Making a List (of Sewing Needs) & Checking It Twice (at least)

Heh. I didn’t even realize until now that there was a common theme in my post titles for yesterday and today (or I should say a common “thread,” this blog being so much about sewing and all). “Christmas in July” and “Making a List…checking it twice…”

Except that for that part about me giving the gifts to myself. But then again, some of my favorite gifts are the ones from myself. I always seem to know just what I want.

Thanks! I shouldn’t have!
Source: http://blog.altec-inc.com/

Anyway… Have you ever had those times in life where you feel like you’re waiting and waiting and waiting and then…bam! Everything just seems to happen at once? I mean, not bad things, but several good things you were waiting for?

Yeah, I can’t think of any times like that either. But this week seems kind of close to that in terms of this whole sewing and costume-making adventure.

I thought I had the arrival of the various “components” of this Costume Quest plot spaced out pretty well over this week and the next. The new machine and some practice fabric would come in time for me to spend some time getting used to the new machine by working on the DIY costume (using proper basting techniques!) and installing invisible zippers in scrap costume components, and then next week the professionally printed fabric would arrive after I had time for careful practice and planning…

But now it’s looking like there’s a really good chance that everything will be here by Friday (if not Thursday) including the professionally printed costume fabric!!

That doesn’t change the plan, really. It just means I have to discipline myself not to cut into the pro printed stuff before I’m comfortable with the new machine and installing invisible zippers, and basting, etc. It’s like how a pilot has to put in so many hours on a simulator and flying with an instructor before going solo. (It’s exactly like that, I’m sure. Flying and sewing, just two sides of the same coin, really.)

But really, it’s awesome and exciting that everything is converging, surrounding me in a good way. It’ll be like swimming in money, except instead of money it’s sewing supplies and fabric. And, of course, it’s kind of the opposite of swimming in money in that the stuff I’m swimming in represents a loss of money rather than an accumulation of such… Wow. My analogy generator is even more off than usual today…

So, you said something about making a list…?

Yes, the list…Lists, actually. These are by no means exhaustive and certainly not in any particular order:

Stuff I have/stuff that’s on the way–

• Black and Red Fabric for practice costume (arriving today)
• Black and Red Thread for practice costume
• Fabric marking chalk for light and dark fabrics
• Extra pins (finally got some)
• Sundry sewing supplies that I’ve had all along (shears, cutting board, rotary cutter, pin cushion, etc.)
• Sewing machine (arriving tomorrow) — delivery includes: walking presser foot; invisible zipper foot
• Invisible zipper for practice
• Professionally printed fabric (arriving tomorrow or Friday)
• Styrofoam head model thingy (needs padding to add a couple of inches of circumference)
• Other stuff I can’t remember right now

Stuff I still need/should get–

•  More invisible zippers (for practice and for the final pro printed costume)
• More black, red, and possibly blue thread (once I examine the final color and placement of the seams for the pro-printed costume)
• Worbla and black paint (for eye frames on practice and pro masks)
• Mirrored material for lenses
• An extra/better pin cushion (I like the idea of this long pin cushion)
• Somethin’ somethin’ for making the soles of the boots for practice and pro costumes
• Final plan/materials for eventual improved sewing work surface (a la my “futon mounted work table” idea)
• Ideas/plans/purchases of a good webbing material for the practice costume.
• Other stuff I can’t remember right now

Obviously, I need to take a bit of an inventory of my more immediate needs, and of course several of these needs can be put off until after the foundational work of making the actual costumes. But yeah, things are really coming together, as I said.

The funny thing is that this is all coming to a head right as I will not have very much time to do anything with it. I have Friday off, but that’s because I work Saturday, and then there will be the Sunday/Monday out of town trip, week of work, a long weekend out of town again.

But that’s probably good, since I mentioned a need to not rush the work on the final pro printed costume. And of course it is also good for me to get away from my projects and enjoy time with my GF and my family, maybe even spending some time in the wild world out of doors!

Pictured: The Legendary Land of “Outdoors.” I’ve heard tales of this place, but I thought they were only legends…
Source: http://site.recy-cal.com

Wrapping up with some moments of Gratitude:

Because my momma raised me to say please and thank you, I want to take a moment to thank some fellow bloggers/sewing enthusiasts/costume making enthusiasts. Again, not an exhaustive list, but some stuff from recent memory (the only part of my memory that is even slightly reliable)…

MachineGunMama: ALWAYS so supportive and excited with me and for me, and willing to share ideas and thoughts and opinions. Thanks! (Yay walking presser feet! And I am going to give that hand basting thing a try!)

