Monday Monday 2 Electric Boogaloo

Ch ch ch ch changes

Easily the most obvious change this week - the end of a nearly year long run of variations on silvery white undercuts. Blue is my go-to grow out colour but I've never done this silvery denim blue.

I started the silver process in April '15 (it took a few months to get to white - finally NAILED it in June) and this is easily the longest I've ever kept it up. The silver has been a lot of fun and I know I'm going to miss it, but it's expensive and hard to keep up. It may be time to change things up when you've started using Manic Panic as a Leave-In.

The undercuts, mohawks and between I've been wearing since the wedding have been a LOAD of fun but it's been a while since I did something softer and more feminine (that wasn't growing out length for my wedding hairdo) so once the lightened portions are cut out I think I'm going to go a bit longer, in front at least. I have a pretty tenacious crown swirl so I prefer to keep the back short.

Cut and color by Fran Nordstrom of Waves Salon in Sayville
(scroll down a bit and you might see a familiar face!)

I have a pretty big change in my current embroidery project as well.
I finished page two of Heaven and Earth Designs Portrait with a Spiderling and decided to change up projects so I started Mini Shades of Red in 2/1 on 22ct Navy blue fabric.

I'm about 600 stitches in as of bedtime last night and pricing out cones of DMC 310 as the ENTIRE background is solid black. The 22 count goes a lot faster so far than the 28 I'm working on Portrait but stitching 2/1 eats up thread and I find laying the stitches makes a big difference in stitch uniformity so I'm trying to consistently use a laying tool (some people like railroading but it doesnt seem to do much good on 22ct), which leads me to...

I really wish I was comfortable enough with this page to just order one The thing itself costs all of seven dollars but I cant even imagine how annoying the shipment would be.

I might actually make one of these when I get home today. There is a type of fingertip laying tool I never see on English language embroidery pages - only pages written in Cyrillic script (presumably Russian?) and I WANT ONE - that page has pics of a bunch of different home versions (and in many cases step by step pics). Here is another link of same.
I have a mass market one called a Trolley Needle but its WAY too clunky for my use.

Chopped my nails off (by necessity) and took of my nailpolish without refreshing it, so it's been interesting running around with bare nails for the first time in a few years.
My cuticles are A MESS so I may do some much needed hand care before my next polishing.

Monday Monday

In the interest of getting back in the swing of blogging I'm going to try a weekly wrap up thinger.

Spider cocoon by NataliaDrepina
Get it? Wrap up? Get it?

A lot of times I feel like the individual stuff I'm doing doesn't really rate a full blog post but it would probably still be nice to actually mention what the heck I'm doing lately.

So lets see...

I went to a Masquerade Ball on the 30th in Salem MA and apparently I still clean up pretty good.

Here's the full outfit with a necklace swap and also a husband (mine, in case you were wondering).
I owned the leather coat (I'll look up the brand when I get home), the mask and skirt came from Amazon, the boots are from Miz Mooz. The necklace above came from my mom's jewellery stash, the other necklace I have had as costume jewellery since I was a very small child.

The skirt has a big waist bow but it didn't work with this outfit so I left it untied. It was surprisingly nice for an Amazon cheepie skirt - to the extent that I'm seriously considering the black version of the same. I FINALLY broke out our garment steamer (wedding gift) and as a person who kind of hates ironing it was everything I ever dreamed it could be.

My HS bestie and all around amazing person Christa tipped me off to this event in the first place and if you poke around the event pics you'll see she cleans up pretty damn good too. It was a lot of fun and I am totally doing it again next year.

My main crafty project this week was to finish organizing my embroidery floss which is no small task when you do Heaven and Earth Designs cross stitching as they tend to have upward of 90 colours each. I started getting the fabric set up for my next big project and finally got back to stitching on Portrait With a Spiderling.

Oh, uh, I also got a tattoo.

More on that when it has more... on that.
It's at outline stage at the moment, which IS pretty cool, but a) its really hard to take pics of your own arm and b) I don't think pics would do the final design any justice. Also it's peely right now and that's never very pretty.

For now I will say that I am working with John Lally at Masquerade Tattoo in Ridge NY and it's FREAKING AWESOME (but currently very itchy).
John also does amazing fine art and if you poke around his website a bit you might find a familiar face.

What was sundered and undone shall be whole

...The two made one.

By which I mean I finally merged my two main blogs. This blog and my crafting blog will now live here as a broader lifestyle type dealy, hopefully in harmony.

The posts from the craft blog have been merged here (filterable via the Craft Posts Only link on the navigation bar above) and that blog will be going away in short order.

I'm also strongly considering merging my old craft livejournal into this blog as there's a LOT of good stuff in there, but those will be backdated archived posts and will likely be a long term project.