Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Friday, April 26, 2013

Novel stash busting tip: Just let the bugs eat it!



Seamsters, is your fabric and yarn getting you down? 

Are you sick and tired of those perky polka dot prints, wool doubleknits, hand-dyed merino hanks and sassy silk crepes hiding in the backs of your stash drawers, muttering and mocking you, whispering evilly "Why haven't you just sewn or knit me into something fantastically amazing and perfectly fitting already?" 

Are you worried that Me Made May '13 is going to be JUST TOO EASY?

What would you say if you knew there was a fast, efficient—and, best of all, 100% FREE—solution?

Try our new and improved.... 

Vicious Little Moth Larvae™!

They creep, they crawl, they chomp, they squiggle, they squirm! You'll have empty drawers in no time—your wools reduced to cheesecloth, your yarn reduced to bits, your handmades more ventilated than EVER before!

"But Mikhaela, how do I get some Vicious Little Moth Larvae™, you ask?" 

That's easy! Just take home a mysteriously holey thrift store cashmere sweater and assume that a gentle hand washing and a good darn will have it right as rain ... Let some woolen items fall to the ground in the deep dark recesses of your closet... ignore your stash for months ... and VOILA!

... er.

But seriously, folks. It's true. My husband and I have spent the past week battling the Moth Infestation of Doom, and I just cannot believe how far the little monsters have managed to spread. Our bedroom closet was the worst—all our suits and my wool skirts eaten, including my Sew Grateful Challenge Colorblock skirt.



But after we cleaned out the closet—washing, cleaning, throwing out or eco-friendly-dry-cleaning EVERYTHING that had survived... I began to inspect all the other drawers in the house. I'm still not done, as I'm going through them all very carefully, opening and shaking out each piece of fabric or item of clothing onto a sheet ...

I got all the way down to the bottom of my first fabric drawer and was loudly proclaiming in excitement to my husband "They didn't eat my fabric!!!!" ... when I unfolded a beautiful piece of cotton shirting and there they were, squirming away (though not eating—they don't eat cotton, they just live on it).

Yeah. So I've had to be incredibly ruthless. Handwashing doesn't kill the pests and I don't have the budget to eco-dryclean every piece of dry-clean-only fabric I had. ALL scraps are gone now—those leftover wool or silk fabric scraps that I'd been keeping for I don't know what—quilts? Stuffed animals?

And I've really made some hard decisions about my clothes as well. On the plus side, this leaves plenty of room for new me-mades. On the minus side, well... THEY ATE MY STUFF AND THEY ARE SO GROSS. (Though mysteriously, they were in my sock drawer but did not TOUCH any of my large collection of wool socks... phew! Probably because I am always opening that drawer and shuffling the socks around, the monsters hate light and disturbance.)

I still am not sure how the nasties got in, but I do suspect it was a beautiful thrifted wool sweater with a few little holes that I'd been meaning to darn... I put it in a hot dry dryer for 60 minutes the minute I got home (to kill potential bedbugs) but maybe that wasn't enough to knock out the moths. Or maybe it was a vintage handbag I bought on Etsy, or a piece of wool fabric from a bargain bin in a dusty old fabric store... Who knows!

Act now... GET YOURS TODAY!

P.S. Knitters, take heart. I'd always been in the habit of keeping all my wool yarn in plastic sweater bags for protection... and I didn't find a single little wool-chomper in those drawers. Too bad I hadn't treated my wool fabrics the same!


Friday, April 20, 2012

I Sewed a Snuggie! AND a Body Bag.

Inspiration: The Snuggie, the Forever Lazy, and the modern body bag.

Pattern Description: Large polar-fleece monstrosity has powers to eat you alive, make you cry, snuggle you tenderly.

Pattern Sizing: Fuzzy fleece sadness has no sizing, envelops all people equally.

Did it look like the photo/drawing on the pattern envelope once you were done sewing with it? The very question offends, as this miracle of engineering was the product of months of exquisitely intellectual design.