Miss Leslie the Good Witch: She recently helped validate an idea that I was a bit dubious about. Even if she is just enabling my delusions, I appreciate it. 🙂

SaiTurtlesNinjaNX: A recent “arrival” here who jumped right in with encouragement and advice that is very specific to my needs because he underwent such a similar quest, trodding the path ahead of me, thus allowing him to share great wisdom. (Thanks again for the video that is uncovering the mystery of sewing 90 degree corners!)

And Everyone who actually reads and/or follows my little Costume Quest. Thanks!

Up Next: Tweaks to the Practice Costume Patterns and Plan, and maybe some pics of New Stuff

Pre-Visualizing Upcoming Tasks (because I can’t afford to do them for real yet)

Trash Talking My Sewing Projects as Path to Success 

I have written before about my almost entirely stubbornness-based personality. I even tried to make the case that I can use my stubbornness in place of patience. I think this is true in a manner of speaking, but a more accurate way to put it might be that I use my stubbornness as persistence, which is a little different.

The reason I am splitting hairs here is that there is an aspect of patience that I definitely lack, and that I am always trying to get a hold on both in my work projects–which involve web design and web programming–and my home projects, which, of course, have involved a lot of sewing lately.

Persistence is important. I mean, persistence as in the “try, try again,” “get back up on that horse,” “practice makes perfect,”, etc. kind of thing. When you’re trying anything new or different, you won’t get very far if you give up at the first sign of difficulty, if you don’t do it perfectly right away.

That is where my stubbornness/persistence serves me well. I take it as a personal affront when I run into obstacles, when I can’t get something right. “Oh yeah, sewing project? That’s how it is, huh? I don’t think so. It’s on, baby.” (I don’t literally trash talk my sewing projects. Well…maybe a little bit. But it’s best that I restrict my trash talk to inanimate objects and concepts, since I am not very good at it.)

But  my stubbornness can also do me a disservice, can fail to substitute properly for patience.

There’s another kind of patience, perhaps a purer blend. I think it is aptly summed up in a phrase that feels tailor-made for sewing (See what I did there? Ha.): “Measure twice, cut once.”

The problem with my dogged persistence is that it is not easily balanced by patient preparation. I usually start out pretty eager and bold when it comes to starting something new, like sewing, and after what is clearly not enough preparation, I dive right in. I do spot research here and there, especially at the beginning, but as time goes by, and I run into trouble, I become more and more likely to take a “beat my head against the wall,” “do the same thing over and over again expecting different results” approach.

Source: http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-and-bang-your-head-against-the-wall.png

I can freely admit that this ill-advised manner of doing things is the dark side of stubbornness, an odd permutation of the stereotypical “man won’t stop and ask for directions” gene. (It is a stereotype, but it sums me up pretty well, and doesn’t go well with my horrible sense of direction. Thank goodness I have my GF around to enable me by always knowing which way to go, and my GPS when she’s not around.)

But the thing is, I can’t afford to take that approach with sewing for too long. And when I say that I “can’t afford it,” I mean that literally. Fabric and thread cost money! And Lycra Spandex is among the more expensive fabrics, in addition to being unique enough in nature that I can’t get the practice I need with stuff from the discount table. I can only afford so many “practice mistakes.”

Upping the Ante

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have begun the ordering process for the professionally screen printed costume fabric. By sometime around the end of the month, I will receive in the mail a 58″ X 85″ (ish) hunk o’ 4 way stretch Lycra Spandex with my Ditko Spidey costume design printed on it. Non-returnable even at that point, much less after I start cutting into it.

I will need to cut out the pieces–main body/front of mask, sides of neck/mask, arms, palms, thumbs–and sew it all together into a single bodysuit with invisible zippers on the back of the neck (for being able to pull the hood forward off my head) along the sides of the torso and the bottom of the back of the “belt.” And possibly invisible zippers on the undersides of the wrists as well, so I can free my hands when needed.

I cannot afford to make any mistakes (well, any that I can’t undo with a seam ripper).

Enforced Patience

When I bought my first car years ago, I had the most powerful tool in my pocket that I could have: a lack of funds. I was willing to walk away from the initial deals offered by the good cop/bad cop team of salesman and mysterious back office manager because I literally and truly could not afford more than a certain amount.

I am similarly being forced to be patient–to not dive in head-first–at this juncture in my Costume Quest. I can’t really even do hands-on practice a the moment. I will be returning my borrowed machine soon, and really need to do my practice on the new machine anyway, which my GF and I cannot afford to get until the second half of the month.

