Russian Sledges

Hi, Sewcialists! My name is Andie and I blog over at Sew Pretty in Pink.

Back in November, I took Beverly Johnson’s beginner bra making course at Bra Maker’s Supply in Hamilton, ON. I was very lucky to learn how to make a bra from the Fairy Bra Mother herself. In the course, Beverly fits you and the instructors and her do any necessary alterations to the pattern. We used the Classic Bra pattern from Pin up Girls. By the end of the course, I had an okay fitting bra, but not a great fitting bra. I had a lot of alterations ahead.

My main reason for taking the class was to be able to make cheaper bras in better fabrics and a wider range of colours. My 40HH size often meant my bras were around $100 each and only available in black, white or beige. Customs charges, exchanges rates, and shipping fees to Canada made the cost of shopping online unrealistic even with decent sales. I am lucky, however, to have a well-fitted bras even though they are in boring colours. Because I knew what a nice fit in a bra felt like, I didn’t want to spend the time tweaking the Classic Bra to my size and taste. I wanted to take my well-fitted bras and clone them.

Bev has a tutorial on one method of cloning using freezer paper. I followed the traditional method. This does mean taking the wire out of your bra, though. You can put it back in but you may want to choose an older bra that you are ready to retire.

You need some knowledge of sewing a bra in order to use your cloned pattern. I had only sewn one bra before cloning my own bra. So it is possible to do this at a very beginner stage. Please note the tutorial is just for creating a pattern. Not for sewing a bra. If this is your first time sewing a bra, I suggest Demystifying Bra Fitting and Construction by Norma Loehr to help you understand not only how to sew a bra but also how to alter the fit. I used this book to help me alter the fit of my pattern pieces. It helps you understand the fit issues and the pattern pieces you need to change based on the fit issues.

I am not an expert in bra making, but found this method really worked for me.

Before you start, try the bra on and note any fitting issues so that you can do some flat pattern adjustments. Also, check the stretch direction and note the stretch percentage in the fabrics. Note where the elastic is pulled and try to determine how much it is pulled by. You can do this by pulled the material flat and checking the difference in the length. This information will help you sew the bra later. I’m not going to be going over fit issues or sewing in this tutorial. Just the basics of cloning a bra.

Time to gather your supplies:

1. You will need either a piece of foam core board or a cardboard box flattened out and made into a piece big enough to pin your bra to. I used a cardboard box, because it was what I had on hand. You can also use cork board or anything that you can stick pins into without ruining the pins.
2. You needs pins. I recommend pins with either a pearl head or something on the end. Not flat top pins, because you will get sore finger tips with those. I used them the first time I cloned my bra. Ouch!
3. You need paper or tissue paper. I chose paper this time so that I can show you more clearly how the pattern piece looks and how to add in seam allowances.
4. You need pencils and rulers. A regular ruler and a french curve are good for the project. You can do it without the french curve, but it does make it easier.
5. And, of course, you need a well-fitted bra.

Step One:

Take the wires out of your bra. You can do this by making a small hole at the end of the channeling and working your wire out of the channeling.

Having the wire out will also make it easier to order your wire later. You can use the charts on bra supply websites and match them directly to your bra wire.

Step two:

Lay your paper over top of your cardboard and make sure you have a piece big enough for your pattern.

Step three:

Start pinning.

You pin at the stitching line. You will be adding in seam allowances later. Just make sure to not pin on the top stitching line. In the picture below, you can see the line of stitching to the left of the pins. That line is the top stitching. If you pinned along there, you would have to add in even more  once you take the pins out.

Be sure to get your fabric flat. In the below picture, you see I stretched the elastic under the arm out so the fabric laid flat on the paper. This is probably the more difficult part of this, because the pins will want to pop out. Make sure you really secure them in your cardboard.

All your pin holes will connect together to become your pattern pieces. Be sure to stick them into the corners and get them pretty close together.

Step four:

Connect the dots.

