Category: Life

Kiss Me Deadly – Paradise Girdle


Photo © Kiss Me Deadly

A few weeks ago, one of these turned up in the post. No, not a lovely blonde lady with a pointy dagger, but a Kiss Me Deadly Paradise Longline Girdle.

Given that during my recent wardrobe purge I threw out every single piece of uncomfortable lingerie I owned (which to Paul’s dismay was nearly all of it), this might seem like a bit of a bonkers purchase. And it is, a little bit. But in its favour, it’s stretchy, it doesn’t dig in anywhere, and best of all – you can colour it in.


Photo © Kiss Me Deadly

Yes, you read that correctly. The design itself is black and white, but every Paradise girdle is supplied with a set of paints and a brush, so you can paint your own. I chose the pearlescent paints, because I like the subtle effect in this picture, but you can also choose from sparkly, glittery, or glow in the dark! Kiss Me Deadly are awarding prizes for pictures of the finished result, so I’d probably better get a move on and colour mine in!

I do need to make a small alteration to mine first though. Despite the advice on the KMD website to order this particular garment by your waist size rather than your hip measurement, I went the other way. This means it’s a little bit too big for me at the top, but I’m glad I went for the larger size otherwise I think it would have been too constricting for me at the bottom. Please note – my body is a very odd shape, thanks to 20 years of IBS and three lots of abdominal surgery, so if you’re buying one of these I would still recommend following the fitting advice on the website! However, I have the technology to take in the side seams at the waist without disrupting the technical construction of the girdle, so I’m going to do that before I get the paints out.


Photo © Marks and Spencer

Recently, Catherine wrote an article for The Lingerie Addict about What It’s Like to be a Woman with a Disability in the Lingerie Industry. This was particularly well timed for me to read, having just thrown out all my bras and replaced them with distinctly un-glamorous (but tolerably comfortable) brightly-coloured cotton crop tops from M&S. (Yes, they’re for children. Yes, that makes me feel weird.) Some of my health issues are different from Catherine’s, some of them are similar. And let’s just say that the multiple mirrors in a Marks & Spencer changing room do very little for the self-esteem of a woman who’s almost forty, overweight, in constant pain, and trying on children’s underwear as something of a last resort. That was not the most enjoyable morning I’ve ever had.

But, I did realise that if these crop tops are comfortable enough, then I could probably get away with one of Kiss Me Deadly’s more unstructured bras, like the Van Doren. (I love the style of the Fifi, but just looking at that narrow band makes my ribs hurt!) If this is a picture of the back of the Van Doren bralet (which I think it is), that nice deep strap and wide elastic combination looks very promising indeed.

First things first though – time to make that alteration to the waist of the Paradise girdle, and then get the paints out! Honestly, clothes you can colour in? Best. Idea. EVER.

Pinterest-ready?

Apparently this is what my kitchen looks like now.

Moving house is a funny business. Paul and I (well, okay, mostly Paul) have spent the past two weeks scrubbing our house and tidying it to within an inch of our lives, as well as redistributing a good chunk of our belongings amongst kind people’s spare bedrooms and garages across the county.

This is the dining end of our kitchen. Doesn’t it look lovely? Apart from the grainy photo, it’s almost Pinterest-ready, I’d say! Sadly, when I look at this, after “ooh, those flowers smell lovely”, all I can think is “where am I supposed to dry the laundry now?”. Usually this area is full of clothes airers, and the chairs normally live in different rooms. The cushions were pinched from the sofa, when I suddenly realised that the red-and-gold upholstered chairs matched the kitchen before Paul decorated it. And please note the beautiful pale duck-egg blue on the wall… that we nearly didn’t have, because Paul thought it might be “too bright”. Suffice it to say that we do not have the same taste in colours, not even slightly!

The tablecloth (twice the size of this table) has been carefully ironed and folded to hide the old red wine stain that won’t wash out. Those are Emma Bridgewater egg cups, but they’ve never been used because I don’t much like boiled eggs, and I’m not very good at cooking them anyway. The lovely blue glass jug was my Mum’s – a wedding gift that now neither of us have ever used!

Even the artwork isn’t ours. Paul bought the frames at some point around Christmas, but we couldn’t be bothered to move the laundry out of the way to put them on the wall. They even came with these prints included – sufficiently abstract that it doesn’t even matter which way up you hang them. We’ll probably replace them with our own photographs at some point… but we’ve got so many to choose from that it could take us years to decide which ones!

