Dyed dress...or maybe a skirt?

I finished my ombre dyed dress today and discovered that its not really a dress. I think it wants to be a skirt. I didn't realize until hubby took the picture and I looked at it that this makes a totally unflattering dress. The problem is that the shirred yoke at the top is not long enough to fit from the top of the bust to the ribcage, so it flares out much further than it should and makes me look very wide. I might use it as a skirt instead. However, I really don't like the length this way.

If I hem it, I will hem off most of the lovely dye. I'm thinking it might need to be re-done. I think it needs another darker band of color along the hem line anyways. The color washed up much lighter than what it was wet. Even after sitting for over 24 hours, it seemed that a lot of the color washed out. I'm trying not to be dissapointed as it was my first time dyeing with these products and it was a lot of work. I ordered all of my products from Dharma Trading, and I used fiber reactive dyes in plum, wisteria, and seafoam.

A family of 2 (iphones, that is)

The last few days have been quite interesting. Brian and I joined the hordes of people on Friday to stand in endless lines in hopes of acquiring brand new 3g iphones. We arrived quite early, before 6:30am (lucky we are in a smallish town where overnighting is not required) but we were still #25/26 in line. We had decided instead of going to our local AT&T store that we would drive to Georgetown which is smaller. Either lots of people had the same idea we did, or the lines were just that long everywhere. There were roughly 100 people behind us by the time the store opened. We had decided we both wanted the 16GB white model. By the time we got to the front of the line, people in front of us were already being told the model they wanted was out. We got lucky and got ours, though.

Can you imagine standing in long lines for hours only to be told there are none left?? And for some reason AT&T refused to give any information about how many phones were available, so no one knew what was going on. Then of course there was the whole debacle with not being able to turn the phones on and activate them because Apples site was overloaded. When we got home it took about 4 hours of constantly pinging the activate button about every 30 seconds before we got through. So we finally got everything working, which was wonderful….and now comes the itunes debacle.

We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 200gb, maybe more of music, audio books, and video. The video probably bumps it well over 200, but since the whole collection is in multiple locations I’m not sure. A very small amount of this stuff translates perfectly into itunes. Along the way we have changed formats of ID3 tagging several times, and a lot of stuff is missing album art (which is needed for the cover flow function). This means that when you open itunes, everything is pretty much a jumble. So Brian and I started working on retagging and general itunes formatting on Friday, and we are still working with no discernable end in sight. Of course when we are done, everything will be so wonderfully organized, but in the meantime it’s a pain in the ass. We also figured out the hard way that when you change anything on the media center where we store all of our, well media, the individual itunes on your computer can no longer access your collection. It’s certainly a learning process. I’d really love to get around the syncing problems, but I’m not quite ready to hack the phone to do so.

Don’t get me wrong here; all of this is absolutely worth it. This phone is hands down the best device I have every used and I love it. There are a few small things I’d like to change, but everything that the iphone does it does extremely well. Here are my biggest wishes:

-multimedia messaging (yes, I know, you can send pics via email. Most people still don’t have email on their phones yet, though. So although you might be able to email them, whose phone will you be emailing them to?)
-A2DP stereo Bluetooth. In relation to my body size, the iphone is pretty big. I’d like to drop it in my bag and listen through my stereo Bluetooth headset.
-A better camera. My old phone had a 3.2 mp camera, and I will miss that very very much.

I’ve managed to get very little crafting done during this changeover to iLand, but I will have photos up soon of my drying yarn. It needs to hurry up, because I have a wedding present to knit!

Fabrics and yarns to dye for

Yes, yes, I know it's been far too long since I posted. But as usual nothing happened for a long time, and then all the sudden I had a lot happen. I will try to make several posts over the next week or so to catch up on all the different things this week. Today I spent about 4 hours dyeing yarn and a dress that I had purchased from Dharma Trading. The dress is nothing fancy, just a shirred tube dress. I have wanted something done in Ombre (dip dyed with gradations of color for those not in the know) for a long time, but finding a piece that is reasonably priced and reasonable seemed to be too tall an order. So I'm making my own. I also did a hank of silk and one of cotton. I took a whole lot of pics, but apparently I'm very shaky tonight, and hardly any of them came out well. I will take more pics and give a more detailed explanation of my process. It wasn't all that hard, but very involved. It's probably one of those things where you get more effecient and therefore, faster, as you go along. Oh, and yeah, its extremely messy. More on all this later.