Lady L

... I hadn't realised I have not posted since July 7th. Oops. Hi. Happy fellow birthday to shaggydogstail and furiosity, and thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday as well!

All of my sisters and a couple of friends came over yesterday for a small birthday get together, which we followed with attending a shadow cast screening of Jurassic Park. Phenomenally terrible. Occasionally it was funny but mostly it wasn't and after awhile we just stopped watching the cast and watched the movie instead (while being silently annoyed that they were in the way of the screen). Alas, you win some, you lose some.

Here's the birthday cake my friend baked for me. ( cut for AWESOME )

I also (finally) finished my mermaid quilt this afternoon. ( cut for pics )

I like to go into Pottery Barn Kids and check out all the awesome but overpriced felt toys. It's torturous to me that I don't have any friends with kids for whom I can make this shiz, and as such I'll share some awesome tutorials on felt food that I just found: carrots, cookies, cherry pie, and saltines. Actually, in the cursory ten second look I gave the rest of the site, they seem to have tons of other great stuff too.

A friend of a friend went to Hong Kong last month and she brought back these stuffed felt food kits for her friends. My friend got a green tea cake kit that I am sorely tempted to make next time I am at her house.

ETA Freaking adorable felt food on Etsy.

ETA 2 The Toy Society, where people make handmade toys, drop them off in public places for random people to pick up, and then, when all goes according to plan, the recipient emails the site email address letting them know where they found it. Random acts of toyness!

Based on their logo, I'm pretty sure that Signature Vacations is actually trying to sell me tampons and/or feminine wipes of some kind.

I saw Moon this afternoon. ( cut for spoilers )

I saw Public Enemies tonight. ( cut for spoilers ) 2/5 (until my Photobucket resets itself)

Unrelated question: does anyone have any idea why whenever I try to watch a You Tube video, the volume control is red with an X beside it? I've tried Googling this but all I've come up with is some new policy of You Tube's whereby they can disable the sound on any videos that the sound is not original to (e.g. Evanescence songs on bad Titanic fanvids). When You Tube does this, they also display a message indicating as much. I'm getting no sound across the board and no warning messages, so I know it's not this policy issue going into effect. WTF.

One of my coworkers just forwarded me this thing about things Canadians can brag about and #12 on the list was:

Canada has the largest French population that never surrendered to Germany.

LMFAO.

It also claims that "the handles on our beer cases are big enough to fit your hands with mitts on" which I don't know how accurate this is having never tried to carry a beer case in winter, but I'd like to think it's a nice forward thinking design element.

forest_hermit and I saw Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen last night. ( cut for spoilers )

Is it just me, or does this purse look like Jar Jar Binks?

My parents claim it was "Dimetrodon", which suits me just fine.

Another dress (almost) finished!

( cut for pics and other crafty stuff )

The Toronto Star asked how gay is your neighbourhood? I link because I liked the interactive Google maps that chart census data about gay marriage and what neighbourhoods gay married couples live in (men, women). In my neighbourhood, there are 1-2 marriages between two women per 1000 (marriages or people, it doesn't clarify) but 0 marriages between two men. I'm genuinely shocked that there are no married same-sex couples on Queen West (but perhaps no one in that neighbourhood gets married, straight, gay, or otherwise?).

I'm inconsistent with doing this, but when I remember I try to do a mid-year summary of the best films I've seen thus far and since I'm unlikely to go to the movies again before Wednesday, I sat down to figure out what my Top Ten from January-June was.

AND THEN I REALISED THAT 17 Again WAS ON THAT LIST.

Haha, kill me now. I know that January-June is a tough period for movies, but oh my god this depresses me. ( cut for list, in case anyone cares )

In other news, I've been trying to do dishes but it seems I have no hot water. It sometimes goes in and out, I presume because of the water usage of the units around me, but it's kind of obnoxious since I shamefully admit I have not done dishes in like two weeks.

It's rainy and kind of depressing out and I'm having trouble motivating myself to do anything but sit on the internet. I have another dress to make, so I could do that. Speaking of which, I was reading my sewing machine manual and you can apparently do non-elastic smocking with it. It also says that you need fabric three times the width of your finished piece, so that's good to know.

ETA The Hurt Locker is only playing in four theatres but made more per theatre than Transformers did. Seriously, people, if you are living near one of those four theatres, go see it.

Pro tip: just because you can resize an image using HTML doesn't mean you should resize an image using HTML.

If you have an image that is 800x600px and you use HTML to do something fancy (I use the term loosely) like this:

<img src="http://imagehost.com/image.jpg" width="300px" height="225px" />

... people still have to download the larger image. Resizing with HTML does not change the actual file size of the image, it just changes the physical dimensions of that gigantic file. This means it still takes just as long to load as it would if you had posted it as an 800x600px image, thus negating 83% of the point of using a "thumbnail".

Either resize your graphic as a thumbnail so that when you're posting an image as 300x225px it's actually 300x225px, or post full size so that everyone knows how much you fail. Layout makers are the worst for this.

Tell your friends.

Pink gingham dress!

( cut for pics )

I saw Whatever Works. ( cut for spoilers )

1) I have never really understood the appeal of monster truck rallies, but I could definitely get behind this sort of thing. [It falls outside of Flickr's safe search filter because of other stuff in that set of images, but that one is fine, non-traumatizing, and safe for work.]

2) I have PINK GINGHAM in the wash as we speak. I also bought elastic thread, so I'm hoping to try out some smocking on the pink gingham. The only thing is the elastic is... navy blue. I couldn't find any white. It shouldn't matter, though, since the elastic goes in the bobbin and will appear on the wrong side of the fabric anyway, so it shouldn't be seen.

3) I also bought some polka dot fabric to make another dress in the style of the one I posted the other day. I love this pattern!

4) The fabric stores in Toronto depress me. This city has a fetish for stretch polyester in terrible patterns, I swear. The places that do carry the pretty stuff you can find online are so overpriced that it's not worth it to buy. I know that the markup is in part related to having an actual bricks'n'mortar store, having to pay staff, etc. but when I can get Amy Butler online for $9/yard, why on earth would I pay $19.99/yard at a fabric store? Even after factoring in the exchange rate and shipping costs, it's still cheaper to buy online. My fabric obsession is not so dire that I am willing to spend exorbitant sums just to experience the instant gratification of buying from a store.

5) I think I will spend the afternoon making coffee cup cozies because they're quick to make and they use up your fabric scraps. Win win!

ETA 6) Free instructions for making a plush bird mobile.

I saw Year One with some friends tonight. ( cut for spoilers )

I FIXED MY DRESS!! I ripped out the side stitches from the top down to the pockets and then inserted a little wedge of fabric to expand the top to accommodate my ginormous ribcage while keeping the rest of the dress the size I needed. I conquer!

( cut for pics )

Also, I mentioned yesterday that I've made two skirts previously with this pattern and since I finally found a decent area of my apartment to take pictures of clothing against, I have pictures of those too.

( cut for skirts )

Anyway, I really love this pattern, especially for the skirts. I want to make ten more and just wear those all summer. The dress pattern is a little weird in places because they don't tell you to finish the seams in any particular way and then with the way the edges are constructed, you can sometimes see bits of them. I'll have to find a way around this in the future.

You know how sometimes you're on a roll with a project so instead of going to bed at 11:30pm like a reasonable person, you decide to stay up until 1am working on it in your sweltering apartment because just maybe you're making a dress and it would be nice to wear it to work tomorrow?

You know when you try it on and it DOESN'T FIT?

Ugh. I had made two skirts from the same pattern previously and they were a little roomy, so I made the next size down for the dress that was part of the same pattern. I have no idea why I forgot this, but I have the WORLD'S LARGEST RIBCAGE and even if it fits fine everywhere else, the side zipper will invariably say "Oh ho, you think I'm going to zip up? Think again, my circumference-challenged friend!" The zipper, it mocks me.

Anyway, here's a picture. ( cut for pic, which I really should have sharpened ) I haven't yet decided whether or not I'm going to cut it down into a skirt. Maybe it will fit amazingaudrey. The fabric was on sale and only cost $5 for 2.5 yards, though, so I don't feel like I've wasted money on it. Still. Grr.

Oh Christ, ten movies (instead of five) will compete for the Best Picture Oscar next March. They claim they're just going back to their roots since the Oscars originally had ten films in the Best Picture category, but I think that it's clearly a ploy to increase viewership. Uncle Sid Ganis says:

Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognise and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.

What he means is that they can nominate fan favourites (The Dark Knight) without anyone in the Academy having to take them seriously, thus bringing in more casual viewers. Blah.

Also: I guess this means that Hollywood is going to have to start financing even more Holocaust films to round out that list of ten nominees.

You know, I rarely see five films per year that make me think they're worthy of Best Picture nominations. Now I have to start thinking about ten? Jesus. I'm so glad I turned down that invitation to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

ETA Casino Jack was filming on site today at work. I had no idea until I left around 6:10pm and saw a sign that read "CASINO JACK LOAD IN" and assumed it was some made for TV movie or something. Turns out it has Kevin Spacey, Jon Lovitz (GET THESE WILD ANIMALS AWAY FROM ME), and Barry Pepper (for you, amazingaudrey), not that I saw any of these people.