And, of course, the ordering and processing of the pro printed costume fabric is taking long enough that I will have to wait to jump into that for a week or two after getting the new machine.

This was supposed to be about a work payday, but then I saw this. Mmm. Payday. I used to love these…

So, what I’m saying is, thank goodness for enforced waiting, for time on my hands in which I am being forced to not only practice while I wait, but wait before I practice.

Why is that a good thing? Because this is forcing me to do the sort of preparation that I am horrible at unless forced. I need to research, to read about invisible zippers and watch videos of people doing them, view tutorials, figure out what the likely mistakes and missteps are so that I can avoid them. I need to get back to the basics of measuring and cutting and pinning and basting.

Those are the things I am horrible at doing while I am in the thick of a project. If I had everything on hand right now–suit fabric, new machine, invisible zippers, time (almost as rare a commodity as money sometimes!)–there’s a really good chance I would spend 5 or 10 minutes preparing before diving right in and regretting it within half an hour.

So, bring on the delays! They will do me a world of good!

The Practice of Waiting to Practice Begins

I have already reviewed a couple of tutorials on Invisible Zippers. They are by the same person/site, but one is a video and one is a picture/text tutorial, both by Coletterie. And I already understand way more than I did about invisible zippers! (A good sign. If you ever understand less about something after a tutorial, it probably wasn’t a good tutorial. )

In conclusion: I like to think that I am capable of being very patient when I have absolutely no other choice.

Next: You’ll have to be patient to find out (which is just me trying to cleverly (and thematically) cover up the fact that I don’t know what’s next).

 

Comic Heroes versus Real Life Heroes Part II: The Conclusion

Google’s Carboard + Smartphone =Virtual Reality. Source: http://thenextweb.com/

Virtual Reality is a big thing now. Again. Like many technologies, it comes and goes, and sometimes it’s just not ready, not good enough or useful enough for anyone to care (see Virtual Boy). Who can say whether it will catch on this time, whether in the form of Google’s DIY style project, or the more high end, Facebook-backed Oculus Rift.

But–if you will allow me to be a bit corny–we have had virtual reality almost since our ancestors had the ability to speak. Stories have been our built-in VR functionality since the beginning.

I’m not just talking about the concept of stories “transporting us to new worlds” and “other times and places” and so on. I’m talking about stories serving as sort of life simulators, laboratories, testing grounds. Stories are no substitute for actual life experiences, but they allow us to get a taste of aspects of the human experience that we have yet to experience for real, or that we just can’t or aren’t likely to experience due to locale, gender, sexual preference, mentality, beliefs, the nature of reality (stories can change that too), era, lack of radioactive spiders to give us the proportionate strength, speed, and agility of a spider…

Fictional  Hero Stories as Moral & Ethical Simulators

“Experience is the best teacher.” That’s a phrase that has been around for a long time, and I think most of us would generally agree with the spirit of it. But I think it’s important to think past its platitudinous nature, consider that there are certainly other ways to teach and be taught. You could even say that there are certain types of experiences that are “high risk” enough that learning from them might be the last thing you do.

“Oh crap. Parachute. I knew I forgot something. Oh well. Experience is the best teacher.” Source: http://www.skydive.tv/

For example, certainly nothing compares to the “experience” of a pitched wartime battle, but it is probably not the best place for a soldier to learn to fight. Falling alone into deep water will certainly inspire one like nothing else to try and learn to swim, but failure doesn’t exactly leave much chance for lesson number 2.

Luckily, there are ways to “experience” things before the actual experience of them, and stories are one way that people–especially children–can engage in certain aspects of life, mentally and emotionally sample those aspects ahead of the actual experience, or as a supplement to those actual experiences.

I wrote in my last post about all the years I spent as a kid with Peter Parker aka Spider-Man (among other characters in comics and books) as he went through his many struggles and trials and triumphs, faltering and sometimes failing, but always getting back up to keep on keeping on, having learned that any of us who has the power to do something, to help, has a responsibility to do so.

Source: http://www.chasingamazingblog.com

That kind of “virtual” experience through fiction is very powerful, and very valuable. For a child especially, it is a “safe place” to sample aspects of the human social, moral, and ethical experience. But beyond being “safe,” it is also a way to explore situations and scenarios that we might have yet to experience due to age or circumstance, or–as stated above–situations and scenarios that we can only experience via fiction because of who and where we are in the world, or the nature of the world itself.

So, to bring this back to the topic of Fictional Heroes… That “virtual reality” experience allows us to have Virtual Heroes. So, how do these VR Heroes compare to IRL (In Real Life) Heroes?