The most difficult thing to photograph are teeny little pinholes. You can sort of see above the little dots that are below the french curve. Using the french curve or freehanding, you will connect the dots. If you are freehanding, I suggest more pins and make them closer together to get an accurate pattern piece.

Here is the pattern piece once the dots have all been connected.

Step Five:

Add in seam allowances.

Bras have a standard 1/4 inch seam allowance. I added in seam allowances by marking a 1/4 inch on my ruler and then making dots and connecting them again. You can use any method you like for adding in the seam allowances.

Step six:

Repeat for all your pattern pieces.

Your bra may not have all of these pattern pieces or they may look completely different from mine.

Step seven:

Note the stretch direction on the pattern pieces and name/date the pieces. When you make pattern adjustments, I suggest tracing and dating the new piece again so that you aren’t just constantly altering the same piece over and over. It will fall apart that way. You can toss out the other piece, but I suggest keeping them until you’ve tested the fit on the new bra. You might want to go back to the previous alterations and use those instead of the new ones.

Finished….Sort of…

You don’t really get away with not having alterations and muslins with this method. You still might have fitting issues for a few different reasons:

– The bra itself was not a perfect fit

– The fabrics you are using are different

– Errors in the cloning process

– The position of the sun (joking!) and many more

Bra fitting is a difficult process and gets all the more difficult the large size you are. Sewing the bra is a breeze in comparison! Very minor differences can lead to very odd fitting issues in larger sizes and you can’t really check the fit until the bra is done. If you have a smaller size, this can be true as well due to different size breasts or the shape of your breasts. Don’t get discouraged that you will still be tweaking the fit as you go. The point for me was to get a little bit closer to having my style of bra and for a cheaper price than I was used to for my size. I’ve gotten that and, with each bra, I get closer and closer to the perfect fit.

Here are the three bras that I’ve created with my cloned pattern, including my largely failed first bra:

Top beige one I created for my wedding day, centre one was my second cloned bra, and the bottom one was my first using the cloned pattern. I’ve now made four bras in total including the Classic Bra. My best fit so far is the top, but it will only get better from here.

224,00 USD

Vintage 1950s draped rayon jersey dress (very Ceil Chapman in style) with fitted ruched sleeves, gorgeous gathered and draped bodice and length of skirt with long drawn down sides and back. Metal back zipper.

✂-----Measurements

fits like: small
bust: 36-38"
waist: 26"
hip: free
length: 43"
brand/maker: Miss Crane
condition: excellent

✩ layaway is available for this item

To ensure a good fit, please read the sizing guide:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/DearGolden/policy

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When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough, and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

And they really, really fall apart when they need to classify classical music.

Digital music software has never been well adapted to classical music. iTunes only added a “Composer” tag in 2004. Two years later, the developer Stan Brown published a guide on his website to “taming” Apple’s software for classical music. Since then, other hacks and kludges have followed. But digital music was so endlessly efficient that classical fans, especially the younger ones, embraced it and adopted it.

Certainly that was the case for me, a music-school student in the late 2000s. In the waning hours of a camp or festival, you’d squat with the other kids on the carpet, set up Firewire cables between everyone’s laptops and hard drives, and move music files back and forth. (I still have a DRM-locked copy of Candide in my library that will forever require Will Carmichael’s iTunes password, which I do not know.)

But as streaming services have flooded out MP3s, the situation worsened. Apple, which long paid classical more mind than other big tech companies, debuted Apple Music with dismal classical options, as NPR’s Anastasia Tsiouclas and The New Yorker’s Alex Ross have documented.

And even beyond the streaming service, the new version of Apple’s signature music software seems especially broken. In the name of creating a “complete thought around music,” iTunes 12 has crammed a streaming service and a media library and a recommendation service and a file store and a device manager into one interface. The sum is that nothing “just works”—and MP3s especially don’t work well. I wondered: How were professional musicians handling the change? And how did they organize their music in the first place?

After all, their job requires them to have quick and fluent access to a library of working recordings.

