Coast walk, sculptures.

Lots of walking this weekend. Walked to Coogee, met my walking friends, we walked to Bondi. Here are some photos because sculptures by the sea was on.

Ate our lunches along the way, and the 4 who made it to the end got ice creams. We caught the 362 bus back to Coogee. It's a weekend only bus from Bondi to Coogee, very handy. Then I walked home. Did some stretching. So much walking. I wore my hat, it was good.

More walking on Sunday, for the maroubra fun run. Watched The Fellowship of the Ring in the afternoon so that I could watch people walking across Middle Earth. Surprising how many lines I still know off by heart. "Eight there are here yet nine there were set out from Rivendell. Tell me where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him." I also ate many lollies I bought at the fun run. And defrosted the freezer. Then church. 

Today I am tired. Must have walked 12km or so over the weekend.

Photo wall.

I redid my collage doors last week. I threw out some tatty posters and put up a lot of photos instead, in a nice grid, with holiday postcards and some drawings and other little posters as well.

Step 1.
Collected the best photos from the last few years together and printed them at a shop on matte paper, MOST IMPORTANTLY paying extra for a white border. The white border frames each photos and makes the display of photos more uniform and designy.

Step 2.
Buy Scotch sticky squares. They are on the officeworks website but not instore. They are better than blu-tak cos they don't stain or damage surfaces. I found I could cut each square in half to stick a photo to my glass door surface. They stick better on smooth surfaces, I found they didn't always stick on my concrete walls cos they are a bit rough.

Step 3.
Stick photos up in a grid pattern. I organised them in columns.

Now I just hope the photos don't curl.

Dress alteration: secret waistband.

I have a dress made of stretch fabric and it's got lots of layers so it's heavy, stretching down from the shoulders under its own weight, so I feel like I have to keep hitching it up. That kind of annoyance hinders my cost per wear. I think it was $70 and I've had it almost a year and only worn it half a dozen times.

BUT I found a solution on the internet, I think it was called "hidden stays" or something, but I can't find it now. Basically, a secret waistband inside a dress to pull the weight up around your waist instead of all off the shoulders/bodice. The one I found had a ribbon you tie around your waist on the inside of the dress. Since my dress has layers, I could easily sew things to the inside layer without it showing.

I got a piece of elastic, safety-pinned it snugly around my waist. Waistband.

Then I put the dress on over the top, and pinned it to the elastic around the waist. Then took it all off in one go, fixed the pins a bit straighter. So the waistband is pinned to the inside of the dress.

And sewed the elastic to the inside of the dress, to the inside layer only. I tried hand-sewing, but elastic is really hard to get a needle through so I ended up getting out the machine and doing a zig zag stitch.

Now it doesn't all hang off the shoulders, it hangs off my waist! Also the elastic kind of holds my tummy in a bit. Not in a corsetty way but when you wear a dress with no waist your tummy feels no resistance so it takes advantage of the freedom and lets itself go, but with a waistband it knows there is a limit. Like the difference of putting on jeans after you've worn track pants. I maybe should have wrapped the elastic in something soft so that it isn't so scratchy, I'll have to see how I go when I wear it for a day.

So I'm proud of that, I've made a dress less annoying and more wearable with a clever hidden elastic trick. I'm not proud that I watched Big Brother at the same time.

HAT!!!!! My beloved hat.

I collected my custom made and fitted hat on Saturday! I also gave the maker my details in case she runs a hat-making class. She's a really nice lady. We bonded over neither of us liking fascinators very much. Both times I went in, once to measure and choose and once to collect, she said "do I know you?" and turns out I look like a friend of hers called Boadicea. She also likes my eyebrows. But importantly, she listened really well to what I wanted. So she said that a high crown and short brim would look best, but I wanted a wide brim for sun protection (rather than fashion), so then she helped me with that.

We narrowed it down to either a grey straw hat or a brown panama hat. Straw hats are a braid of straw that is sewn in a spiral. Panama hats are woven from some kind of flaxy fiber. Panama felt smoother and softer, but the grey straw had more height and the colour looked better on me. Could choose the ribbon and the shape of the crown and the width of the brim, and she fixed it up during the week.

It fits firmly but well. Although by the end of the day, the firmness felt annoying, just too much pressure on the head for too long. Like when your hair done professionally and all the bobby pins start to ache. But that was a lot of wearing and I suppose it will stretch a little over time. It really just felt comfortable yet secure in the wind for most of the day.

Hat: Grey straw, square crown, 13cm brim, narrow grey ribbon and band.
Cost: $155. So I have entered it in my closet app to track CPW. Aim is $4 per wear by the end of summer.
Maker: Rosie Boylan, in Newtown.