VR Heroes versus IRL Heroes

VR Heroes: Peering through the Window

First, here’s an interesting advantage of Fictional Heroes: With fictional heroes, comic heroes in particular, we are privy to their internal thoughts and feelings as well as their external words and actions.

Since I love analogies so much, let me try this one out. With IRL people, it can be like trying to learn math by seeing the problem and the solution, but not the method and steps for achieving that solution.

But our VR Heroes show their work, as it were. We get to see the stages they go through as they try to work out, their behind the scenes tirades and breakdowns, their internal monologues (Spider-Man in particular is great at internally monologuing). We see that, so often, the path from a moral, ethical, or personal conflict is not a straight line, but is rather a crooked path, a roller coaster. A well-written fictional hero does not always instantly decide what’s right and do it. He or she waffles and second guesses and missteps and makes mistakes and apologizes and tries again and often just gets it wrong in ways that can’t be undone.

Source: http://www.epic-randomness.com

Obviously, IRL Heroes do the same. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m just saying that we rarely see that side of our real life heroes.

So, is that good? Bad?

IRL Heroes: Intuiting and Thinking for Ourselves

The thing about having something laid out for you completely is that it doesn’t leave much room for you to learn to work things out for yourself.

A big part of life is making observations and intuiting, extrapolating, interpreting. A big part of understanding people–as individuals and in general–is making efforts at communicating, having to work at getting a look at that internal world, the behind the scenes stuff that is so nicely and conveniently laid out for us in comics and other fiction.In that struggle to communicate with others, we learn more than we could ever learn just be reading about relationships, where the communication is so often either extremely smooth or ludicrously hard. (How many times have you been reading a book or watching a movie and  thought to yourself “You know, a lot of this conflict could have been avoided by these people just freaking talking to each other”?)

Ultimately, while there is so much to learn from the IRL person’s experience, that experience is theirs, not ours. We need to draw our own conclusions, apply those lessons to our own experience. And sometimes, the lessons we learn from those external observations are superior to what we might learn from knowing the reality of that person’s internal world. Maybe Joe Hero chose to run into that burning building because he saw news cameras nearby and wanted notoriety, but I could be inspired to put others safety before my own because what I observed appeared to be an act of great selflessness.

Super Sponsorship: Booster Gold (he gets better) Source: http://tvmedia.ign.com

Splitting the Difference

I should hope it’s apparent by now that there is a lot to learn from either VR Heroes or IRL Heroes, and even more to learn from both.

Fictional heroes are a great way to simulate and try out aspects of the human experience, morality and ethics and heroism and pain and struggle and inspiration… But that alone is not a substitute for life, for relationships, for experience.

Heaven forbid any of us live our lives based solely on the lessons and representations and expectations inherent in fiction, in comics. We can see the follies of that approach in our reactions to media of all kinds: women and men alike expecting fairy tale love and marriage to just happen without effort, women and men trying to match some generic, outwardly decreed ideal of appearance, and on and on.

Real life heroes are inspiring and wonderful, but flawed, and apt to fail us. But that in itself is a lesson. We have to learn that people do fail us. People fall and get back up again, but people also fall and give up, don’t bother to get back up.

And we have to learn not to blame those people for our own actions. Just because our role models, our heroes, might end up ultimately being weak doesn’t mean we have to be. It doesn’t change the lessons we learned or the strength we gained from their examples in the first place unless we let it.

So, ultimately, yes, it is incredibly valuable to have “safe” ways to learn about life and living, virtual heroes that don’t fail us, or whose failure only matters very little. It is important that we learn to fight in some other way than being thrown into the thick of war.

But it is also important that we apply those experimental lessons, compare and extrapolate and ask and do and try and fail and learn in real life.

What it comes down to is this: have your In Real Life Heroes. Learn from them, be inspired by them. Just don’t confuse them with your Fictional Heroes who rarely fall. Because ultimately, they are as human as you are.

Next: Yes, I’m done being all preachy and pseudo-philosophical for a while and maybe I’ll actually talk about costume related stuff…

 

Super Hero Hipsters Unite–or whatever

I don’t know if I count as a super hero hipster or not. I just had a funny thought about those among us who “liked super heroes before they were cool.”

Certainly super heroes and comic characters in general have been in popular culture for many decades now, and it’s not like they have only just entered the mainstream media in recent years. As I referenced in my last post, there have been movies and TV shows–even popular, well-received ones like Christopher Reeves’ Superman–for quite a while. But the level of mainstream-ness seems to have increased exponentially in recent years, after what I see as some fits and starts in the late 80’s (Burton’s Batman) and 90’s (the Batman movies that we will not speak of, TMNT, Dick Tracy, etc.).

