Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

I have been DETERMINED to get going on adding to my wardrobe, because I have basically exactly enough clothes to get through the week (and I just keep getting fatter!) and finally this afternoon/evening I made patterns and cut out fabric.

Used pattern no. 46 in PoF2, an 1895 day dress and chopped it off at the knee. Had the usual troubles scaling it up to my size: comparing the one side of the skirt's measurement to my entire waist rather than doubling it, forgetting to take gathering into account, etc. But I think I have pieces that make sense. Plan to running stitch them together like a lazy bitch. It's a nice lightweight wool - I was worried about how tightly the skirt needs to be gathered in the back, but it shouldn't be a problem.

Will I ever make the buttonholes on my blouse??? We shall see. Maybe after the skirt seams. Although part of me is like, why not check with a local tailor and see if they have a machine that makes nice ones ...

I am still feeling all my PMS feels about Everyone Here Hates Me and It's Not Fair, You Can't Be A Curator Unless You Have A PhD No Matter How Much You Know And How Capable You Are, so I'm gritting my teeth and hanging onto sanity by my fingertips. Ugh ugh ugh.

Fun stuff! I just ordered a big lightbox today so that the photos I take for inventory can look not like shit, and so that if I can get permission to have objects other than the ~most specialest paintings in the world~ on our collections website we won't have to retake all of them. Thinking ahead. It will probably slow down the inventory but it will be more interesting. (Unfortunately, thinking about this reminds me of the way one of the Skinny Bitches immediately pooh-poohed it when I brought up having more objects online, onward, ONWARD.)

I made this pretty potholder and am excited to make a few more for gifts this winter. Close to being done with this - just doing the lace edging. It seems a little small, but maybe with the edging done it will look right.

I scaled up a very basic Edwardian walking skirt from The Voice of Fashion and have been putting it together bit by bit.

The original illustration and the pattern

Obviously you've got to piece that - the vertical seams ended up nearly at the center back, which is good visually I think. But it could be made a little wider, because the size I scaled it up to with the ruler based on my waist only gave me

Basically put together

The frontmost dart is being weird ... I'm hoping it's just a combo of the fabric being stiff and thin, and if I make this in wool (as intended) it will smooth out. Overall, pretty happy! This could be a basic workhorse skirt pattern for me. But maybe made a bit fuller? I feel like my body requires more fullness in a skirt for balance.

I just about ate this book up! Lovely m/m romance set in 1885 (with flashbacks).

David Forester is the proprietor of the Curious Fox, a molly house, where he tries to do the best that he can for the club's patrons. His friend, Noah Clarke, is a high-end tailor who often dresses in drag at the Fox. The two met at boarding school when David defended Noah from a bully, and the two explored their sexualities together in adolescence. Then Noah went to Italy in order to learn his trade, while David tried to manage his family's failing fortunes (shitty dad who pisses away the money syndrome); David's father burned down their hotel and died in the fire, causing a massive scandal that saw the family scattered to the winds and David left to fend for himself in London. For a while, he was the plaything of Lord Belleville, a wicked aristocrat who eventually let him take over the Fox once they were no longer having an affair.

When the book picks up, Belleville is making noises about closing the Fox, which would leave its queer clientele with much less secure places to hang out and have sex and would leave David with no employment. Eventually, he intimates that he might be able to change his mind if David comes to the country with him and brings a fake wife for respectability. Noah persuades David to take his (Noah's) sister, but turns up at the train station in drag himself, and David finally decides to leave Belleville for good and make a new life for himself - which is good timing, because it turns out that Belleville was under investigation by the police. Happily Ever After in which David and Noah get each other and the Fox, and Noah also starts his own, more interesting, tailoring practice catering to the lesbian crowd.

( ALL MY THOUGHTS )

Having one of those weird brain times where I can't get anything done, ie executive dysfunction. I did manage to write a couple of ficlets yesterday and I still don't know how. Just one left! (I took prompts for something to compile into my fiftieth OFMD fic, and then I regretted it because it meant I had to write them, and not only that, I had to finish them before I could post anything else. I create my own restrictions and then I get annoyed at them. But they are good and fun ficlets and I can't wait to post them.)

Trying to get back into sewing. It's damned hard. But so far this morning I have sewn a line of gathering stitches and pinned the gathers into place, which is more than I've done in months. At the rate I'm going, I think it would make the most sense to cut out the long sleeves for this blouse, since I'm unlikely to finish before the fall.

