A long and winding road

To recap: I started out with a pair of men's Lacoste faded denim jeans, which the boy had thrown out because the knees were ripped.

I had a grand vision of turning it into a shell top, sorta like the kinda you might to work under a jacket, but denim. A bogan corporate look, if you will.

Unfortunately, it looked very very bad on me.

And here is what has happened to it since:

I found two pairs of old jeans of my own, and decided to add them to the top and make a dress. The jeans were both different types of denim and different shades of blue.

I couldn't decided whether to go deconstructed and obviously made from 3 pairs of non-matching jeans, or to aim for a more sophisticated look. In the end, I put the whole thing through a navy blue fabric dye to even up the colours.

What I didn't forsee was that the white thread I'd used on all the seams and topstitching would not dye. Also, it was supposed to have an empire waist, but something happened there...
So now I have a very Seventies-look denim dress, perhaps a bit home-made looking but I guess that was part of the Seventies thing too, no?


Here it is anyway. I'm gonna wear it for a while before deciding for sure, but I'm thinking of adding either a minimal ruffle down the centre front, or else a row of small white buttons (blue would have been better but I got 3 kinds a blue goin' on here).

I know what I like, but I may not know anything about fashion

A friend of mine very generously shouted me a ticket to a design school fashion show. I was keen to check out what the creative young things are doing these days.

There were some nice tailored items that I could imagine being worn by fairly normal people in the street, many fanciful outfits that I thought belonged in the Wearable Arts awards and a few that were kinda uninteresting. There were clothes that made music when the models walked (cute, but potentially life-threateningly annoying), clothes refashioned from jeans (a nice idea but hardly original), and architectural constructions that looked like their creator was channelling Issey Miyake.

Obviously, the outfits looked like they were designed for 20-25 year olds.

Funnily enough the award-winning collections were, almost without exception, the ones containing the clothes I just didn't get and couldn't imagine anyone wearing outside of avant garde fringe theatre.

Although, perhaps some of my less-than-positive reactions were the result of fashion-fatigue. At 2.5 hours (with a 20 minute break in the middle), it was awfully long.

It was great fun though, and well worth the half hour walk in gale force winds to get there.

Finding gods

We've been watching a TV series called John Safran vs God. It's really quite interesting. Safran's an amusing Aussie who, in this series, explores a wide variety of religions around the world.

Although he's funny, he doesn't mock the faiths (okay maybe a little, but only occasionally). He's (mostly) genuinely curious and open-minded, whether he's trying to find enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery, participating in a Voodoo ceremoney or being smeared with chicken blood in an African magic ritual (to undo a curse on Australia's soccer team).

So, really, this show would be more accurately titled John Safran looks for God.

The last episode was really quite freaky. Safran decides that all his toe-dipping into the religious pools around the world may have left him vulnerable to demon posession and visits an exorcist. The freaky thing is that, in the exorcist's hands, Safran really does behave like there's something bad and weird in there somewhere. Even his camera crew admit they've never seen him act like that before. It certainly didn't look like an act to me. The whole thing ends with Safran, who is Jewish, giving into the exorcist's pressure to become Christian, as "the next step" in his cure.

Unfortunately, there's no debriefing afterwards - so we're left with no idea as to what Safran remembered of the experience later, or whether he regrets giving up his Jewishness.

A party

What a week - it started with funeral service, ended with yet another cold and in the middle was a (in my humble standards) great Guy Fawkes party.

The party was held at a co-worker's home up in the hills overlooking the harbour. She has this amazing house whose walls are almost completely comprised of glass and it sticks out from the hill like a big glass elevator on one of those fancy high-rises. I only knew the hostess and two others, but the other guests were really easy to chat to, so I had a really nice time. It reminded me of the old days when I used to go to parties full of strangers and pretend to be tiddly just so's I'd have an excuse to brazenly break into conversations uninvited.

At 9pm, we all went out onto the deck to watch the fireworks display on the harbour. Nothing beats actually being on the harbour, craning your neck to watch the lights explode like an imitation supernova, but even from the hills it was quite spectacular.

It was also bloody freezing, and all because I was too lazy to go downstairs to retrieve my jacket.
Is it just a coincidence that I've now got a cold, or is it really possible to "catch a chill"?

We said goodbye

Funnily enough, for a person who claims to have far too much black in her wardrobe I did not have a plethora of funeral-friendly outfits. Of course, it didn't really matter what anyone wore, because our faces were not exactly festive.

The place was completely packed; cars parked each other in and there weren't enough chairs for all the folk who'd come to say goodbye. The casket entered the room accompanied by a Maori chant which I don't know the name for - like a powhiri but probably different. Members of the family and old friends, often overcome by emotion, recounted anecdotes from the editter's life and reminded us of the qualities that endeared her to us - the super-quick wit, the scarily sharp memory, the ease with which she made friends and her way with children.

Of course, I teared up as soon as we arrived and didn't stop until the end of the service.

I would have liked to stay after the service ended; to join in with the the reminiscing would have made it easier for me to walk away with happy memories in my head. But I had to get back to work, so we said our goodbyes to the ones we knew - only to return because someone's little blue Chevrolet Cruze had parked us in (which no one would admit to owning, but which mysteriously disappeared soon after I made the request public).

No more Letters from the Editter

My dear friend, who was ill for the last few months, has died.

I can't think of anything to add to that, except "Goodbye - I'm gonna miss you".

Our battery collection

For months now, I've been avoiding putting our used up batteries into the household rubbish - because somewhere, I read or heard that those things are full of heavy metals and ought to be disposed of in a special way. So I hung up a plastic shopping bag to collect them, fully intending to find out where they should go and then taking them there.

The bag has gotten pretty heavy by now, and the boy voiced fears that it can't be healthy having a big bag full of toxic thingamies hanging around in the kitchen. So I finally got around to going on the 'Net to find out what I'm supposed to do with it.

And it turns out that there is nowhere nearby that recycles them.

So into the kitchen bin they go.