Category: Uncategorized

One of my clients bought a dress on clearance at H&M without trying it on, and when it didn’t fit her she gave it to me, thinking the cut would work as a maternity dress. It does, but I think she was blinded by the $5 pricetag because the original colour? It wass white people skin colour. Here, let me show you:

Since I’m not super keen on walking around looking nude and the dress is 95% cotton, I figure I could fix this with some dye I had left over from my purple jorts.

First, I washed the dress so it’d take the dye properly, and plopped the still-wet dress straight into a bath of Petal Pink Rit dye to completely eliminate the original colour (you could skip this step if your dress is already a non-disgusting colour). I let it simmer on the stove for a while (like an hour) before rinsing.

Next came the dip-dye portion of the process: I mixed up some Fuchsia dye and instead of submerging the whole dress, I hung it over the bath with just the bottom half of the skirt in the dye and let that simmer for another hour, occasionally raising & lowering it to try and prevent a really harsh line between the shades of pink (I wasn’t entire successful at this).

Through the dipping and the power of osmosis the dye spread up the skirt, creating a light-to-dark pink gradient. How lovely!

l-r: original colour; after first dye & rinse; after dip-dye & rinse; washed & dried

supplies:
• a cheap cotton dress in a light colour
• one or more colours of fabric dye

tips:
• as always, if you’ve never dyed clothing before, FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS ON THE PACKAGE OF WHATEVER DYE YOU PURCHASE
• be aware that the base colour is going to show through the dye, so use common sense when choosing colours: don’t put blue over yellow and expect to get blue, you know? Because it’s gonna come out green.

hahahah idek what is going on here

After the last couple weeks of crabby, terrible pictures I figured it was about time I made more of an effort. I coloured my hair & dyed this dress (I’ll be posting my half-assed diy tomorrow, so exciting!) this week and I actually put on all my makeup today*, so I guess I look pretty okay? I feel terrible though so this is kind of a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation, except it’s not helping much and I’m still feeling angry and sad and frustrated and annoyed and OH YEAH in pain. It isn’t being pregnant that’s bothering me, it’s mostly this whole ultrasound situation, like my doctor STILL doesn’t have the results and it’s been over a week so what the hell. That’s kind of why I didn’t do another post today, everything I tried to write about my pregnancy just sounded like whining so after saving like, fifty different drafts I ended up trashing them all instead (you can thank me whenever).

The “in pain” part isn’t related to that (well, the EMOTIONAL pain is), but is due to my own stupidity. Last night I dragged Taylor to the store to buy stuff to make brownie sundaes. I was wearing flip-flops and because I’m apparently the clumsiest person who ever lived I somehow managed to bash my messed up pinky toe (the one I break all the time) against a man’s shoe???? I DON’T EVEN KNOW. Anyway it totally killed and I was blinking back tears and limping around the grocery store and it kind of ruined my brownie sundae experience. Today it is all swollen and painful so maybe I broke it again? WHO KNOWS, it barely even counts as a toe anymore and it breaks if I even look at it funny. Maybe I should just get it removed.

Anyway here’s some sweet photobooth pics I took since the poor image quality hides all my flaws. For this week’s makeup experiment I put the Candy Apple Lip Butter over this screwy MAGENTA lipliner I have for some inexplicable reason.

Taylor was going through the pics of me he just took

until I pestered him into turning around

my belly for good measure 😀

*actually I put it on and then cried it all off and put it on again this afternoon, which is why this post is so late, so I hope you all appreciate my efforts

I stepped outside after lunch to throw something away and look what was waiting on my doormat:

A package from my girl Sara! In case you don’t know she’s the artist who drew my portrait over at the top of my left-hand sidebar (you may have also seen her portraits of other bloggers on their sidebars but I INVENTED THE PRACTICE).

Inside was one of her limited edition “Sea Weed” prints (get your own here) and a cute little note on the back of one of her cards. It’s taken FOREVER for this to get here (USPS is slow as hale apparently) and I’m so excited to have it!

I’ve been buying prints like crazy (like, SIX IN AS MANY YEARS!) and once I take down the wall of kid art in the dining room and paint, that’s where they’re all going to go, I can’t wait! Right now it’s a strictly daycare area (tiny table & chairs) but I’m looking forward to having a real dining room for people over the age of five.

Last night after work I had the brilliant idea to take Georgie and Kichou to DOG BEACH, this crummy little beach crammed between a bridge and a boat dock that somehow manages to be the BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD. Unfortunately I stupidly forgot my camera but please enjoy these cellphone pics.

Also yesterday I finally got around to recolouring my hair, the blue ends as well as the roots and OH MY GOD WHY DID I PUT THIS OFF SO LONG????

