Sew, Curvaceous! This is the beginning...

This morning, while walking along the road hauling a suitcase, I thought about how much unnecessary stuff I have. I moved house last May and all of my belongings are still in boxes in three different places: a storage unit, my Mum's spare room, and my bedroom at my flat - where I can barely get in the door. I was going over it in my head and trying to mentally get rid of it all; "Mustard yellow jumper (that was a mistake) - charity shop.. black dress I keep wishing would fit again (it won't, I think I was 12 when I bought it) - charity shop.. but what about all the bras?" I can't bring myself to believe that charity shops make a good profit out of second hand bras. Bras are intensely personal, I feel odd even borrowing one from a friend, so the idea that they have any recyclable value is tough to believe but I hate throwing anything away unnecessarily, especially if it's not damaged or faulty but simply no longer fits. So as I trundled on down the road, thinking how unexpectedly hot it is today and how I wish I hadn't worn a scarf, I ran through a sort of word association game to come up with a use for old bras. Bras: pretty, flowery, lacy, padded, puffy, cushioned... Pin cushions!!! 

Pin cushions. Why not? Pin cushions are handy, sewing is very cool right now (so is knitting, crochet, cross stitch, embroidery...) recycling is essential, and pin cushions are extremely easy to make. I made one at Christmas out of a scourer sponge (an unused one) and some pretty material, as a sweet homemade gift. Bra cup pin cushions are a cinch! I made six when I got home this afternoon and only stopped because I ran out of unwanted bras. 

But why would one buy a pin cushion made out of a bra? I'll tell you why - for a darned good cause, that's why! Bras and women's issues have been joined at the nip (sorry, I can't resist) for as long as we've been boosting, squishing, emphasizing and supporting our boobs. Fun fact - the word "brassiere" was first used in the English language in 1893, but women in ancient Greece are thought to have worn a bra-like contraption called an "apodesmos". For this reason I think the partnership of discarded, unloved bras and women's charities is a no-brainer. I chose two to start with - Eve Appeal, a charity that fund-raises to support the research centre for gynecological cancers at UCL (read their 10 very compelling reasons to support Eve here) and Breakthrough, the breast cancer charity. My plan is to donate any proceeds from this initiative through Just Giving, for transparency and ease. 

But I can't do it without good pals!! I need bras, awareness spreading, possibly some web assistance, and anyone handy with a needle and thread who can make some pin cushions at home - I promise it's really not hard! 

If you're interested in being involved in any way at this very early stage, please contact me on Facebook, or on sewcurvaceous@outlook.com. 

Beth x

Black Lace

Olive green

Purple floral

Breast cancer awareness and body confidence are not comparable issues, but they are linked; you can care about one more than the other, but you can also care about both. They are apples and oranges in terms of principles but there’s room for both on one plate. Consider them 2 of your 5-a-day allowance of important problems facing women.

I know it’s really annoying, but I have a lot of principles. See what I did there? I began a description of my character by criticising myself. Because I’m female. I had a friend at uni who had a, frankly hilarious, habit of responding to a compliment on an item of clothing with “It only cost £_!!!” by way of defending herself for having something nice, or perhaps for trying to look nice that day. One of my principles is that I can’t bear (and yet can’t get away from) head to toe assessments of women’s appearances. If you are female, breathing, and in contact with other humans on a regular basis you will know that your appearance never, ever goes unnoticed. Sometimes it’s lovely – your haircut gets noticed, the shoes you carefully matched with a necklace gets appreciated from an open car window by a friend driving past (true story). But other times it’s the total stranger (male stranger) who feels that it’s fine to say “cheer up!” or “smile love!” to you as you walk past frowning intently but actually just thinking about whether or not your keys are definitely in your handbag. It’s the builder who whistles at you, or the guy in a fast car who beeps you and makes you jump out your skin. It’s the shop assistant at the post office by your work building who always, always makes an ambiguous statement about the way you look – “haven’t seen you in a while. You look different. Very different.” That happened to me on Wednesday. The same man has a fondness for telling me I look tired, and I’m willing to bet the entire £15 I’ve paid into my pension so far that “you look tired” is not a compliment. OMG, I LOVE the bags – is that purple eye shadow? No. 