Were the instructions easy to follow? You mean the ones I made up in my head? Cut hole in middle of giant piece of fleece, insert over head, finish edges, add centered zipper, stand back in horror.

What did you particularly like or dislike about the pattern? Like: fuzzy and warm. Dislike: saps will to leave couch.

Fabric Used: 4 yards black stretchy polar fleece from Fulton Fabrics in Brooklyn, $4/yard. Zipper was $2-something.

Pattern alterations or any design changes you made: Left bottom edges unfinished.

Would you sew it again? Would you recommend it to others? In all seriousness, this thing took a surprisingly long time to construct, as the seams were so long and my toddler kept trying to pull it off the sewing machine by the ends.

Conclusion: I'm a costume designing STAR. Time to sit here by my cell phone, waiting for Hollywood to call...

Video background details:

"Just Give Up." Because Snuggies and Forever Lazys are for Liars.

Written and Directed by Stephanie Bencin (pictured above with Z, who was totally fascinated by all this.)
Starring The Prom.
Siobahn Thompson
John Milhiser (shown in first photo)
Sasheer Zamata (shown in above photos--her love of vintage and thrift styles recently featured in Time Out New York)
Stephen Soroka
Justin Brown
Amber Nelson

Costume Designed by Mikhaela Reid

P.S. In case you're jealous, but don't have my amazing advanced skills of "designing" large terrifying fleece rectangles with centered zippers and neckholes...

Seriously, where do you think I can get some of that crossword puzzle fleece?

Friday, March 16, 2012

Friday Funny: "The Scarf" (How NOT To Tie One) + Costume Preview

Yeah, so, you know that feeling you get when you're trying to tie a scarf just right... or you keep putting on different skirts and yet somehow NONE of them work with the top you're wearing, but when you change your top, the new top doesn't work, and you start to leave the house, but then you stop and look in the mirror and you're just like. WAIT. NO. And you're late for something, but ...

Then you may get a little deja vu while watching this comedy video short by my friend Stephanie Bencin (no blog, but she's on Tumblr and Twitter), a fabulous up-and-coming comedy writer/filmmaker. Stephanie is a documentary film researcher by day, and by night writes for The Prom, a sketch comedy team that performs at New York's Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre (founded by the awesome Amy Pohler, among others).

Anyway, Stephanie recently drafted me to do what could very generously be called costume design (to say I am not on a Dreamstress level would be an understatement) for another upcoming video... the same comedy costuming project I mentioned before that required I buy copious amounts of (shudder) fleece. Here's a sneak peek--Z was really sad she couldn't keep the costume when it was done.

Z hiding under the black polar fleece

And the above video details:

"The Scarf"

  • Written by Stephanie Bencin
  • Directed and Edited by Adam Sacks
  • Shot by Andy Bond
  • Starring Moujan Zolfaghari
  • Featuring Lauren Adams, Sasheer Zamata and Matt Cutler
  • Music by Lawrence Kim

If you enjoy the video, please do your part for female comedians and leave comments here or on YouTube, share it on Facebook, Twitter and so on--Stephanie is just starting to do more of these comedy shorts and any feedback and exposure would have a super big impact! (AND would likely mean you will get to see more entertaining costuming projects here in future).

P.S. Sorry to those of you reading on non-video-friendly devices, but it's worth emailing or bookmarking and watching later!

P.P.S. Speaking of scarves, how beautiful (if super large) is Sarai's scarf collection? I only own 6 or 7 and I really need to start wearing them more often. Honestly, I am terrified of my poor scarf manipulation skills, and in a fit of anxiety a few years ago actually purchased two books on scarf tying.

P.P.P.S. Here I am in 2009 on a rare scarf-wearing occasion in Paris with a turquoise Diane Von Furstenberg silk scarf I bought on deep sale ages back. I definitely didn't have it on right, but cliché or no, I was more scared of NOT wearing a scarf in Paris than wearing it wrong, if that makes sense:

Obligatory photos of Tour Eiffel (Eiffel Tower)

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