I had another interest here. Earlier this month, Apple released the new and likely final versions of its iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. They shipped with interfaces that looked more than three years out of date. The blogger John Gruber said that this was because “what remains of the iPod software team” had been absorbed by the Apple Watch division. Apple has already discontinued its iPod Classic, the last media player that could conceivably let you tote around your entire music library in one device. The company is floating to a streaming model.

If classical listeners are ill-served by streaming services, though, they will stick with music files; and that means they represent, as a bloc, the set of listeners who will continue to maintain personal libraries of owned music even as the larger public rents their digital music instead. How are they adapting?

* * *

As it turns out: poorly.

First, the bugs. The new version of iTunes disappears music. It confuses live tracks and studio versions. And its search bar cannot even find songs which it contains in its library.

“To give you a really specific situation, there are two settings of the Te Deum text by Benjamin Britten. And it would seem to me that if you type in ‘Britten’ and ‘Te Deum,’ you would see some of them,” the composer Nico Muhly told me. “But it says, ‘no results found.’”

I want to submit to the record here that Muhly’s hard drive contains seven different files that could be reasonably called the Britten Te Deum. In fact, it contains more than 2,000 files, or 11.9 gigabytes, of music by Benjamin Britten. It also contains 97 different settings of the Te Deum text.

“What’s extraordinary about it is that I tagged everything really, really well. It’s in Artist, Album Artist, all these things are organized,” he said.

But when “Britten Te Deum” is searched—and he sent me a screenshot of this—nothing comes up. “It’s not like, let me show you too many results. It just does not compute.”

(Even when the search function does locate a file, he says, pressing ‘return’ to play it does not start playing the highlighted file, but the first file listed alphabetically in iTunes. “Which of course is only Aaliyah.”)

Timo Andres, a composer and pianist, reported fewer problems with the new version of iTunes, though he echoed that it had some odd behaviors. With his music files, he had moved the composer to the “Artist” field. The performer, conductor, and other information went to the file’s general comments field. “I started to do that because there is no performer field,” he said.

Andres has also started to use Apple Music, but has stumbled again with labeling. Apple Music only searches for songs in its library by Kemp’s original three tags—artist, album, and song title—which, combined with often flawed metadata, makes searching for a specific recording of a specific piece arduous, if not impossible.

So many of the problems seemed to come down to metadata. According to Jeremy Morris, a University of Wisconsin professor, Kemp’s tagging system took off when it was adopted by the Compact Disc Database (CDDB). The CDDB is the database which iTunes used to detect what was on a CD while ripping it.

Classical is not the only genre that works poorly with this tagging system, said Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format, a history and meditation on the technology. Audiobooks, lectures, and sound art don’t really adapt well either.

If anything, said Sterne, the long-playing record and the compact disc—the two great audio formats of the late 20th century—might have been special cases.

With both the CD and the LP, he said, “it just so happened that things that were of interest to the broader world of people who made recorded media, and people who were in the music industry, lined up with those of classical performers and audiences.”

Audio formats before the LP also failed to capture classical music, at least by our measures. Sterne recently bought a 1928 Victrola, he said, and it came with a 78 marked “classical music.” The record boasts five minutes of Debussy. That’s not, to be clear, a five-minute work by Debussy, nor in fact any labeled work at all: It’s just five minutes of some Debussy piece. For more than a century, classical music has been marketed as prestigious, even though what’s being sold may be distant from what the composer first wrote.

“There’s lots of issues” with MP3 tagging beyond classical, said Sterne. “Engineers, producers get left off records. Studio musicians are often left off in ways that were often much more detailed in liner notes.” A week ago, he was trying to find out the engineer who recorded Jay Z’s “Death of Autotune.” The MP3 ID tags didn’t say, nor could he find the answer in five minutes of googling. That’s exactly the kind of information, he said, that would have been printed in liner notes.

* * *

If classical’s messy software is ever fixed, it will require, first, better metadata.

“I get really obsessed with specific vectors of classical music performance—I’ll spend weeks listening to just one performer, or one work, or both,” said David Yee, a software developer who trained as a classical musician, in an email:

Being able to explore a particular movement of one of Mahler’s symphonies as performed by various orchestras in different halls would push all my buttons. The reason you can’t do that now has everything to do with titles—some recordings will refer to the movement by number, some by tempo marking; some put the catalog number in the track title, some in the album title.

New software that could provide more granular and specific access to songs in a huge classical library in some ways has to come after better metadata (both the fields to provide that metadata and community/label effort to provide that metadata). Once that’s in place, you can imagine putting together a day’s worth of listening that focuses on just one movement, or being able to add a complete symphony from a box set of Beethoven’s complete works with a single click.

I have two thoughts here. The CDDB, the industry’s leading database of MP3 metadata, is now privately owned and controlled, but it began as a crowd-sourced project with volunteer contributions. There is no reason this now-private database couldn’t be supplemented by a more robust, more complete database of audio file information maintained on a wiki-like basis.

“I want to take every other part of iTunes and propel it into the sun—everything from suggestions to equalizers,” said Yee. Andres and Muhly both expressed a similar desire for simplicity; some independent iOS and Mac developers have wondered this week why iTunes, the file management software, couldn’t be a separate application from Apple Music, the streaming service. To use iTunes now, it seems like, requires understanding not only Apple’s current music strategy but also its previous several.

But if Apple is committed to a cruft-ridden iTunes, other developers could step in the void. It’s not just classical music libraries: Many users with their own sizable libraries want software that lets them listen to MP3s and AACs. Plenty of minimalist text editors for Macs and PCs persist in the world. If iTunes is beyond repair, it might now be time for some minimalist media management software.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-tragedy-of-itunes-and-classical-music/399788/

64.00 USD

Pretty dusky pink 40s jacket, originally from a suit set, great arrow detail and coppery buttons, crepe lining in very tidy condition! Fabric is a wool or wool blend gabardine. Please check the measurements for best fit and condition notes below.
Item ships first class worldwide.

c o n d i t i o n
Shows some yellowing at the top of shoulders and a faint linear discoloration down left front side, see close up of 2 small holes at back of right shoulder. Very nice color overall despite the slight variations. Tiny pull below right pocket, sold as is.

size: XS-small
length 23
shoulder 14.5"
sleeve 21"
bust 32-34" (max when buttoned, most comfortable at 32" when fully buttoned)
waist 27-28"

shop previews on instagram @wildfellhall

★check out our vintage lingerie shop right here!
http://www.etsy.com/shop/theslipperie

Thank you for stopping by!

themanofwater:

Patti Smith and  Robert Mapplethorpe

The possibilities are these: Bland died from an untreated head injury after State Trooper Brian Encinia bashed her head against the pavement and police staged her suicide; Bland died from an epileptic seizure (recall that Encinia's response to Bland telling him she had epilepsy was "Good") and police staged her suicide; Bland was killed or died in some other way in police custody and her sucide was staged; or Bland indeed took her own life, after she informed police of previous suicide attempts and they utterly failed to prevent another while she was in their care. There is no version of events where police are not culpable for Sandra Bland's death.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

metal band logos as captcha

Eagle Scout. Young Republican. CIA recruit. Air Force officer. CIA director. Secretary of defense.

It’s not the resume of a radical civil-rights campaigner, but Robert Gates has now integrated two of the great bastions of macho American traditional morality—first the U.S. armed forces, and now the Boy Scouts of America. In both cases, Gates pursued a careful, gradual strategy, one that wasn't fast enough for activists. In both cases, he was careful to take the temperature of constituents. And in both cases, once he was ready to act, he did so decisively. In the end what seemed to matter most was not Gates’s personal feelings but his determination to safeguard institutions he cared about and his deft skills as a bureaucratic operator.

Before the Obama administration began moving to eliminate the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy there was barely any indication of Gates’s views on LBGT issues—though not none. In 1991, while director of central intelligence, Gates ordered an inquiry into whether CIA personnel had ever been blackmailed into espionage because they were gay. When he found no cases, he ended the practice of asking employees about their sexual orientation as part of polygraph tests. From 2002 until he took over the Pentagon in 2006, Gates was president of Texas A&M University, a famously culturally conservative school. (In 1984, students sued, successfully, to force the school to recognize a gay-student organization; the ruling effectively removed all legal prohibitions on LGBT student groups nationwide.) At A&M, Gates worked to improve student diversity overall—including racial minorities and LGBT students—and appointed the school’s first administrator specifically in charge of diversity.

