On a monthly basis, I pay $50 more for tuition than I do for our fucking rent, and what’d we do today? We watched Osmosis Jones. That’s all we did. The first half of the day we finished homework, and those of us who had already finished it (most of us) surfed the net. My last 15 minutes of class were spent explaining to Crystal who Gerardo is/was and why she couldn’t find the lyrics to his songs by searching for a musician named Rico Suave.

Tonight we’re going food shopping to get some stuff to tide us over for the next week. I’m hoping to not blow a wad of cash while we’re there, since we need to put it aside for rent and shit which is due in a week or so. Last night’s pizza was horrible. We think that they’ve changed sauces because it’s literally like they replaced their regular sauce with salsa.

In crafty news, I spent last night working on the monkey, and all he’s needing right now is eyes. I’ve got a second one that needs to be stuffed and assembled this weekend, and I’ll probably enlist Eddie’s help with that because I honestly hate stuffing the fuckers. I’ve also got a pair of amigurumi kittens that need to be stuffed and assembled for Monday, providing that Mom doesn’t see them and steal them.

After a week or two of experimenting, I managed to get the geisha’s face to be whiter than it was. It’s not glaringly pale, since I don’t want to make the sock overly stiff, but it is paler than it had been. I don’t think it’s going to get any whiter, so I’m going to work on the lips and mouth tonight. Last week I bought some red embroidery floss for the geisha’s lips, and do you think I can find that shit today? No, of course not. I can’t find the extra black floss I bought either. I’m going to check my purse when I leave, and if I can’t find it I’ll pick up some more when I pick up Eddie. Then I can finish the geisha up tonight, and hopefully we’ll get some sunshine this weekend so I can take some pictures of her for the monkey photo album and ship her off.

My jaw is so much better today than it was earlier this week. I can talk and it doesn’t hurt.

I found out that next Friday is my final for the two classes I’m in right now, which conveniently is also the day that Eddie has off, so I get out early and come right home to be with him.

I really miss my funky haircolor. I don’t mind brown, but after about 10 years of dying it bright colors, you can see why brown just isn’t me anymore.

Tonight is Survivor night, followed up with CSI and ER. I’m not sure if we’re cooking or ordering food. I’m wicked sleepy, probably because of the benedry I took today to avoid sniffling like crazy at school.

I spent a lot of time working on the Geisha tonight. I trimmed the juban (the orange clothing you see under the blue kimono) by about 6″, since the kimono was shorter and the juban was hanging out a bit, and it just didn’t look proper. I’ve also put a couple of tiny hook and eye closures in it to keep it closed up.

I also sewed on the kimono’s sleeves, which wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be on the machine and required only a minimum of touch-up by hand. Thankfully, there was no need for me to break out the steak-knife seam ripper, since I made certain that the sleeves were pinned correctly. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you’ve sewn a sleeve on not only inside out, but facing into the inside of the item. There’s going to be at least one hook and eye in there to keep the upper part closed up properly, but hopefully the obi will keep things tidy. I’m debating about putting one a few inched below the obi so that I can keep the lower part of the kimono somewhat closed as well, but we’ll see; I don’t want to put too much strain on the fabric, and I sort of like the look of the juban showing through the slit a little. In the full body shot the kimono is more open than it should be because the fabric is very slippery and she was sliding down the pillow I posed her on.

The obi is made of two parts. The wider orange obi is made of the same orange fabric as the juban and has a very faint slightly zig-zagged stitched edge. It’s about 2′ long, and at this point isn’t tied all fancy-like because I’m just going to have to undo it to put the hook in the kimono, iron it, and to do the hair. The multi-colored woven obi was something that caught my eye this afternoon in the clearance bin in Walmart’s craft department, and matches the rest of the outfit perfectly. It ties it all together, as they’d say.

At this point, I haven’t done the face. I’m testing out some white fabric paint to see if I can get a good geigha-like makeup look to it without making it look horribly obvious that it’s paint; I want something “softer”. Unfortunately I can’t find my airbrush kit to do it, but i’ve got a couple of ideas that i’ll be testing out on some scrap this week. I did buy the buttons for her eyes and some red embroidery floss for her “lips”, but naturally can’t do those or the hair until I work out the makeup.

We don’t know what we’re doing today. Eddie’s still in bed, and Pickle has been out of her cage for an hour and a half now. She’s worn herself out and is sleeping in her favorite spot under my chair. I managed to sleep until about 9am.

The weather is fucking with my sinuses again. It sucks.

We don’t know what we’re doing today. I’d like to take Pickle out somewhere, but it’s a little chilly outside for that. We’ll probably hang out here, and I’ll work on the monkey and make Pickle some new hammocks and bedding while Eddie plays WoW. I was thinking about the kimono last night, and wondering about lining at least the bottom part of it, and remembered that I’ve got a yard or so of some light blue satin in the pile that I have no use for, but I don’t know if it’s the right color.

While we’re not sure what we’re doing today, tomorrow we’re going to Mom’s house for chicken wings, dinner, and football. To avoid football, I’m bringing my homework and doing it there. I’m also going to print out the kimono pattern on Nanny’s computer so I can get started on that, as the monkey only needs to have her ears and mouth put on right now and the really fun part of these sorts of projects is fast approaching.

I’m going to go fix myself some yogurt for breakfast, put Pickle back in her cage for a little while, and read my book.

Last night we went to Walmart for trim and assorted stuff. We headed out there in the middle of rush hour, just after 5pm, but amazingly didn’t hit any nasty pockets of traffic along the way. Eddie took off in the store to pick up some bug spray since we seem to have some crack in the house that’s allowing our nice clean house to be infested with flies, and I headed off to the fabric and craft area to find myself some trim. I picked up a spool of it, but couldn’t figure out if it was the same color as what I had already used. When I decided that it was the same as what I thought that I had, Eddie handed me another spool that had a color that I was even more certain was what I needed, but I still couldn’t figure out which I needed. So I ended up buying 2 yards of each, which were carefully measured out as though there is some satin cord shortage in the world and gods forbid that I get an extra inch of it.

I also picked up a few glass beads to trim the neckline of the gown, as I made a tiny bad cut that I’d like to cover up, and Eddie found me some sewing machine oil that I was desperately needed. What I should have picked up was a seam ripper, since I sewed a sleeve onto the bodice inside out and had to take it off with a steak knife, as I couldn’t find my x-acto knife and Eddie’s box cutter wasn’t pointy enough, and a smaller needle because my one needle is too big to sew the beads onto the gown.

However, on a positive note, the gown is finished, with the exception of the beading that will only take a couple of minutes. I decided against trimming the waistline of the bodice, as I felt it would ruin the flow of the dress. Her ears are on, her eyes are open, and I’ll do the mouth and veil at lunchtime. I’d love to be able to have it finished tonight, since Eddie can bring it to work tomorrow so that my mother can bring it down to show my grandmother before it gets handed over to its new owner. As Eddie told the woman who’s buying it, she’s getting a helluva deal for $25, and it makes the stepdancer look as though it was made by a retard.