Sew Dance

My current progress on my frogs. Several things happened this week. Tuesday, my phone dropped onto the driveway, landing screen down and it cracked. I need to find a place to replace it. Thankfully everything else on the phone is functional. My rosebush is in bloom. A bit later than usual this year due to the weather. And finally, my partner and I participated in a competition yesterday. We got a 3rd and a 2nd in the Samba, Cha Cha, Rumba rounds and won both Jive contests.

I'm late on my update again. I have a really good reason though. I spent Sunday finishing up my tailoring on my fringe dress and then made a shirt. I'm having trouble with the hem on the top otherwise I'd have a picture of it. I may make bias binding and finish it that way. On Thursday, I finished the over 2 stitching of my dragon. I then started on the over 1 Chinese characters. By the end of Saturday I had a little over one to finish so I decided to wait, thinking I could finish it up after I got back from the competition the next day. We made top 24 and the quarter-finals for silver latin. But given the amount of entries and how long it was between the heats, they were running in level order rather than finishing up newcomer/bronze before starting silver/gold, I didn't get home as early as I thought. Therefore, I had to finish the characters today. Now onto the backstitching! I did buy more fabric, but it was one piece of denim as I'm going t...

I have reached page 4 of Celestial Dragon. Tada! A better picture than the last few weeks. And this time you may actually see a hint of sparkle on the dragon. Hopefully won't be too long before this page is done and I can go on to complete the over 1 sections. But then comes the backstitching. That alone will take me over a week. Not to mention the beads. Last night my Mom wanted me to sew something so I pulled out all my patterns. As we were going through them, I found out a few things. I need a bigger box, or at least a secondary box. I have more patterns for woven fabrics than stretch fabrics despite it being the opposite for what's actually in my stash. I need a better organization. Although in light of that, I believe I have finally matched a pattern to a piece of fabric from my stash. The pink being the main fabric with the gold and the other two colors being the wrong side of this fabric (visible on bottom right corner). What do you think? Now, I...

I somehow managed to work on The Accolade for a week. Barely. On Thursday I got tired of it and switched projects. But I did manage to get down to row 118. I tried to hold on to finish 120 but couldn't. 13 rows until the end of the 2nd row of pages. Say hello to TW's Celestial Dragon. Or rather at the moment a tiny hint of dragon and most of the upper left corner border. For only using 29 DMC colors only 8 of those are actually used as solid colors. Everything else is blends. Update on my dancing. Friday, as I may have mentioned was my first competition with my new partner. We placed 17/23 in silver latin. I thought we should've at least made it to the semi finals but we didn't. Back to the studio for practice. A bit of good news, my mom bought me a new dress for next time. Similar in style to the roses one I made but leopard and I didn't have to spend time making it. My mom took video and I will edit it soon.

I seem to be a bit all over the place this week. Let me walk you through it. Sunday, I have declared this day to be for 'insanity'. I shall try and keep this up. So Monday, I picked up a new cross-stitch, Mystical Wizard. More on that later but here are the colors. Wednesday, I decided to work on one of my sewing projects. A 17.5" stuffed Christmas tree. I was going to make the 12" one but I had enough fabric if I ignored the included cutting diagram and got away with 1/8" less. But come Thursday, I was tired of my cross stitch. There's only so much I could take of stitching blue on blue, and mainly two colors of blue. Of course the upper left is the least interesting part color-wise of this piece. So I switched to The Accolade. I'll include the last photo I took of it (with my old phone) because I didn't get that many rows finished. But not bad for only two days.   And as today is Sunday, I worked on Insanity again. And...

First milestone: I am almost halfway done with Put On Your Red Shoes. I'm still having to frog more than I would like, but I'm catching the mistakes fairly quick and correcting them before it affects something else. Second Milestone: I am done with my Masters. Today was the official end of the semester. Two of my three grades are posted, including the one I was iffy about. I know I didn't fail the course but the traffic getting down to my final was horrible and I didn't have time to look over my notes right before the test began. I thought I would've had to go to class to show my final for another course but he said just to email it to him. Therefore I was officially done Thursday afternoon as soon as I hit send. Next up: Finding a job and getting ready for a ballroom competition in January. I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I found an amateur partner. We've been practicing since September and will be competing in our first competition i...

