The Ariel Costume

So, last Tuesday, Josh came over to finish up some stuff on his Once Upon A Time-Hook costume that ended up looking like this:

We added the red satin panels, trim, and buttons to an old vest and gave the jacket some cuffs, buttons, and collar patches.

Since we were doing this for his & Andrew's Halloween party taking place that Saturday, Josh asked me if I knew what I'd be dressing up as.  I gave him a hesitant but thoughtful sigh and said, "No clue."

Matthew and I had kicked around a handful of ideas, but a decision hadn't been made.

Since he was out of town and had everything he needed for his costume options, I quickly made a decision a little later that night after remembering this awesome mermaid scale fabric I'd seen at Joann the other day.  I did up a quick sketch and got my measurements and ordered the corset & gloves from Amazon.  The corset looked like this before:

Which was too goth for Ariel...so when it came in on Thursday, I took all the black lace off and covered the remaining black trim with this rad silver trim and relaced the back with a metallic silver ribbon.

The tail skirt was an interesting experiment.  I wasn't working off a pattern or anything and the scale fabric was stretchy and my first attempt at a hem turned out awful because I'd used the wrong stitch setting on the machine.  My side seams are where I figured shit out and it was smoother sailing.

Tulle is a bitch.  I say that lovingly because it made excellent fins and my "make-it-up-as-you-go-along" way of getting things done was totally on track, but it's not my favorite fabric to work with.  I did a loose hand-stitch along the top to gather and then bunched that shit up before I ran it through the sewing machine.

Also, it was glittery and the entire house still looks like a unicorn farted up a storm.  The girl at Joann gave me the awesome advice of spraying it down with hairspray. That helped some but my vacuum cleaner has an interesting layer of mermaid fin glitter mixed with cat litter.

To hide the stitching where the fin meets the tail, I trimmed it with a glittery green ribbon.

Can I just tell you how much I love Liquid Stitch?  That stuff is amazing.*

Ariel needed accessories so I dug around the house and found a dinglehopper (plastic fork painted with silver glitter) for my hair, a thingamabob pendant (old corkscrew painted up and on plastic pearl beads), and a snarfblatt (belt buckle pipe I wore on an arm strap).

When I finished it on Friday, everything looked like this:

When I wore it on Saturday, I looked like this:

And for the majority of the night, ran around yelling "I'M A MERMAID!!"

______________________________

* Josh, can I get an Amen?

A First Friday

As mentioned in yesterday's ramblings, I'm unemployed....was RIF'd back in July.
Here's a cute little throw back in case we wanna reminisce.

There's a funny thing about being in sales.
It's called a 'sales cycle'.
Everything is measured on a quarterly basis and due to this, for some odd reason (*cough* quotas) everyone decides to wait until the last month of every quarter (or every third month, for you yearly calendar folks) to push mega hard, and give discounts, and draw-up endless revisions of contracts & spreadsheets, and have war room concalls, and wait around for signatures in the lobbies of corporate offices, and do everything they frantically can to pull in at the very last minute whatever big elephant deal they might be working on....

And usually all of this is going on within the last 2-3 weeks of that magical beast of a third month.
As if that magical beast of a third month were somehow unexpectedly sneaking up on everyone.

And all the field reps you support are doing all the same cram-it-in things all at the same time.
And your regular 40-50hr work week turns into an 80hr work week for at least 2 weeks in a row.
Every. Third. Month.

And on the last Friday of each quarter....
It's like Christmas with none of the fun stuff.
Because we'd all be staying up late, glued to our laptops til 2 or 3 or 4a.m. babysitting those big elephant deals because they'd just come in that afternoon and they're complex in backend paperwork and everything has to match up just so for processing....
And there'd be emergency fire drill concalls with teams of management at 1a.m. and additional confirmations needed via email or someone forgot to click a checkbox in some system and everyone that's ever been associated with the big elephant deal is asking you if it's booked yet....
"Is there an SO#?"
"Is there an SO#?"
"Is there an SO#?"
"Is there an SO#?"

And in the past 10yrs, this is the first Friday at the End of The Quarter that I don't have to do ANY of that.

Tonight, I'm pouring one out for my corporate homies that kick so much ass.

______________________

PS. If you're reading this and you know who I'm talking about when I say "Sales Associate", hug them, send them flowers, liquor, beer, strippers, buy them a car. They take really good care of you and do their best for you and, at times, get little in return.