A Very Long, Very Busy Week

Hello my equally-or-more busy friends,

There are weeks where I look up and realize it's Thursday and wonder where the entire past three days have gone. "What have I been doing with the past 72 hours", I ask myself. Usually the answer comes back, "nothing." This is not one of those weeks.

I'll start with the fact that I finished not one, but two bead dresses this week! It happened Sunday, shortly after I posted my last blog post. Since that blog post was after midnight you could argue it happened on Monday. Whatever works in your timeline better.

The coffee dress was worked on until I could go no further. The skirt consumed half a tube each of
size 11s and 15s in its dye-bleeding eagerness. By the time I had finished my fingertips were nearly black with dye and shiny with layers of it - the grip from my fingerprints was useless and the final rows were very difficult since I couldn't pick the tiny few millimeters the beads provide.

The skirt finished, I washed my hands thoroughly and added the little bow. The ribbon was fussy and frayed some on the end, so I worked it until the fray matched. Perfectionism at its greatest - matching errors to look intentional. The crystal is from an antique saloon chandelier my grandmother gave to me to take apart (which I happily did). Since it's not "sew-on" ready the thread loops around the spokes to stay on. I tightened them down once it was all done, giving the final product.

For the second dress I grabbed the green and gold beads I had mentioned a few blog posts ago. It's the first five-inch bead dress I've ever finished in one sitting, though I wouldn't recommend it in the end. I worked 11.5 hours straight to the finish line! So you could say I started it on Monday and finished it Tuesday. I might be adding sequins to the top like in the original mermaid bead dress.

When I picked out the beads I had no idea they would turn out so pretty! I found that green and noticed there were no size 15s to match it, so the gold was hunted down to make up for the loss. Now that she's finished though I find that she reminds me an awful lot of the Hyrule Historia. So, while unintentional, I may have found the perfect color combo for Zelda fandom dresses.

My gamer subconscious picking out beads?

And that's just the first two days of the week! Since you may have inferred that my sleep schedule does not exist, Wednesday night / Thursday morning is when I listed a bunch of mine and my brother's old video games on Amazon. I'd had the pile of games we no longer play sitting next to my bookshelf for some time so it was a nice feeling to finally get all of them online. I had offered the pile to my friends several times with only a handful selling and figured the same amount of influx would happen with these. Well, have I ever been more wrong? I've already shipped seventeen of them with two more going out the door Monday morning.

As an extra bonus I received an Etsy order for two of my faux stained glass pieces. Those were fun and interesting to package up with bubble wrap foam inserts and plenty of thank yous. 

I recruited my mom and my brother to help me package up all these games. There's no way I could've physically done it on my own as each box was going to a different person - no two games went in the same box! Let alone how I would carry all of those into the post office by myself, packaging them all and making sure everything went in the correct box was an all day effort by my family. I imagined what it would be like if I suddenly got seventeen Etsy dress orders and I knew I would just have to contact the customers and let them know there would be a slight backlog since I'm only one person! It was wonderful practice to say the least, but goodness what an effort.

This week I need to find the motivation to take all the final clean photos of the two dresses and the xstitch butterfly I finished. Photo days take me a whole day to do which is why I avoid them. I have to set up the shots, take them, make sure they're perfect (if not retake), color edit / correct, arrange everything, then write nice long descriptions for them on deviantART. An extra step if I list them on Etsy is writing a second customer-friendly description. It's just so much work, agh! It's my least favorite part of doing art, haha, the finalization.

Until next Sunday,

Pinky

Ashley Mae