Sore.

I've gone from one sort of sore to another since the long weekend. I don't know if resting/inactivity or movement/stretching would be the best thing but whatever I do seems to be wrong. One thing leads to another, so my hands and wrists and various things are super sore today, possibly from the yoga I was doing for my hips which were pinched on Friday. GRRAAAH.

I went to a hat shop on Saturday and got a hat to fit my head, the hat is being adjusted this week. My head is 60cm. That's above average enough to make it hard to get a hat to fit. It was expensive, as in, more than I would spend on a pair of shoes. But I think it might be a hat for the rest of my life. Unless I become a milliner, which is rather tempting. If I didn't have to earn a living, the world would be a better place.

Write it down.

After my holiday I had some really nice ideas in my head. But I was afraid I wouldn't do them once I got back into normal life, so I wrote a "todo list", even though they were fun things not jobs. J saw me and said "well done! writing something down makes you 70% more likely to do it, whether it's a fun thing or a boring thing!" (I forget the percentage but it was a lot.) This is extremely useful to know. I wonder why writing things down is so powerful? It vents emotion, calms stress AND helps you achieve your dreams. What magic is this?

Whether it's because I wrote it down or not, I have actually accomplished one of the fun things!

I bought some herb babies! Peppermint and lemongrass. $5.50 each from Heritage Gardens in Maitland. I will try and use them to make my own fresh tea.

I've previously tried to grow herbs from seed in my kitchen, and they sprouted but never grew properly and the soil in the pots went all manky so I had to give up. I don't believe that lame cliche "I'm so hopeless every plant I get dies lol lol!", it's just that I have very difficult circumstances to grow plantlife: most herbs need a lot of sun, and my apartment gets only occasional morning sun. Maybe I'll have to be very dedicated and carry them out of the house regularly to give them enough sun. Which is a pain but I guess it's still less work than a pet. Mint is very tough so it might survive. My aim is to get at least one cup of tea from each one before they die. If they survive the summer and actually grow bigger, this will be a roaring success beyond my wildest dreams.

Maitland blanket shawl.

We did a Jelssievision on Saturday morning and then I went to Maitland on the train. Maitland was relaxing and productive. I shall list below.

• Spotlight with mum to buy new curtains, and I bought some fleece for a wearable blanket for my fridged office.
• Tax with Dad.
• Mum cut my hair.
• Brother came out for lunch at Billabongs.
• Church.
• Cut out my wearable blanket using mums as a pattern.
• Read.
• Went to garden nursery with mum and bought plants (I got lemongrass and mint), did gardening.
• No snacking.
• Caught train home, the 4.15 from Morisset on Monday. It took 2 hours to get to Central, which would have been well quicker than the F3 because we actually hit that traffic at the Morisset exit. A 17km traffic jam apparently.
• Did some grocery shopping for the week ahead, and broke my no takeaway rule. You gotta know when to break a rule.
• Sewed my blanket shawl!

Only complaint is my body got all weird and achy on the train ride up on Saturday so that was super uncomfortable, and it hung around on and off, I think I'm still achy today actually but I've also got some sore Jillian muscles so I cant tell where one ends and the other starts. But it's like how your body feels when you have the flu, but only from the waist down. Achy back and legs.

I saw my cross stitch framed! It looks very amazing. I couldn't bring it home on the train. But I took a photo on my ipad.

How to make a blanket shawl.

Buy some fleece. It is usually about 150cm wide, so buy 1.5m of it so that you have a square. Buy 1.5m of 2 colours that go together nicely. Or 3 metres of one colour. Or if you want the cheaters version, just 1.5 of one colour. I went with dark navy and a medium brown. I spent $22.

I used my mums shawl as a pattern to cut around because she'd done all the hard work, but the idea is, cut the fleece (both pieces) into a square. Then cut about a 90cm square out of one corner of the square so you have an L shape (layer the two pieces on top of each other to make sure they are the same). HINT: round the corner so it sits comfortably around your neck. Use a dinner plate to draw the round corner.

If you're doing the cheat version, once you have one L shape you are finished. You have a blanket shawl to wear. But the reason not to do the cheat version is, fleece will curl around the edges. So keep going.

Put your two fleece Ls together with the fluffy sides facing. Pin them. Sew around the edges but leave about a 20cm gap somewhere. Then turn your L inside out through that gap, and now you have an L which is fluffy on both sides. Handsew the gap closed. 

The last step is just to finish it a bit nicely, top-stitch all the way around the edge to keep the edges flat. That means, sew all the way around the edge about 1cm from the edge.

Tada! It's also reversible.