Oasis of Maturity

So everyone knows that I'm a costume designer, right? (I think almost everyone on my flist knows that) Also, you all know that I spent three years in Japan...enjoying myself immensely, but under massive weight restrictions in terms of what I could bring either direction on the plane. (you'd be forgiven for not knowing the second thing if you've only joined me in the last few years).

So naturally, I couldn't take my sewing machine with me! Especially since it's a heavy duty home machine and completely made of metal. (you know those kinda flimsy plastic machines they sell to home sewers these days? that are so light they really need suction cups so they don't jitter across the table as they sew? ...not a problem with my machine. The only plastic in mine is the removable arm and some of the dials.) Naturally, it stayed home! I packed it into the attic of my parents house with all the other things from University and there it stayed for three years!

Unfortunately the attic is not all that well insulated; it alternately froze in the winter and boiled in the summer. When I came back, it didn't work all that well, but I muddled through for a couple of years as it slowly got worse and worse. I'd actually been trying to find a place I trusted to get it serviced, but that wasn't too easy.

But now I have a place! They took my machine and had it for almost a month, but now I have it back and it's all fixed! (including the jammed knob on the end that's supposed to let you wind bobbins without running the needle.....it'd been jammed for a couple years before it went in the attic.) Turned out the motor was completely fubar, but they got a new one and tuned it all up so it's like my machine is new again. \ ^_^ /

Suffice it to say, it's never going back in the attic.

As seen in my last post, I REALLY need an idea and I'm running out of time! Anyone?

So, dear flist...I've got a bit less than a month until Fanime (which I will be working) and I want to put together a costume for it.....but I have no good ideas >_>

So! Needs to be something I can run around in and not die in potential hot SanJose weather, I need to have a full range of motion so I can work in it (this is why I'm not taking part of my kickass Sakura costume, the top doesn't let me raise my arms hardly at all), and it would be really nice not to have to worry about a wig...my hair right now is a bit past my shoulders, cut kinda layered (grown out) and brown....

Any ideas? I'm a pretty awesome costumer, if I do say so myself, but I need ideas/pictures!

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either.

BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.

Snagged from sophie_448


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Ubervilles-Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams – the whole series
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I stopped going to my school partially so I wouldn't have to)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



There aren't any italicized titles because when I read books I pretty much always finish them. ^_^

Everyone who's read The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan (and those of you who haven't, chop chop!) should all go and read this. It's an awesome piece of backstory for the book. Go read and be drawn in to this world!

Just read that Reading Rainbow is over. This makes me very sad....

THEY GAVE ME A DRESS FORM! YOU CAN USE IT FOR PANTS TOO!

It was a very nice weekend, but I'm back home now...

So I didn't post anything about it (though I meant to! really, I did!!) I had a fabulous surprise visit from some of my favorite people a couple weeks ago. Super last minute 3-4 hour drives for the win! Now this week, as in tomorrow, I'm returning the favor! (I was planning on going down anyway before they all showed up, but it sounds so reciprocal this way ^_^) So I'll be in Portland until late Monday! It will be super awesome!!




(not that the icon is appropriate or anything.....except that I LOVE that clip...and only recently uploaded some Supernatural icons finally. Look at my excuse, isn't it shiny?)