The house will go on the market early next week, so hopefully all this cleaning and clearing and staging will make itself worthwhile. I’m just not certain how we’re supposed to live in such a tidy house until we move out! I’m such an untidy person that all these empty rooms are making me very uncomfortable indeed. Thankfully the Shed is still a complete mess… I suppose I’d better tackle that next!

Psychedelic Dress

Psychedelic Dress

This is a test-run of Kwik Sew 3472, a simple jersey dress. It also has options for a knee-length version, a scoop neck and short sleeves. The fabric, I promise you, isn’t anywhere near as loud as it looks in this photo! In real life the colours are much more muted and dusky. I figured that any mistakes I made on this first try wouldn’t show up too badly against this very swirly pattern, but thankfully it seems to have come out pretty well! I think the only change I might make is to shorten it a bit, but I’ll wear it first and see how it goes.

I have nine metres of organic cotton jersey on order, ready to make three more of these – two black, and one purple. That should give me a basic work wardrobe that goes with most of my existing shoes and accessories. My fibromyalgia’s playing me up quite badly at the moment, which is seriously limiting what I can comfortably wear. Separates give me stomach ache. Anything that isn’t soft enough makes me itch. And frankly I need every scrap of my brain power to be working for me through the tiredness, not fighting against my uncomfortable clothes.

I realise this all sounds very dramatic, but unfortunately it just seems to be a fact of life for me now. Wearing uncomfortable clothes causes pain, which causes fatigue, and life’s too short to be exhausted because my stupid jeans gave me a blister. I’m sad and angry about it, because it seems as though I’m going to have to get rid of about 80% of my current wardrobe, including a lot of things that I’ve made for myself over the years. The thought of sending it all off to the charity shop makes me utterly furious that my body has decided to do this to me.

But hey, let’s look on the bright side. I get to make a whole new wardrobe of the softest organic cotton dresses.

Also, I have one really nice picture that Paul took of me at the Frome Steampunk Extravaganza. I’ll show you that one soon.

Harris Garden

Hellebore
Hellebore

Last weekend we went to an open day at the Harris Garden, part of the University of Reading.

Magnolia
Magnolia

For some reason I’d completely forgotten how to make my camera behave, so I managed to come home with a grand total of three in-focus photos.

Seed pods
Seed pods

Here they are!

Candles & hand cream

Hand cream

Today has been mostly filled with making twenty-one candles in glass jars, and sixteen and a half tealights. Once that was done, I kept the bain-marie warm so that I could make some hand cream. I hadn’t done this for years, and I’d forgotten how easy it is.

Now that it’s just about cooled down I’ve tried it out, and I think it’s going to be a tiny bit too oily for my liking. It reminds me more of Neal’s Yard’s Wild Rose Beauty Balm than the kind of hand cream I’m used to. This might be because the soya wax is softer than the beeswax recommended in the recipe, so the cream doesn’t set quite as hard. Having said that, it sinks in really quickly, and the geranium essential oil (my favourite) makes it smell divine.

It took less than 10 minutes to make, with all natural ingredients, and was just enough to fill a little aluminium Lush tin. I’ll see how I feel about the recipe, and once I’ve perfected it I’ll share it with you! Now I’m looking on Ebay for either a pink frosted glass jar (that matches my dressing table set) or a white ceramic jar (that matches my bathroom), with a lid, that I can use for future creams and lotions.

Also, have I mentioned how lovely my husband is? This morning I grumbled that the most time-consuming part of making the candles was cleaning the kitchen before I could start. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, just after he’d left for work, I discovered that the previously messy kitchen was now absolutely spotless. Thank you, Paul!

Snowed under at work…

MERL Garden

Not literally, thank goodness, although this is a picture of the garden at work when it was very frosty just before Christmas! But there have been a lot of changes going on, which has meant a lot of meetings, which has meant going into work on my days off, which has added up to nothing getting done! And this week’s half term, so I’m working extra days for that, so nothing’s going to get done until next week now.

Shortly after that I start a new shift pattern, which doubles the hours of one of my roles, and means working half days and different days each week. All very confusing at the moment, but all we can do is see how it all settles down in time. The best part about this change is that I no longer have to work every weekend, just one in four! So I’ll be able to spend some time with my husband again, and we can hopefully start taking our cameras out and about.