Cate Blanchett, on the red carpet at the Golden Globes earlier this year, bent down to look into the lens of a camera (attached to a photographer’s face, naturally) that was currently spanning her from the toe up extremely slowly, and asked “do you do that to the men?” She was being light-hearted, it was not the heated exchange that some papers made it out to be, but she made a valid point.

So when I became gradually aware yesterday of a social media craze, which amazingly and completely brilliantly raised over £1 million in 24 hours, of women taking selfies with no make up on and nominating other friends by name to do the same in the name of cancer, I sighed just a tiny bit. When I see something that sits badly with me, like this, I spend some time thinking about it to work out why my instinct is to wince at photos of my friends with no make up on. But I can’t emphasize this enough: I was not, am not, will never ever be, wincing at raising money for cancer research – why on earth would I? I also was not wincing because I thought it was vain, or petty, or frivolous, or… whatever else. I’ve done selfies, although they never make it onto the internet. When my boyfriend travels we send one another photos throughout the day so we can see each other’s faces, and every time I take one (then retake it, retake it again, retake it once more for good luck and trying to narrow down the quantity of chins in the picture) I think “urgh, I look awful. I hate my teeth.. and my eyebrows. And that extra layer of chub on my cheeks.” So it was highly possible that when seeing endless pictures of my friends in their natural, unadorned state could have made me feel good about not being perfect myself. But that wouldn’t have been a very nice emotion – never mind if I look like s**t, so-and-so from uni looks worse! I can’t help that my reaction was to feel disheartened that in order for one such vital, wonderful thing (ie the cancer fundraising surge) to occur, something else close to my heart had to be, in my opinion, set back a little bit. And it’s not just close to my heart. Did you know that the Girl Guides have a “be body confident” badge campaign at the moment? It’s a pledge to be “B.R.A.V.E”, I’ve signed it, and it entails:

B.e myself, and be proud of myself

R.ecognise and reject body image myths

A.ccept how I look and how others look

V.alue my body by treating it well

E.ncourage more people to be body confident as well.

According to statistics from the Guides, 87% of 11 to 21 year olds think women are judged more for their looks than their ability, and 71% would like to lose some weight. I can believe this without a second’s doubt for two reasons – I don’t think women are judged more for their looks than their abilities, I know they are. Secondly, I can remember being 11 and I thought I was so fat.

I do think it’s better that we’re beginning to reinforce a positive, more realistic body image through things like no make up selfies, and idolising (to the point of despair, for the women concerned) curvier women. But I watched an interview on Youtube with Christina “Mad Men” Hendricks, the woman who Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone has encumbered with the mantel of being the “correct” body ideal, in which the interviewer incessantly asked her questions about her curvier appearance. As though Hendricks were some alien who just landed on earth from space, the interviewer seemed fascinated by the fact that this actress was not a size zero and asked her twice “what has been your most inspirational moment [as a curvaceous woman]?” The first time she was asked this question, her face fell and she floundered for words before looking to her publicist for help, who advised the interviewer to move on. The interviewer asked exactly the same question, immediately. This time Christina responded “you just asked it again!” and ended the interview shortly after. She was there to talk about a film she’d made and discovered the only thing anyone was interested in was the size of her arse. The point I’m making being: while it’s nice that there is one, solitary woman on TV who is simultaneously curvy AND desirable to men (jackpot!), the media, the world, everyone, is still focussing on what she looks like instead of what she’s doing. I would rather have no body idols, personally, than a choice between natural, curvy “correct” ones and thin, unrealistic, “negative” ones. In short – it’s fine to look good, it’s fine to look bad. It’s not fine to focus on it above all else.