My poor ends were so dried and fried that when I went to rinse the blue dye NOTHING CAME OUT. The water just ran clear right away, my hair must have sucked up every last molecule of dye and now it’s so soft and shiny. I guess I have to stop being so lazy about keeping it up.

I want to start getting back into the habit of posting more about what I do with my life, especially on the weekends, especially since soon I’ll have four day weekends and then SEVEN DAY WEEKENDS 😀 I even took my camera with my everywhere but OF COURSE I hardly took any pictures. Quelle surprise, amirite?

Anyway, I mostly spent my weekend wandering around the city getting sunburnt. On Saturday Taylor and I walked all three dogs down to Second Beach and back. I wore my skimpiest tank top and ended up with crispy shoulders, which still persist in feeling tender even though the burn has mostly faded to a sweet tan.

The tide was out so there was lots of charming slimy seaweed everywhere. Dogs aren’t allowed on most of the beaches and we saw a lot of people getting lectured by lifeguards and ticketed by park rangers so we stayed up on the Seawall and spied on people at the pool.

On Sunday I dragged Taylor all over the city looking for that most elusive of prey: DECENT MATERNITY SHORTS LIKE OMG IT IS SUMMER IT IS HOT I NEED SOME SHORTS. I tried H&M, even though their maternity section is a single rack of horrible garbage, and then made the trek out the West 4th to visit some actual maternity stores. Before we went I actually checked the website for one of them and the “shorts” page had 6 pairs of bermuda-length jorts and 10 pairs of hideous capris so I wasn’t very optimistic. As expected it was a total bust, so I consoled myself with a few cute baby things from the rich jerk baby stores and a giant body pillow, aka my new bff. After I got home I found a pair of tiny American Apparel shorts at the bottom of my pajama drawer that still fit alright, and it turns out they’re on sale for EIGHT DOLLARS so I just ordered a couple pairs in a larger size. Problem solved!

There aren’t many places in my basement apartment that get good sunbeams and WATCH OUT SMALL DOGS & CAT because if Dougal wants it, he gets it.

Merida Popsicles

Last night Taylor and I took Sym to see Brave (and cried under my 3D glasses, both because of the movie AND the fact that for 3 tickets/popcorn/sodas it cost EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS omg) and in honour of the red-headed protagonist I made these delicious orange-ginger popsicles. They were really easy to make and easily my best effort since the lime mint ones.

four simple ingredients:

•sugar
•water
•fresh ginger
•oranges

The first step is making ginger syrup: just throw the sugar, water and ginger into a saucepan, simmer & stir until all the sugar is dissolved, let cool and strain the ginger out. I used a quarter cup of sugar, a quarter cup of water and about 15 or so thin slices of fresh ginger root. Depending on how much syrup you want/how gingery you want it to be you can easily adjust these amounts.

Next comes the orange part. I would have liked to use blood oranges to get a redder colour but none of the stores by my house had any so I just used these organic valencia oranges I had sitting around. I always GROSSLY overestimate how much liquid my popsicle mold holds so I squeezed all nine oranges, resulting in 2 1/2 cups of juice, which was WAY too much (I really only needed about 1 to 1 1/2 cups to make seven popsicles). You could also just use store-bought orange juice if you don’t want to squeeze it yourself. Really! I won’t judge you.

Finally, mix your cooled ginger syrup with your orange juice, pour into the mold, freeze and enjoy! These popsicles are great, sweet and citrusy with a spicy kick at the end.

As I mentioned yesterday, Taylor wanted to go out again to take pics during the magic photography hour. I agreed but tbh I wasn’t really feeling it- my belly was feeling all stretched out and sore and my face is a sick mess this week. On Tuesday afternoon it suddenly got REALLY itchy and that evening my cheeks and chin turned bright red and when I washed my face it felt like it was on fire. Now the whole thing is covered in rough scaly patches that are flaking off and all the dead skin is clogging my pores into a million blackheads and BASICALLY I HATE IT. This excessive amounts of dead skin cells on my face is a pregnancy problem I’ve been dealing with for months now, and I thought I finally had it in check with an exfoliating scrub, but now my skin is apparently too sensitive to even use my regular cleanser, let alone something with microbeads. WEAK. Anyway. You can see all the pics here (plus a bunch from the dog park, YAY!) but I think this one expresses my feelings about my appearance yesterday pretty well.

1. the Dr Pepper Disaster popsicles 2, 4 & 5. some of Sym’s fine art 3. Sym herself (+ Georgie) 6. Symmie after dentist (she has a weird baby tooth that needed to get pulled) 7. Sym’s oldest stuffy, her dad bought it at the hospital gift shop!