All this is a very long-winded way of saying that I have no idea when I’ll next be able to sit down at the computer and write something, but I hope it won’t be too long!

2012 round-up

I’ve been thinking about this post for a week, and I kept putting it off because I felt as though it wasn’t really worth making. Each year I like to look back at everything that I’ve made, but this last year I don’t seem to have made anything very much!

Of course there were the theatre costumes for Neverwhere, which I still haven’t shown in their entirety. They took up most of January. May was dominated by several Steampunk outfits, including a ball gown. From August to December I was working five days a week instead of three, and from October onwards I was also volunteering, so I suppose I didn’t really have as much time as usual to make things. I also haven’t been trying to run a business this year, so I’ve been doing more things just for the sake of trying them out, which means I’ve got a lot of unfinished bits and pieces lying around that didn’t really fit into this collage.

I just can’t help looking at this picture and feeling a bit miserable, as though I’ve done nothing with the past twelve months. I love to make things, and it does make me sad when I don’t have time to do it. I think this year, I need to find a better balance.

Resolutions for 2013…

13/05/2012

No more alcohol
This one will be easy at least until March, as I can’t drink while I’m taking the Amitriptyline anyway. That should be long enough to get me out of the habit of drinking a bottle of Crabbies on a Sunday night and then feeling like a zombie all of Monday from one drink. Not worth it. I don’t go out terribly often (I stopped going to the pub after choir because I was so tired!) so not buying drinks in pubs is easy enough. Although if I do find myself in one, choosing a non-alcoholic drink that isn’t packed full of sugar and caffeine is a bit more tricky. Mind you, most civilised pubs seem to sell tea these days.

Tea

No more coffee
I really like coffee, but it doesn’t like me. I stopped buying takeaway/cafe coffee ages ago, as that amount of milk really disagrees with me (and they cost a fortune!), but I do occasionally succumb to coffee at work. Which is awful, because it’s cheap nasty granules, and the decaf’s even worse. In fact, switching to decaf doesn’t help because it still upsets my stomach and gives me headaches. I already have a box of peppermint and a box of chai teabags on my desk, so I really have no excuse for ever drinking coffee at work. At home, the jar of instant that we buy whenever my parents come over really needs throwing out anyway. I might replace it with a small pack of fairtrade filter coffee (and buy a couple of in-cup filters or a cafetiere) so that guests can have nice coffee that I won’t be bothered to make for myself. (And when it inevitably goes off, undrunk, in the back of the fridge, I can use it to dye fabric with!) And it’s not as though I have a shortage of other things to drink…

Tea dyed fabrics

Never waste a tea bag!
I started saving my herbal tea bags and freezing them, so that I could dye fabric with them when I had enough. Except that at some point I forgot about that, and we’ve just been chucking them out. I need to make up a bunch of freezer bags, each labelled with a particular kind of tea, so that it’s really easy to take the bag out of the mug and chuck it in the freezer. I’ve also just had a slightly mad idea about carrying around little organic cotton squares with me, so that if I have a cup of tea when I’m out and about, I can pop the teabag onto the fabric when I take it out of my tea, and at the end of the tea-drinking I can ditch the teabag but keep the little square of partially dyed fabric. (Which will be damp. In my handbag. Lovely.) I have an idea about making a “my year in tea” quilt with the pieces, but I’m absolutely certain that will never ever happen!

Walk in the woods

Walk home
At least to begin with, I’m not going to be well enough to walk to work, do the work, then walk home again. But I can probably catch the bus, do the work, and then walk home. This gives me time outside, boosts the vitamin D (weather permitting!), and helps me to get fit again. From town it’s about an hour and a quarter, from work about an hour, and from campus about 45 minutes. (All uphill.) And if I forget my waterproofs and get soaked, then at least I’ll be at home and can get changed, instead of dripping my way through work all day. The most difficult thing with this one will be motivation, especially while it’s still so dark and wet. Much easier to get the bus. But Dr Chan recommended gentle exercise, such as normal walking. And if I can’t do every day to begin with, that’s fine. I’ll do what I can.