Part of the reason I felt disheartened by the campaign, is that I believe there are myriad ways that everyone could have been kept happy. Yes the nature of the viral selfies and nominations got everyone buzzing, talking, arguing and in the end, apparently, “that’s all that matters.” It’s not to me, when I am so sure the same awareness (a word I’m reluctant to use because awareness implies a spread of knowledge, which this was not. It was great, and while it did not spread awareness, it spread generosity) could have been achieved through means with less potential for bad feeling. My own approach was to write “check your:” above a drawing of some boobs on my face, of which I took an extremely close up picture showing only my cheek and eye. I didn’t nominate anyone to do the same thing, but I did donate. Twice, in fact, I thought it hadn’t worked the first time. Then when I was out walking on my lunch break today I saw a breast cancer screening unit in the car park of Waitrose and I thought – aha! That would have been great. Write the location of your nearest screening unit on a piece of paper (a quick google search would give you the answer to that question) and take a selfie of you holding it up for all to see. Wear make up for it or don’t, whatever. Or how about a selfie of you holding a sign with one golden rule for checking your breasts on it? My doctor advised me that when you feel them, it’s OK if they feel like cottage cheese but not if they feel like marbles. So simple, so memorable. Or a less informative but definitely saucy and bound to spread like wildfire idea – post a photo of the bra you wore that day. Totally relevant to breast cancer and still personal without being vulnerable. If I’d been nominated to do that I’d have thought it was brilliant.

To anyone who thinks I’m cynical for not wanting to just be involved like everyone else, sorry. That will never be how I think about anything. But don’t be angry with me and others who voiced their distaste for this, because we kept up our half of the bargain: we argued, made people angry and contributed to the success that goes along with a controversial campaign. 

How to make a Sarcastic Customer Dissatisfaction Graph while watching a contextually appropriate episode of Murder She Wrote

Firstly I just want to say that not every blog will be about Murder She Wrote (although if there were enough requests I would happily write one that’s ONLY about MSW) but when I got home from my freaking terrible day and turned on the telly and saw the name of tonight’s episode, “Murder takes the bus” I couldn't believe it because my bad day was all about the bus. Then the opening credits started to roll and I learned that the episode guest starred Linda “The Exorcist” Blair, and I couldn't believe it because at one point today I was so angry my head rotated 360 degrees atop my shoulders, and then the music started which was an almost note-for-note rip off (homage?) of Bernard Herrman’s legendary eerie score for Hitchock’s masterpiece Psycho, and I couldn't believe it because today I almost became a bit of a psycho. So I really had no choice but to make JB Fletcher my muse and inspiration once again. At the moment she’s rifling through the suitcase of the recently deceased man – killed by a screwdriver to the back of the neck while sitting alone on the broken down bus, if you’re interested – while the motley crew of bus passengers are sheltering from the storm in an isolated road side diner. Also, Linda "Exorcist" Blair is now a grown up and seemingly heavily preggers, I’m terrified about what’s going to come out of her.

So, onto the graph. Say you have beef with a certain company, in my instance Arriva buses, and a complaint email doesn't quite seem like enough? Enter the Sarcastic Customer Dissatisfaction Graph. A picture really does say more than a thousand words. It’s pretty easy because there’s not too much science or maths behind it.

All you need to do is come up with different categories pertaining to customer service experiences. Weight each segment proportionally relating to how important it is to your satisfaction with the company. So for instance, while I was more angry  the time I went to the man in the office at the bus station for help because my M-ticket (which is a bus ticket downloaded to your phone and can be bought to last a day, a week, or a month) had disappeared for no reason and I needed to get home and he a) didn’t help me, b) answered his mobile while I was talking to him and c) shouted at me, that segment is smaller than the segment for the M-ticket’s disappearance because that was a lot more important to my daily ambition of not spending all my mother-lovin’ time either on buses, thinking about buses, paying for buses, or thinking I’m going to die on buses when a mad man plants a bomb on it that will explode if they bus driver goes under 80 mph.

Secondly, if some of your experiences are good fill those segments in green, if they are bad fill them in red. Label segments clearly. Lastly, sum up the whole graph effectively by making it either into a big smiley face if it was all really great and you loved it (unlikely to happen with a SCDG) or a big sad face if it was all terrible and you’re considering never going anywhere again because it’s just too difficult.