I had a VERY exciting Friday night. ( medical stuff - no surgery )

Twitter is absolutely shambolic! Apparently they're not paying their rent on certain services and are trying to shift off of them but since they laid off so many people it's going poorly, which is why everyone is rate limited ... and Elon decided to spin it as deliberate by saying blue checks get 6000 tweets/day to look at and everyone else 600, which is apparently about fifteen minutes of browsing. Really feeling more and more like the death of the site every day.

Posted my Reverse Bang fic yesterday, Momentum, and I'm very pleased with it. Felt SO anxious afterward, though, a combo of the usual "will people like it?" feeling with a second layer of "does the artist actually like it and think it's worthy of their work??" (Esp as the summary is frankly not very expressive - I found it a very hard fic to sum up.) The art is excellent.

Changed my regular Big Bang fic outline (the totally unhinged one) to a new non-reuniony one, then scrapped that because I built it mechanically and with no heart and I just didn't really want it, and came up with a new one that is unhinged in a different way. Already written about 8k words, so I know it was the right choice. Am desperate to see it illustrated.

I should really be studying woodworking tools ... We're cataloguing this carpenter's tool chest that we bought at auction ummm months ago (we were waiting on getting a) a laptop for collections use b) with access to the database c) and a way to plug it into the network), and I just do not have the words to explain different types of saws and planes and chisels!

I basically never get negative/shit-stirry comments on AO3 because ??? I'm an adult and I stay out of contentious topics, I guess. But today I did get one on my Stringer/Charlotte (Sanditon) fic, which is actually quite funny. Very few people must write the ship, unsurprisingly, because this fic regularly gets kudos ... okay, wow, only 37 fics on the whole of AO3.

Anyway, this person is a self-professed Charlotte/Sidney shipper and they chose to read a Charlotte/Stringer fic for some reason, and then they saw right in the top note that a) I made Sidney Charlotte's babydaddy to create the situation that b) was specifically prompted by the recip, Stringer and Charlotte getting married to protect her reputation. And then they read it anyway and commented to say that they didn't think it made sense because it's too mean to Sidney and wouldn't the Parkers realize what had happened? (Telepathically, I assume?) Girl, what are you thinking?

(In case it's not clear, I'm laughing - this makes me feel like I'm 15 again, only now I can respond reasonably and maturely rather than like a teenager.)

I'm finding Queen Charlotte surprisingly good ... I'm on ep 4 and the only real issues I've had are that for some reason Shonda Rhimes decided to have the princesses be unmarried by choice and to have Charlotte disparage them for it - it just strikes me as not quite fair given that IRL they were constrained by their parents and largely not allowed to get married despite wanting to - they even had affairs with equerries and such because they wanted love and connection! (And on that note, even in-universe Charlotte and the camera are such bitches to the grieving Prince Regent after Charlotte dies! wtf!)

There's historical accuracy stuff to discuss - yeah, that one bit about "the bones of whales," plus she says the whalebone in her stays is "delicate" and could break if she moves too much, very silly - but it's all more along the lines of "Hey, interested in the history behind Queen Charlotte? Blah blah blah." Like, when Augusta and George discuss his marriage he assumes she's offering him a bride from the English nobility, and then when she says she's found him a German princess, he says, "A German? How exotic" - a subject bride wasn't against the rules but it was seriously problematic (Augusta and Lord Bute persuaded the real George III against doing just that), and George himself was so freaking German: Augusta (his mother) was a German princess, his father had been born and raised in Germany, George I was indisputably German and George II was a German adult when his father inherited the crown. It's not bad-bad, I just would like to see an 18th or 19th century royal drama that really engages with how German the family was. IIRC, even Victoria grew up speaking German at home and did the same with her children? And there's also some of that "you MUST get an heir soon or our family's position is precarious" stuff that is in every royal drama but is pretty silly here when George had three younger brothers (but I think they don't exist in this universe).

Somewhere in the middle is the fact that IRL, George did not admire Charlotte for her brains and fierceness - he very much expected her to stay in her place, submissive and quiet. He was kind of a domestic tyrant. I can't reasonably object to this because, eh, well, see icon, but it's one of those things that people should probably be aware of re: that Julie Andrews disclaimer at the beginning of the show. (I will, however, bring it up whenever anyone criticizes OFMD for the same thing.)

However, I really like that George and Charlotte each have a gay butler and the first ep has a totally unnecessary but actually very well-done sexposition scene between them. Equal rights! I'm also loving that they didn't go the Marie Antoinette route of having Charlotte unready for queenship in order to make her more ~relatable~ - the day after her wedding, she's prepared to be dressed by other people and then have a social schedule. She's confident and clever. Even though it's a spinoff of Bridgerton, it doesn't feel like a show About Romance in the same way as that - it feels like a historical drama that centers on two people who are married and falling in love. They seem to be handling George's mental health issues well, too.