TM Lewin Shirts

Don’t Buy Stuff
If it’s not handmade, organic, ethically produced or second-hand, don’t buy it. If I don’t look in high street shops, and don’t look on TM Lewin’s website, I won’t know what’s out there, so I can’t waste time coveting it. I can set up searches on Ebay for things I really want (like the gorgeous Monsoon jumper with a tree on it that my sister was wearing over Christmas and is sold out in every size and colour), and make the majority of things for myself.
Note to self: this includes fabric and dress patterns. Knitting yarn is negotiable, as I can’t afford a jumper’s worth of handmade!

Lush Henna...

Walk the talk
Stop just collecting ancient almost-empty deodorant tubes and fossilised bits of soap, and actually get around to recycling them. Make tutorials, blog about it, show how easy it can be. When the current pots of Lush hand cream and moisturiser run out, make some. Share recipes. Also, throw out any old half-used tubes of stuff that are probably full of bacteria and yuck by now. (Save any useful jars though!) Go through the ever-increasing collection of aromatherapy, natural remedy and herbalism books, and actually read them! Or give them back to Oxfam. There probably isn’t a prize for owning the most copies of Culpeper. (Especially when they’re all cheap editions from the 1980s.)

Recap from 2012…
I think the only resolution I’ve actually managed to keep from last year has been stop messing with my hair. Well, for a certain value of “messing with”, anyway. I have cut in a fringe and shaved an undercut… but I haven’t bleached it or dyed it a funny colour, and I’ve let the top layer grow. My intention is to continue not messing with it, except for henna if I can be bothered, and one decent haircut to get rid of the last remaining inch of bleach damage.

Most of these resolutions are things I’ve been thinking about, or doing a bit half-heartedly, for ages anyway. Hopefully the beginning of a New Year will encourage me to actually make the effort!

Fibromyalgia and Vitamin D

Vitamin D

This photo looks how I feel: rubbish, and a bit fuzzy.

I don’t want to get into a habit of posting about being ill (I do enough whingeing about that at the best of times), but the last time I did mention it a few of you were kind enough to get in touch, so I thought it would be nice to let you know what’s been going on.

I’ve had a bunch of tests – I scored 18/18 for fibromyalgia tender points – top marks for me! This basically means that I went OUCH every time the doctor prodded me in the 18 test places. Including under my shoulderblades, which is a place I don’t tend to get touched, so that one was a bit of a surprise! I also had lots of blood tests done. So many that I felt a bit like Tony Hancock. (“A pint? That’s very nearly an armful!”)

The results came back today – mostly clear, which was nice. No inflammation markers, no signs of connective tissue disease. Phew. One more test to go (an ultrasound on my worst wrist), but rheumatoid arthritis and lupus are pretty much ruled out. Excellent.

The one that did come back a bit surprising was the test for vitamin D. The usual levels are between 50 and 200 (50 and 200 what, I don’t know), but mine were, rather startlingly, 11. Eleven. Which is not enough, by quite a long way! It’s common for people in the UK to have low levels of vitamin D because the weather’s not exactly sunny (especially this year), but even “low” usually means around 40. Not eleven.

Symptoms of vitamin D deficiency can include things like joint, bone and muscle pains, chronic fatigue, and confusion. Which explains a lot. Thankfully it’s extremely easy to sort out! I’m now taking vitamin D tablets for 500% of the RDA, which I’ll do for the next six months. After that I should be a) feeling much better (fingers crossed!) and b) able to go down to a more sensible maintenance dose.

As for the fibromyalgia, the hope is that once the pain from the lack of vitamin D is under control, it’ll be a lot easier to manage. In the meantime I have three months’ worth of a very low dose of amitriptyline (10mg) which will hopefully help to break the pain cycle that’s going on between my body and brain.

I also have advice about diet and exercise and acupuncture and generally looking after myself, which should hopefully all help too.

So, I can expect to continue feeling a bit rubbish for a while, but once the vitamins start to kick in, hopefully all will be well. Hooray!

Amber necklace

Mum's amber pendant

This is a little amber pendant, made for my Mum.

It replaces one that I made for her several years ago, although I think this one’s a little bit smaller. The pendant settings and stone all came from Kernowcraft.

I don’t quite know what to say about this one.

I made it because my parents’ new house was broken into, and almost every single piece of my Mum’s jewellery was stolen. She still has the matching earrings to this pendant only because she happened to be wearing them. Unfortunately the rest of her jewellery can’t be so easily replaced, but at least for now she’ll have one matching set to wear.