As a finishing touch, email it to the company in question and strongly imply you work for Father Christmas and that you KNOW they have not been good this year and their likelihood of getting presents is pretty low. (You might have to attach a picture of yourself dressed as an elf)

  Footnote: The bus driver was the murderer. He was avenging his daughter’s death from 15 years ago. Also while Jessica was out of town she missed the drawing of a prize raffle in which she would have won a flat screen TV but she wasn't there so they gave it to someone else. Those sound like dodgy raffle rules to me, she should send them a Sarcastic Customer Dissatisfaction Graph.

Footnote 2: Yes I should learn to drive. If anyone wants to send me £3000 so I can pay for lessons, buy a car, tax and insure that car, then fill it with at least one tank of petrol then please make cheques out to Ms Birdie McElf and send them to:
Number 1, Candy Cane Road,
Stripy Red Woolly Stocking Shire,
The North Pole.
99X MA5

Remodelling the kitchen with £30… without stealing anything from skips

 I’m lucky to have a relaxed landlady who is more than happy for me to continually redecorate the house. Like the Golden Gate Bridge, the painting is never finished. No sooner have I painted the kitchen lilac (there was a reason at the time) I begin thinking that it should have been red all along. But this month I really applied myself to the task of decorating it once and for all, I made a Powerpoint presentation about colour schemes and spent hours combing through hardware websites looking for good paint colours and inspiration. Two weeks on, I have an entirely new kitchen! And the best part is that I spent about £30 doing it, new tiles and all.

This is what our tiles looked like when we moved in:

Someone had been over the original tiles with some tile paint and added some purple patches (ah, that will have been the reason I painted the walls lilac the first time round) which was looking a bit tired and needed brightening up. After one coat of Wilko One Coat Gloss Paint in white (£6.95), the tiles were looking really clean and shiny, at a glance they look like new tiles…

The red walls turned out to be really effective as well (Wilko again, grease and water resistant kitchen paint in “Tinsel Town”, £17.75) and the warm and slightly muted shade has made the warm tones in the laminate floor and counter tops look vibrant and newer. Woohoo! It was worth staying up ‘til 4am with only radio 2 for company. It’s amazing how many people ring or text in to argue with DJs in the middle of the night. What are you all DOING? Painting your kitchens?

Plus the 1930s railway poster prints I chose to decorate with really benefited from having a strong colour behind them. This large framed collage of prints cut out of a calendar (which I then realised was a calendar for this current year and I probably should have waited a few months before taking scissors to it) was a bit lost against a lilac wall. Set against the red backdrop the colours in it really stand out.

Lastly I wanted to add a little bit of detail and colour to the tiles. I absolutely love Moroccan tiles, the kind that Charlie Sheen had in his house in Two and a Half Men (choose your style gurus diligently, people). So, never to be one to let things like money, or “not knowing how to retile a kitchen” get in my way, I turned (of course) to the internet. A quick image search for Moroccan tiles led me to a blue and white design I liked, I think it was a facsimile of an old tile, which I saved as a PDF cropped to 10cm x 10cm. I lined up several on one sheet to print out and took the sheet to the library, where I got it laminated for about 70p. I cut them out, and hey presto – new tiles! It was easy to attach them with double sided tape, and I’ll see how they hold up.

As a final touch I added my favourite fairy light trick, the glass cookie jar lamp, to sit on top of the fridge next to my big owl (in Modern Family the Dunphy family has an owl cookie jar on their counter top that I am so jealous of, this one is my attempt at a likeness) and give the space some glittery, cosy additional lighting.

It’s a lovely space to cook and eat in now, and feels so cosy when it’s cold outside!