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Related Story

The End of the Boy Scout Ban on Gay Adults?

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Given the rapid advance of gay rights over the last decade, it’s tough to remember just how different the stage was in 2006, when Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” had had plenty of critics since it was enacted in 1994—President Bill Clinton himself would have preferred simply opening the military to gay servicemembers—but it was still firmly in place. The Bush administration was not interested in lifting the ban, and Gates took a cautious approach. He repeatedly told reporters that he was not reviewing or reconsidering the policy.

When, several months into his tenure, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, said that “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral,” Gates tried to avoid discussing the comments, and said of DADT, “As long as the law is what it is, that's what we'll do.” (Pace, who retired in September 2007, reiterated his personal opposition to homosexuality during an exit hearing with Congress, but also endorsed gay service in the military.) When, two months later, the military ejected 58 desperately needed Arabic linguists because they were gay, Gates still said the policy wasn’t under review.

Even after President Obama was elected and Gates accepted an offer to stay on as secretary, he remained cautious. Though the president pledged to repeal DADT during his first State of the Union, Gates expressed a preference in March 2009 to “push that one down the road a little bit,” infuriating gay activists. Yet in June, he was clearly expecting the policy to end and was exploring whether “there’s a more humane way to apply the law until it gets changed.” A similar pattern held in 2010, as Gates warned Congress not to repeal DADT before he had a policy in place for the aftermath and insisted courts not make the decision. He also issued a survey on gays to servicemembers, a step that LGBT activists, who saw it as putting civil rights to a vote, disagreed with. Yet there Gates was in the fall, saying DADT’s demise was “inevitable” and testifying to Congress in favor of repeal—before the courts did it. (And that survey? It turned out the troops were totally fine with LGBT comrades.)

Once DADT was repealed, Gates moved quickly to enforce discipline and get the change implemented in the military, and shot down any hopes that soldiers, sailors, and marines who disagreed with the policy could leave their commitments early.

Gates’s push for the end of DADT never relied on the soaring rhetoric of rights and justice that people like Obama used. Gates spoke with the dry, careful language of a bureaucrat, speaking in terms of unit cohesion, military readiness, and obstacle recognition. When he indulged emotion, it was to praise soldiers risking their lives—the same language a defense secretary would use for straight soldiers. The decision was more than anything a triumph of pragmatism. Gates carefully studied the effects repeal would have on the military and decided the downsides were minimal; and he looked at the way the country was changing and realized that the policy would have to end soon, and that he wanted it to end on the Pentagon’s terms to ensure the military’s stability and long-term health.

The DADT fight offers a template for the opening to gay scoutmasters. Gates had expressed tempered sympathy for gays in scouting as far back as 1993, when he told Wichita Rotarians, “Values central to Scouting are under challenge today as never before: challenges to our belief in God, challenges from Americans who are gay. Scouting must teach tolerance and respect for the dignity and worth of every individual person, certainly including gays.”

The Boy Scouts had already begun to dismantle some of their anti-gay policies when Gates was elected president in late 2013. A lopsided vote in May 2013 ended a ban on gay scouts but kept prohibitions on gay scout leaders and volunteers in place. Just as he had at Defense, Gates initially took a carefully diplomatic position. “I was prepared to go further than the decision that was made,” Gates said in May 2014. “I would have supported having gay Scoutmasters, but at the same time, I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by 1,500 volunteers from across the entire country.” He said he wouldn’t reopen the decision during his term as president.

At some point in the last year, he had a change of heart.

The shift seems to reflect much the same calculus that guided Gates through the DADT decision. At the Pentagon, he had first avoided discussing repeal because it seemed too likely to create institutional instability; but once he decided that the writing was on the wall and that refusing to change was the greater risk to the organization, he moved swiftly and effectively to impose his new will. The point was to guarantee institutional survival.

