Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The Work Song-based on a true story!

OK, it took a few hours, a paring knife, 2 needles, and quite a few pokes in the thumb, but we now have two (hopefully) awesome running tanks with Minnie Mouse sleeves!!!

As the mice would say...




She goes around in circles Till she's very, very dizzy

Still they holler Keep a-busy Cinderelly!

We can do it, we can do it

We can help our Cinderelly

We can make her dress so pretty

There's nothing to it, really


[Gus:]

I'll cut with these scissors!



[Jack:]

And I can do the sewing!



[Girl Mouse:]

Leave the sewing to the women

You go get some trimmin'

And we'll make a lovely dress for

Cinderelly!


(Thanks for not suing Disney!)

Now we just have to wait for the skirts to be ready and we're off to the races!



Sunday, August 21, 2011

How to break a seamstress's brain

We have two weeks to go from today!  So yesterday was our last run...we ran around the reservoir to get our 16K in. Gotta say, it sure felt a lot easier than the last time we did it! Not only did we chirp along letting our mouths run the whole time, but when we were done we felt great instead of like curling up in a ball and dying like in January. True, it was 25C warmer and no snow to navigate over, but I think the "less is more" approach we tried this time around actually worked! (that's right, it wasn't laziness, it was a technique!) Plus, when we got to the hill at the very end and were about to give up on our chugging up the hill, a group of strangers we passed starting cheering for us..."eyes on the horizon, head up, chest out ladies, keep that form up, YOU CAN DO IT!!!!!" Sure enough, we could! Plus at the end, we thought another 5k would be no problem.

We headed to Christi's for quick showers, then over to the alterationist who would turn our child's size 6 dresses into Awesome Minnie Running Outfits. We thought it would be simple enough...chop the skirt off to make a tutu, and remove the puffy sleeves to make new ruffled sleeves on our black running tanks, an effect that would keep us cool, look awesome and not be too pricey.

As it turns out, we know nothing about sewing. Our Lady fretted and clucked as she stretched what she had to work with and measured our adult Canadian bodies. She was worried the dress would be too short and the top would be too tight, and we were having trouble conveying what we wanted done. At one point, she was going to build us elastic blouses to wear over our tanks, and we started getting nervous about how much this was going to cost. We kept insisting we just wanted to basically baste the sleeves onto our tanks for a one-time wear in a warmer climate and she kept insisting it wouldn't work.

She kept getting more and more agitating as we kept trying to explain they just needed to be worn for 3 hours as we sweated all over them, saying it wasn't going to look good. Now, she knows her stuff and we trust her implicitly, but I think she was trying to make us sturdy lifetime garments instead of cobbling a dress into an adult skirt and sleeves like we wanted. Eventually, after 45 minutes in the shop, we ended up taking the sleeves ourselves and leaving her with just the skirts to make. This afternoon, I'm going to take the sleeves and hand stitch them to the tanks and see if it works like I hope it does...like I said, it doesn't have to be fancy or permanent, just hold up for 3-4 hours around Anaheim!