"If you can't be pretty, you might as well cause trouble" – Florence King
Dec 10th, 2011 by Meetzorp
(the bathroom is still a work in progress, so please don’t judge the crummy floor, the cheezy plastic tile on the wall, or my hair-and-makeup box on a cinder block)
I had no idea Jacuzzi was a brand. I thought it was like the technical term for a deep, fizzy bathtub. Apparently, they make everything you might install in a bathroom – including toilets.
Well, I guess you learn something every day.
Dec 8th, 2011 by Meetzorp
I was remembering earlier today, an incident, a sad, pitiful, seriously pathetic incident Joel and I witnessed a couple of months ago.
We were outside a convenience store drinking some Gatorade on a hot ride and taking a break in the shade. A young fellow drives up in the absolutely shittiest old (late 1980s) Camaro I have ever in my life seen. It was hit on every corner and side, and the whole thing seemed to be decomposing. It was BARELY limping along.
(like this, only 100x shittier)
A rod was knocking. Hell, probably all of them were. It would barely idle. The steering belt was squealing. This car was the rolling definition of fucked up.
So, this poor schmuck cruises his busted car up to the air compressor, drops in his quarters, and airs up the tires. Then he drives it over to the gas pumps, LEAVES IT RUNNING (!!!!!) and gasses it up.
THEN, he sees fit to rev it up a couple of times.
Two good snorts and a BAM. Shit goes flying all out from under the car. Fucker shot a rod and puked out a mess of oil and shattered car guts all over the parking lot.
Poor sap had just probably sunk a good $20-30 bucks in fuel and tire pressure in that old shitheap, and blew the old wreck to bits.
I felt kind of bad for the guy, because there had to be some reason he was actually fuelling up such a shitty wreck of a car, but on the other hand, I thought, “you are one dumbassed motherfucker. You KNEW that car was trashed, you had to hear that rod talkin’, and you saw fit to redline it? You are seriously deficient in the brainmeats.”
Dec 3rd, 2011 by Meetzorp
In Michelle-World, all smartphones are Blackberries.
For example, all of the Project Managers in my office carry iPhones. However, when people call in and ask for a manager who is out in the field, I invariably tell the caller that “So & So is out in the field today, but he does have his Blackberry, so you should be able to reach him by e-mail.” Even though absolutely nobody I work with has a Blackberry, not even for their personal phone.
D’oh!
My other one is that any movie that you bring home to play on the television is a “video,” even though I haven’t rented a videocasette in over 10 years. For some reason, it never occurs to me to say “DVD.”
I don’t, however, call the DVD player a “VCR.”
Dec 3rd, 2011 by Meetzorp
Never let it be said that I am a wasteful woman. From 1.5 yards of 60″ wide woolen jersey, I wrought:
1. 
One 3/4 sleeved pullover top.
2. 
One lace-trimmed tank-top/camisole.
3. 
A sports-bra.
Dec 1st, 2011 by Meetzorp
Yep, I pretty much bombed NaNoBloppo. After the big fancy post about sewing woolen knits, I pretty much hit the Writers Block Wall.
I had nothin’ I got nothin’.
I’ll maybe have something in a few days, but at the moment…
Yep. Not so much.
I’m also not done with the sports bra. I didn’t have enough elastic, so I have to acquire some. When I get that done, I will do the DIY Ibex follow-up post.
Nov 28th, 2011 by Meetzorp
Man, there are times that being a seamstress kicks ass. Not so much when you put a sleeve in a jacket upside down or get finagled into doing a shit-ton of alterations for no money, but when you get about $200 worth of performance gear for about $40, it fucking rules.
So, there’s this fancy-schmancy wool-based sports clothes company called Ibex. Their stuff is pretty sweet, I must say – I have two of their long sleeved base layer tops & two short-sleeved ones which form constituent parts of my traditional foul weather wooly carapace.
These Ibex shirts I bought just before Joel and I went on our coast-to-coast trip. Joel had a couple of Ibex tops sometime before that. But when we bought our Ibex garments, Joel was working at a large bike shop where he could get an employee purchase discount, which brought these high-end goods into our range.
Three years on, he has moved to a smaller shop closer to home, and while the job is great, the discounts are no longer a perquisite he can rely upon.
And three years on, our old Ibex gear is starting to get awfully tatty. I darn, and he darns and so our stuff is well mended, but tatty, none the less.
So, one day it struck my dim bulb that I sew, that I have no aversion to knits, and that I could probably replicate Ibex goods at home, using commercially available sewing patterns and fabrics. First, I tracked down wool jersey knits courtesy of Denver Fabrics. Then, on to patterns. For Joel, Simplicity 9499 provided the raglan-sleeved top. For myself, it was Vogue 8760. Denver Fabrics supplied the jersey-knit woolens in prices ranging from $7.50 to $10/yd. For a shirt for either of us, it required 1 yard for myself (
I would come to find out) and 1.5 for Mr. Long-Limbs. The patterns, after sale and coupons, came to just over $5/ea. Therefore, adding in notions, one could reasonably replicate an Ibex base-layer top for around $15-$17/ea.
I have my first top finished, and am working on his second, along with some bonus gear from scrap fabric. I found that I was able to eke an extra camisole and a sports bra out of 1.5 yds of this terracotta woolen jersey.
I shall post photos of the lot of it when I am done. The 3/4 sleeve raglan top, the camisole, and yes, the sports bra.
The camisole was cut from the tank-top pattern which came with my favored New Look 6564 jacket pattern. Both the jacket and the camisole have been home-run hits. I cut the camisole last week out of scrap from a dress which is another project soon to be in progress, just for fittings sake, and was 100% pleased with the fit and proportion.
The sports bra is Green Pepper 407, which is not in the least glammy, but it was at the $5 price point and seems like it would be a difficult thing to fuck up. We shall see how it goes.
Green Pepper patterns seem to be pretty good, at least judging from the results I had making Joel a pair of #524, the Sunset Bay Cargo zip-offs. They’re to replace an ancient pair of zip-offs he bought at MajrThrift a squillion years ago. While I don’t love the inner leg gusset of this pattern (it seems to be an unnecessary complication), the rest of it went together beautifully. This is literally the best fly-front I have ever put together.
Photos will follow, probably Wednesday, after I’ve washed laundry, and therefore re-claimed my top, and finished up the camisole and the bra.
Anyway, the tally of my theoretical savings is as follows:
