Wedding bits!

Before I get to the wedding stuff,

I'M DONE MY THESIS!!!!!!!

This is also the reason why I didn't post last week, too busy celebrating!I'll post a link to the library listing when it goes up. Kinda excited about that.

On to the wedding bits.

My best friend is getting married next month! I'm super excited and happy for him! It also means I'm really an adult now, my friends are getting married. Weird.

Gift buying time! I got something small off their registry that I could add some more personal gifts too. I'm also sure that neither of them read this blog, let along know it exists, so I can put pictures up with no concern for spoiling the surprise! I lucked out with the tea pot on the registry, totally appropriate for me to give them, and it was on sale when I bought it. It's a really lovely cherry red, which seems to be their accent colour for a black and chrome kitchen. I decided to add a more personalized gift to the tea pot by adding these beautiful antique, French tea towels.

These lovely things from GoshnPoche on etsy are linen in a creamy colour with beautiful stripes on them. They may not make it the wedding. Just sayin'.

Now, for the more important aspect of the day, my outfit (ha)! I have a dress I want to wear, but doesn't quite fit. I bought a beautiful black and blue vintage dress from the Clothing show years ago, and it fit back then no problem. Sadly, my master's degree happened, as well as about 20 lbs of weight gain. I've lost some of it... enough that the dress almost fits again. If I can drop an inch or so off my chest (ha) by the first week of October, I'm good. I've been trying to exercise more and eat better anyway to counteract the master's degree. Fingers crossed.

Should that not work, I did just buy this!

Eshatki is a website I've been looking at for a while, but have been a little apprehensive about buying anything from. Lovely stuff, but a bit expensive for my unemployed self. However, many of the bloggers I follow have made purchases from eshatki, and can't stop raving about the products and customer service. When I was perusing them this past week and found this dress on clearance sale and still in my size, I figured this was a good time to try them out. Now, I just have to wait for it to arrive. The accessories and shoes I've picked for my other dress choice should still work with this one no problem. Should I lose the weight for the that dress, I will wear this for my convocation, which is two days before the wedding.

The only issue I now have, is which petticoat do I want to get to go with it! I know, I'm weirdly, really into fashion and vintage fashion right now. Too many vintage fashion blogs. I'm torn between two colours in the Domino Dollhouse range.

Black, more versatile but now sold out in my size...

or Peacock blue, really fun, fairly versatile with my current wardrobe, goes beautifully with the black dress and available in my size.

The pros are stacking up for Peacock. I met a girl at a bar recently who was wearing a Domino Dollhouse dress, and was able to stalk her and ask about their fit. She raved about them and confirmed that their measurements are true to size, unlike my Torrid problem from last year.

Decisions!!

Yes, it's been awhile.

So. Yeah.

Predominantly sheer laziness, a bit of post first draft hand-in celebrations and a hint of severely fucked up sleep schedule have been what's going on that's caused the lack of blog posts. I handed in the thesis on the 1rst of June, and I'm waiting on the comments from my reader. She's taking her time, which worries me a little since I have to hand in a second draft at the end of the month. I know she's busy, but I may send her an email on Sunday to quietly remind her that she'll probably want me to change some things. We'll see.

The initial, immediate celebration of the thesis hand in started with having to mop up a swimming pool that had appeared in my living room. I live in a highrise. On the 14th floor. Yep.

Please ignore that hideous, pink rodent cage that's the size of a bookshelf. My roommate is planning on moving her girls into bigger digs, and paint that monstrosity soon.

See those slightly blacker parkay tiles? Not really attached the floor in this picture.

We had all our living and dining room furniture pushed up towards the front door to allow the contractor to come in and fix the floor that bubbled and popped as a result of the water. They've also been on the outside of the building, hopefully fixing the actual problem, whatever it is. There's a couple of theories about why this has happened, and none of them have to with me leaving a window open during a rain storm. We have a nice, shiny chunk of floor now from the varnish though, so you win some things.

I pulled an all nighter on the night before the first draft due date to try and edit the thesis a few more times, and my sleep schedule has been out of whack ever since. The bright side to that is that I've been super cleaning the room and going through some stuff to try and purge things. I've also been working through some craft projects at three in the morning, as a result of finding some supplies in my closet. One of them is a tutorial for a Moroccan styled tea light lantern that I saw ages ago on Matsutake. So far the glass paint is producing interesting results. I have a lot of really amazing patterns on real Moroccan lanterns online, so I may try something a little more intricate than the original tutorial.

Crafting with wine!

I have actually been doing some cooking, especially since I purged a bunch of my old or not ever used cookbooks (Blasphemy!). I'm trying to really try some more recipes from the books that I have, especially my Nova Scotia Cooking and my Easy Indian Cooking cookbooks. I've neglected to take pictures of most of them, so there are hints of them in the iphoto library.

 Honey Grilled Scallops from Nova Scotia Cooking.

Coorg-style Pork Curry from Easy Indian Cooking.

That's my update for now, but as a final thing, I just found an amazing steampunk photo shoot by Pixie Vision Productions for Clockwork Couture with Grant Imahara. Yes. Please.

 The eye patch... the leather... the manliner. What I'd do to be that sword. That sounded creepy.

 Cutest, thing, ever. Melt, etc.

Dear god this is hot in so many ways! The whole shoot is on the Pixie Vision Productions facebook page.

Thesis induced insomnia...

I cannot wait for this thesis to be over with.  Ugh.
I'm pretty much done the draft of the chunk I need to hand in to my reader tomorrow... I need to pack for something far more important now.

The Christie Antique Show!!!
This is one of the biggest outdoor antique and flea market shows in Ontario, held twice a year and I have never been able to make it for the past several years. I've been either out of the city/country or been working and not been able to get out of it. I'm so excited to finally go. I'm heading out to the parentals house tonight so we can drive in in the morning from there.

Pictures all lovingly stolen from an Apartment Therapy post about Christie, which can be found here.

I'll try to actually take pictures of my own for once at these types of things...

Re-writing my thesis proposal. Again. Lovely.

Grilled Cheese? Yes, please.

It's not a new recipe, but it's still a good one. It's also the first recipe I ever posted on here. How things circle around again.

Even has a salad to go with it! It's covered in some amazing dressing, but it's still a salad!

And, more writing. And looking forward to James May's Birthday on Monday.

Halloween and an archive update!

Yeah, it's a been a while since I have posted on here. So a bullet point update is in order.


-The PhotoHistory XV symposium was last weekend in Rochester, New York, and a bunch of us did some planning and managed to get down for it. We had a great time and caught some very interesting lectures. One of my favorites was about the cameras that were on the top of Mount Everest in 1954 when the summit was first, fully climbed. It was great to see Team Rochester as well, and a good, drunken time was had by all. 

-I've been working at the Archives of Ontario for a few weeks now as part of my Master's program, and I'm having a fabulous time. I've ding so much stuff and generally making some of my fellow students a bit jealous about it. Most importantly, I think I've sussed out my plan for my thesis, which had been a niggley thing for the past few weeks. Once I've got a solid body of work decided upon, I will further post my idea here!

-Halloween. This year was a D.I.Y.O.D.S. (Do it your own damn self) and thrift store special. My classmates hosted a party and my roommate and I went along for some house party and Wreckroom action. My roommate spent almost a year pulling together pieces from Craigslist and Value Village to create her own Shera costume. The best part was a hideous gold dress she butchered for parts to create the headdress, insignia, belt and armbands. I was inspired by one of Meg Allan Coles's old Decor it Yourself videos for Threadbanger, I had decided to go as Melanie Daniels from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and had managed to find a skirt and retro-ish jacket in tweed, in my size (that's the miracle part of this) from Value Village. I picked up some fake birds from Micheal's and Dollarama, and attached them to the jacket, skirt and my hair. I added a bandage to my head to show the last scene in the movie when she's been attacked and is being taken to the hospital. I also managed to put some peck and scratch marks on my legs, chest and face to complete the look. I only had one casualty over the course of the evening, about an hour into our time at Wreckroom I found a trampled foam bird on the ground. Other than that, I was really proud of the costume.

Back to work, back to school and hopefully some food along the way.