In May 2015, one year after saying he wouldn’t reopen the issue of gay scoutmasters, Gates did just that. In short, he decided once again that if the institution he led didn’t change its policies now, a judge was likely to force it to do so later.

“I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement.”

“The status quo in our movement's membership standards cannot be sustained,” he said. “Between internal challenges and potential legal conflicts, the BSA finds itself in an unsustainable position, a position that makes us vulnerable to the possibility the courts simply will order us at some point to change our membership policy.”

Gates warned that a court order would disarm the Boy Scouts’ ability to act of their own volition, and suggested that doing anything besides opening would be an existential threat.

“I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement,” he said.

Monday evening, Gates got his wish, as the BSA’s 80-member board voted to approve the change. (A smaller executive committee had already approved it.) The new policy may not satisfy everyone. Traditionalists are upset about the move, while progressives feel it doesn’t go far enough—troops that are chartered by churches and other religious organizations would still be permitted to set their own standards. Regardless, the policy marks a serious shift for BSA, and it cements Robert Gates’s place in history: as one of the least likely but most successful proponents for gay equality in institutional America.

PAWS ARF.

UConn has sold naming rights for Rentschler Field at Pratt & Whitney, and the new full name of the stadium will be Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field.

Acronym of UConn Huskies' new stadium name: Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field is PAWS ARF h/t Johnny Mac

— Brett McMurphy (@McMurphyESPN) July 27, 2015

PAWS ARF. Or, P&WS ARF, which looks basically the same.

PAWS ARF. Because their mascot is the Huskies, which are dogs, which

1. Have paws, and
2. Bark, which is sometimes written out by people as "arf."

gifsboom:

Video: Guy Goes Swimming with 12 Golden Retrievers

To find “Forest Bells”, take Route 119 to Groton, then Old Ayer Road south toward Ayer from Route 119 at the triangle common before or after the Mobil Station. Then, turn left onto Indian Hill Road and go all the way to the end. Park cars, but not near the house at the end. Walk back to the end and bear left up a dirt road into the trees. Continue along this road, passing at one point under power lines and continuing down into forest. At the next obvious fork, with the main path going up to the right, turn sharp left on to the side road. About 50 yards later there are a group of fallen trees barring an old road leading uphill to the right. Walking over or around the fallen trees, follow that road up the hill. Continue until you find yourself in a grove of hemlocks, quite different from the pines and oaks all around. You are at the Forest Bells.

cinemove:

In the Mood For Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar Wai

The Red Shoes (1948)
_{“Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on.”}

foreverxalonex:

josephicus:

fuck the police

Yooo

Guillermo Sexo have been a mainstay of the Boston indie rock scene since they began playing in 2004. Over five records, they’ve fleshed out their lush sound, building eclectic anthems with layered guitar work and moody vocals. Now, they’re attempting to up the ante even more with their upcoming sixth album, Eclipse, out this fall via Midriff Records.

The first sample of their album comes in the exceptionally vibrant track “Graffiti Sky”. Vocalist Noell Dorsey floats serenely over the jangling guitar chords and shimmering riffs. As the album title implies, there’s a cosmic vibe running through the track created through smoothly applied reverb cascading over cymbals that explode like tiny stars. It’d be the perfect soundtrack for surfing through distant galaxies — or at least looking at hi-res photos of Pluto on a laptop.

Listen in below.

What made T.T. the Bear’s Place so special? In their own words, here are testimonials from Boston-bred musicians who called the club home through the years.

I probably picked the worst day to blog about a pair of shorts, since it’s been raining, it’s windy, and it’s freezing, but Hey! New shorts! A cold windy day makes for a good opportunity to wear my new super ridiculous…ly adorable cat stockings though, so I guess today was a good day to wear shorts after all!

