than they were whilst being neglected in my home
4. Get together with a great group of ladies!!

So I'm hoping from my pros you get the gist of a clothing exchange. Wait, stop the bus, not everyone knows what a clothing exchange is? Basically you clean out your closets or wherever you hide clothes and meet up and other people go through these items of clothing and take what they'd like. The leftovers get accumulated in bags and donated to charity. I'm sure there are varying degrees of how organized one could get about this but I'll explain how the one I went to was done. 

First off you basically invite everyone you know and tell them to congregate in the largest house you can occupy. We typically have a Facebook page where people can post asking for things they're on the hunt for or motivational comments to get you going on cleaning out the closet!

On the day of the event there are rooms that have signs designating what sizes and gender each room will contain. Since so far it's mostly been women's clothes we've divided the women's clothes by size then had a room solely for children's and men's clothes. We've just used bedrooms of the house to do this or the rec room in the basement, you don't need anything special just an area like a table or bed to spread the clothes out on! 

So everyone arrives and distributes their clothes by size and then typically meets in the living room for some snacks and drinks until everyone arrives. Once everyone has arrived the routine was explained and the games begin!! I put that in underline and bold because as much as free shopping is once you've combed through the clothes what else is there to do? 

This is where you get creative as the host/hostess. The first time I attended one of these the hostess awarded tickets for various things such as inviting friends, those friends actually turning up, bringing a snack, purging the most stuff, you get the idea! Then she put all the tickets in a pot and drew them for various prizes she'd put together. I was the happy little girl that went home with a bottle of pink lemonade wine, hello summer drinks on the patio, here we come! 

This last one was a bit different and more interesting I think. Some of us chipped in a few little prizes, I made a package of 4 crocheted dishcloths that were surprisingly popular! Upon arrival everyone wrote their name on a paper and crumpled it up and threw it in a box. Every 15 minutes 3 names were drawn. These three people then either chose something from the table or stole someone else's prize! It got heated. And everyone went home with something even if it was just a balloon :) This also went on while the clothes were being picked through so you got a little break now and then!

I think I forgot to explain something. Once everyone has the game plan they're released on the count of 3 to go pick through the clothes. Essentially everything is first come first serve and negotiating is allowed. Once you've picked your load you pop into the bathroom to try on your finds! After everyone is done shopping and trying on all the leftovers get bagged up. 

Here's all the clothes we had leftover!

All of the leftover clothes get donated, and in the case of our clothing exchange the host only gives them to places that give the clothes away for free to people in serious need, she thinks this is how we can do the most good and I'm inclined to agree.

Have you ever been to or hosted a clothing exchange?