But it seems that Raimi’s Spider-Man, Singer’s X-Men, and Nolan’s Batman mark the points where super heroes really started getting some traction, leading to Iron Man, Captain America and the other facets of the soon-to-be Marvel MovieVerse, and ultimately to what I see as a crucial mainstream breakthrough with Whedon’s Avengers.

As great as Nolan’s gritty, realistic Batman movies were, Whedon’s Avengers was–to me–the first truly successful “pure” super hero movie. Nolan went almost too far in selling Batman as “realistic” (I know, I know, but it’s all relative, right?). But The Avengers made no apologies in presenting bigger-than-life, over-the-top SUPER heroes that managed to please honest-to-god comic fans and mainstream audiences alike.

But way before any of that, it wasn’t so “cool” to like super heroes. In fact, geekery in general has weaseled its way into the mainstream. It’s not entirely due to the success of movies and shows, I don’t think. I feel like the new generation is more accepting of others’ interests in general, as well, having moved beyond a lot of the old definitions of “cool.”

There was a sort of theme in the movie “21 Jumpstreet,” where the adult undercover cops are sent to pose as high schoolers to uncover a drug ring. One of the two characters was a dork in his actual high school years, and the other was a cool jock. But the jock is dismayed to discover that what was cool when he was a teenager has become uncool, and the dork is pleased to discover that he is now in a position to be one of the cool kids!

 

This is, of course, exaggerated for laughs, but there is a lot of truth to it. Muscle cars are not so cool now amid widespread climate change concerns, and making fun of others for their differences is becoming less acceptable. That includes the difference of geekery.

I’m not saying extreme cosplay and LARPing and D&D are all being practiced in harmony by jocks and dorks together in some kind of Geektopia, but I do see a huge difference from how things were when I was a kid.

Anyway…this was going to be about why I like comic super heroes… I don’t have time to elaborate on these points below in this post, but this is at least a rough outline that I will expand upon next time…

1) Real people heroes are fallible and–well, real

2) Moral Lessons–that are not as simple as one might presume

3) Ever-changing culture time capsule

Next: 50% More words; Same Low Price

The Weekend: Head Cold, Flat Tire, Dad’s Day, etc.

“How was your weekend?”

The usual Monday question. Politely answered with something like “Good. How was yours?” Or if it’s someone you think actually cares, you might give a more specific and honest answer. “Eh. I’ve had better,” or “It was so awesome I can’t remember!” (I sometimes forget what I did over the weekend, but because it was so forgettable.)

Anyway, as I was going to sleep last night, I thought, “how was this weekend?”

My first instinct was “It was bad.” I’ve had a stupid head cold since Thursday/Friday, it was hot and humid, I had to change a flat tire, we spent the first half of Sunday cleaning the apartment…

But then I realized that it didn’t feel like it was a bad weekend, in spite of that list of facts.

I was home with my daughter on Friday, and we saw a great movie, and swam (because I was still minimizing my sinus issues at the time) and had fun. We had an adventurous meal out that night, witnessing the drunken revelry of a neighboring table, which is pretty funny in retrospect.

Saturday–other than the “quick” trip for lunch and a necessary grocery trip that started off with the aforementioned flat tire–we hung around the house, did this and that.

I told my daughter I just didn’t feel well enough to go to the pool or do much else, and she said she was fine with hanging around the house. She might have meant it, or she might have just been telling me that to make me feel better. Either way, I was very grateful.

Sunday, I was feeling a bit better–which is good, since we really needed to clean the apartment. And as much as I didn’t really want to clean, it always feels good to get it done. My daughter even made good efforts at cleaning her room. It still needs work, but considering that asking her to clean usually results in her near-collapse with a sudden case of “I don’t feel good,” I was quite pleased with her efforts.

After cleaning and lunch, we went to the mall for coffee/snacks and wandering, then to the library for a book for her to read, and then to the art store for a larger screen printing frame and some fabric paint. Home for a bit, then out to eat so I could be treated to my dad’s day meal.

Then back home for K to paint an old shirt with her new fabric paint. While she did that, my GF read, and I worked on radically reorganizing my office closet to serve as a space for drying and storing my screen printing frames (no small task)….

Anyway, my point is… It was a good weekend. It would be easy to list those bad aspects of it and say it was bad. But the little, mundane, run-of-the-mill stuff that comprised it…it all just added up to something very unexpectedly pleasing.

So, how was my weekend? Good, thank you. How was yours?

 

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