The pattern is Simplicity 1371 designed by Cynthia Rowley and I’m super happy with the fit. Surprisingly, I made no major adjustments! I cut a straight size 4* and the only changes I made were to the waistband and the zipper (and those were style changes not fitting changes). I never get that lucky with sewing! I swear if I’m not making 8 muslins I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. #sewingproblems #thestruggleisreal

(edit* – I should mention my actual measurements are a size 8/10 but I cut a 4 based on the finished measurements and my preferred wearing ease.)

Though I did no fitting, I did have to do some creative cutting to get all my pieces to fit. I was attempting to work just from the leftovers after cutting out my VIFPMCW Hollyburn and the yardage evaporated quickly. There’s a seam running through the inside of my pockets (eh hem, because I cut them wrong and then tried to fix it) but it doesn’t make them any less functional. If anything it just makes me feel slightly smug, like “Hey good job, you. Way to mess up make do and mend!” – I like those little secrets in sewing projects.

The fabric I used is a lighter weight cotton twill by Robert Kaufman. I really love the way this fabric feels, it’s a great summer weight, but I am rather disappointed with how much the color ran in the wash. I know bright reds (Tomato red in this case) are tricky to make truly colorfast, but still, I prefer not to have to sort my laundry. It won’t stop me from buying this exact same fabric again (in fact I plan on it), but I’ll have to be less lazy with my laundry sorting habits when I do so I don’t ruin more socks.

I think the pattern calls for an invisible zipper but I went for a centered zip instead. On my next pair I’d like to try an exposed zipper since I keep seeing them pop up online and I like the look! Megan Nielsen has a great exposed zipper tutorial on her blog which I’ve bookmarked for future reference.

Alright you guys, the last time I shared a pair of shorts there were many readers who were disappointed with the lack of butt shots (of all things lol!). I can understand that though, honestly. Pattern envelopes can be deceiving and I too like to see all angles of a finished garment before I sew it myself. Soooooo… butt shots, I will deliver. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Children, shield your eyes!

Outfit Details:
Shirt – Grainline Archer
Shorts – Simplicity 1371
Sweater – Awesome21
Cat Stockings – AM Landen
Shoes – stolen from my mom
Headscarf – Thrift Store
Glasses – c/o Victory Optical
(20% off all frames with code LUCKY20)

I’ve been wearing my Archer shirts constantly since Me Made May, and the fact that I haven’t sewn one since last year is utter madness. I’m going to remedy that soon! I originally picked the Sewaholic Granville for one of the pieces in my VIFPMCW ensemble but I might have to swap it for Archer. I like Archer. It fits. It’s comfortable. It ain’t broke so why fix it, right?

Speaking of the VIFPMCW Challenge, these shorts are my first completed piece! My matching Hollyburn skirt is 80% done but I made the mistake of stopping and moving things before I got the waistband on, and now I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Anywhere! I think I may have accidentally thrown it away with the scraps… Oh no, I guess I’ll have to buy more fabric then. Geeze, what a terrible, terrible thing (said no seamstress ever).

One more butt shot and then your eyes can recover

Seriously though, CAT STOCKINGS. They make my life better. Things have been pretty gloomy in the life department lately (I’m not talking about just the weather), and when things get gloomy I like to dye my hair fun colors and wear ridiculous things like cat stockings (and run. I’ve started running). It’s a surefire way to feel better and keep the darkness at bay.

Sewing really bright red things definitely helps too. It’s a great power color. Tiger Woods knows what’s up.

xo
Rochelle

What do you do if you are a woman and you want to play competitive football? You get stuck wearing a bikini in a league that doesn't pay you or provide health insurance -- because it's the best competitive football you can play. This is a great bit of long-form journalism over at Grantland by Jordan Ritter Conn. I ended up watching a bit of a "Legends" Football League game when flipping channels a couple weeks ago and the quality of play was no different from your usual Arena Football game.

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justice4mikebrown:

July 22

“Signal lane change or sheriff may kill you”

Genderize.io determines the gender of a first name. Use the API for analytics, ad targeting, user segmenting etc. It utilizes big datasets of information, from user profiles across major social networks and exposes this data through its API. The response includes a certainty factor as well.