First the good news. I danced in the (delayed) Fall Classic this weekend. I swept my smooth categories. Final medal count was 12 first in smooth single dances, first places in smooth scholarship and 3-dance, 13 firsts and 2 seconds in latin single dances, and third places in latin scholarship and 3-dance. I've linked my videos below. Smooth: Latin: I also got a picture with Tony and his mirrorball. Not the best picture of me, but oh well. I had been dancing for a while. My hair for latin. I think there were 30 bobby pins to hold it all in place. Now the bad news. I was let go from my job on Monday. I was planning on leaving there anyway but I had been hoping to do it on my own terms. So my dancing will be put on hold sooner than I had thought. This is an expensive hobby and with no income (my etsy shop hasn't really taken off yet) I can't pay for my private lessons. It also cuts down on adding to my stash on whims as I've taken to doing lately...

OK. So it's not the end of October until Wednesday, but it's close enough. Plus I have Hurricane Sandy approaching which could possibly mess up Halloween and other events. I got more done on In the Garden this week. I did most of my scarf making at work. Oops. I'm almost done with page 2. I have started stoning my rose dress, I have 3 of the roses 2/3 done. I'll have a picture next update. Just a few more days until the beginning of November which means NaNoWriMo starts. Yay! Or should it be Eek? As much as I have the beginning scenes and the general plot and arc, the middle/end is still really foggy in terms of action. I hope this won't hinder me too much. My main concern is Sunday. I have a competition that day which doesn't lend itself well to writing 1667 words. I'll try, but I'm most likely going to try and boost my word count on other days. I've also been mulling over giving the story I wrote my first year, Lost Princess, a good edit ...

I've made some more progress on In the Garden. I've completed one of the 'magic wisps' that are floating around. I also completed a few more scarves, including this one. It's really soft. I also have a fuzzy red one. Why do I come home to find my cat sleeping on my pillows? I'm jealous. Silly kitty. While fleshing out my story for NaNoWriMo, I've come across a problem. One of my characters, seems to be lacking a motive. He's seems to be a plot device despite the fact that I plan to write some scenes from his POV. I need to somehow figure out a sub plot and a motive of his. Protecting his sister is kind of weak. I have a little over a week to figure this out. In the meantime I have a competition on Nov. 4 to prepare for. My rhinestones for my rose dress came on Friday. I have 5 different colors in 3 different sizes. I'll work on it a little during the coming week.

My progress on In the Garden for the week. Not as much as I could have done but I did work on something else for a few days. Namely scarves. Aren't they pretty? I'm planning on selling them and a few other crocheted items. Currently building up some inventory although I will do custom orders if possible. I made a crochet spider for Halloween too. I ordered the rhinestones for my rose dress and will hopefully be able to stone some of the roses prior to the competition. Still need to make a new smooth dress, but still figuring some things out. I would love to use the purple velvet but I was having trouble finding a good color match for the skirt. I do still have the black charmeuse I can pair with various fabrics. Maybe these? I did pick plot 2 for NaNoWriMo. Plot 1 hinged a bit too much on what powers the Fae possessed and nothing was coming to me. Now I just need to try and finish my plot outline in the next two weeks.

I believe I did well at the competition on Sunday. I don't know if I'll see the score sheets, I think they may have mainly been to decide the placements for top studio. Of my 12 smooth dances, I danced 8 in a row at one point. I did the same thing with latin but I kept switching between two partners. I danced 40 dances in total. 3 each of waltz, foxtrot, tango, viennese waltz, and paso doble. 6 each of cha cha, rumba, and samba, 4 mambos and 7 jives. My feet were killing me shortly into the latin section. The longest break I had during the latin section was 10 dances, with the average being 3. Not much time to get off them but I managed. For those of you who follow Maks on twitter, you probably saw this picture (I nabbed it from his instagram account): That would be me in the foreground with the purple/white dress on. (You can view my blog for the making of this dress starting from here .) He had taken a picture (I think anyway) while he was standing slightly in front of ...