Created as a set of billboards along two Massachusetts highways, “Healing Tool” is a temporary public art installation by artist Brian Kane produced to temporarily relieve stress and promote introspection during one’s monotonous daily commute.

Kane’s digital billboards circulate between pictures of surrounding natural environments, creating “unvertisements” that promote nothing instead of shoving products, restaurants, and services in consumers’ faces from above. The piece builds upon a body of work Kane has been producing that places digital experiences into real world situations. “Healing Tool” is named after the Photoshop tool used to patch over errors in photographs, just as his project is patching over unnatural blips of landscape (billboards) seen from the highway.

The pieces change depending on the time of day. Daylight hours feature natural images of areas surrounding the billboards, while evening hours display high-resolution images of the moon and Milky Way that allow viewers a clear glimpse of the cosmos despite urban light pollution.

Kane explains, “By removing the marketing message from the advertising space, we create an unexpected moment of introspection. People are allowed to interpret an image based on their own experience, and not necessarily with the singular focus of the advertiser’s intent.” (via The Creator’s Project and Junkculture)

La beauté- The beauty. Arabic calligraphy. Tetouan, Morocco, 2015. Calligraphy by Julien Breton aka Kaalam. Photography by Cisco Light-painting.

Artist Julien Breton aka ‘Kaalam‘ is a master of photographic light painting, turning full-body gestures reminiscent of dance movements into the invisible pen strokes of Arabic calligraphy. Breton works silently in secluded urban environments and against dimmed architectural backdrops to execute perfectly rehearsed motions that translate on film to both abstract and literal Arabic handwriting. With its sweeping tails, loops, and punctuated diacritic dots, it’s difficult to imagine any other language more suited to the transcription of human body movement into written language.

Collected here are a number of works over the last few years, but you can see much more on Behance and on his website. If you liked this, also check out the work of Stephen Orlando.

Pensée – think. Arabic calligraphy. Saint-Laurent sur sèvres, France, 2014. Calligraphy by Julien Breton aka Kaalam. Photography by David Gallard.

Dead’s place. Abstract calligraphy. New York, USA, 2012. Calligraphy by Julien Breton aka Kaalam. Photography by David Gallard.

Fraternité. Arabic calligraphy. Alexandrie, Egypte, 2015.

La lumière – The light. Arabic calligraphy. Jodpur, India, 2012. Calligraphy by Julien Breton aka Kaalam. Photography by David Gallard.

Compassion. Arabic calligraphy. Issé, France, 2014. Calligraphy by Julien Breton aka Kaalam.
Photography by David Gallard.

Under the city. Abstract calligraphy. Nantes, France, 2012. Calligraphy by Julien Breton aka Kaalam. Photography by David Gallard.

Credit: Billy and the Kid / Morocco

Credit: Billy and the Kid / Morocco

fashion-runways:

PAOLO SEBASTIAN Couture Spring/Summer 2016

Hunting Spear of Nicolas De Lorraine

• Dated: circa 1570
  
• Maker: unknown
  
• Medium: iron, wood, ivory, bone and velvet
  
• Place of creation: Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany
  
• Measurements: height: 2.23 m; width: 0.16 m; weight: 4.6 kg
  

The spear belonged to Nicolas de Lorraine (1524-1577), Count of Vaudemont Duke of Mercoeur and stepfather of King Henri III of France. Its appeal is reinforced by its technical complexity as three small spinning wheel guns are concealed in the hollow of its iron edges. The spear was the weapon most commonly used for hunting.

The weapons system, which combines a knife and a gun, were very popular in the late 16th century. This spear has received a decorative treatment; its iron sage leaf is fully decorated with a tracery carved decor, while the wooden shaft is inlaid with bone and ivory plaques. The three spinning wheels have in their center an eagle with outstretched wings of the German Empire.

Source: Copyright © 2015 Musée de l'Armée

to st. valentine!

avenging-hobbits:

All Time Favorite Movies:

The Night of the Hunter // 1955 // Charles Laughton

“It’s a hard world for little things.“