Sore feet but feeling foxy after a hard day’s work…

I’m sitting with my sore feet tucked up on the sofa enjoying a glass of wine, huddled close to the radiator, with the sounds of Angela Lansbury solving some crimes in the background (today Jessica has inherited a football team in an elderly uncle’s will. Chaos has ensued). I’m tired but I feel good, because I feel like I worked hard today; it was my first proper shift working back at Walton Clothing (Mistral) in Berkhamsted, where I last worked more than 2 years ago. Christmas is fast approaching and so today’s tasks involved assembling a five foot cardboard Christmas tree with my boss, Pam (it’s a great tree, I’m considering getting one for my living room instead of a real one. When Christmas is over just slide it behind the fridge, job done) and planning for Sunday’s Festival of Lights in Berkhamsted high street. When the tree lights are lit, carols will be sung and plenty of mulled wine will be imbibed. The last two Decembers haven’t quite been the same for me, because I loved working on a high street in the run up to Christmas in 2011, especially in such an atmospheric town like Berkhamsted with its old buildings and interesting boutique size shops (even their charity shops are treasure troves). I’m so happy to be back there working with the old team and, essentially, playing with pretty clothes all day (little girls who love their dollies grow up into shop assistants who love re-styling the mannequins in the window). A condensed version of this blog is posted on the Mistral website, here.

My mum wants to know if we really do sell jumpers for badgers... I'll call head office in the morning.

.

 What’s more it’s so lovely, when the high street is dark and damp, to be inside in the warm surrounded by jewel colours and bright lights, plus a few woodland friends... Our windows in store are adorned with picture book style cut outs of foxes wearing scarves and badgers wearing jumpers, which ties in with the styles in store which are full of animal print (it’s funny how animal print used to mean Bet Lynch in a leopard print boob tube, now it means owl motifs on nice blouses). The fashion for woodland animals on clothing, décor, stationery and so on, is still thriving a couple of years on and I love it. I remember some time ago I thought it was a great idea to experiment with fabric dyes and printing, despite having precisely zero expertise, and faffed around trying to print a motif using a stencil I’d made of a running horse out of a plastic projector sheet. It was very unsuccessful. The paint dripped and blobbed and the end result was not the slick outline of a magnificent beast I’d hoped for, and more closely resembled a hole caused by a donkey falling through a wall. Ah well. We live, we learn, we buy horse print scarves from Primark instead.

 I think we can thank Julian Fellowes and K-Mo (as the Duchess of Cambridge is known to her friends, like me) in equal part for the current love for all things countryside. Royal weddings, royal babies and Downton as our main export have led to England becoming chic again in the last few years, although obviously Madonna knew was coming long before the rest of us. That period where she went everywhere wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket saying things like “’Ellow there, Geldof me old China!” (or something) seemed really weird at the time. Makes so much sense now. Naturally she’s gone back to wearing black bondage gear though and the rest of us have yet to catch up. I do look forward to the transition fashions, I predict bambi print spandex cat suits this time next year – you heard it here first. Bird xxx

 Footnote: Murder She Wrote is long finished and as usual I don’t understand who did it, or why. But it ended with a freeze frame of Jessica Fletcher chuckling gaily like the whole football-manager-drowned-in-a-hot-tub thing never happened, and all is right with the world.



Night night.

So, my boyfriend is on tour. Home alone and working part time... it's arty time!

My boyfriend’s brilliant. He texts me pictures of his breakfast and will watch one full episode of Murder She Wrote with me every day, without complaining (he does complain if it turns out to be a double bill). In short – he just gets me. He is also a musician and is currently on his third UK tour in the course of our almost-2-year-long relationship. This tour leg is 4 weeks (following 10 days in Europe then one day off) zigzagging around the UK to spread the gospel of “djent” (yes, djent. It’s pronounced “gent” by the way, and has something to do with time signatures, heavy metal, and frisbees) far and wide, like some sort of drum kit-wielding missionary.

 I wouldn’t want him to do anything else with his life because if ever anyone had “a calling”, music is his. I really think there is nothing in this life that makes me feel the way that he feels about drumming. I’m a (not very good) musician too, but there’s no deep desire in me to forge a career from it. I have gigged, and recorded and enjoyed a little taster of what life might have been like as a professional violinist but it awakened no fire inside me to give up everything and dedicate my life to it (and that’s not just because the violin is much less cool than the drums). I haven’t got the patience, or what it takes to get up day after day and practise music, because in reality that is what life as a muso comes down to – hours upon hours of practice, hard work, hoarding receipts for tax returns and, of course, travelling – all for mere minutes on stage. But it’s minutes of doing what you love for a crowd of people who love you for doing it. That is true passion.

 So where does that leave me; boyfriendless and climbing the walls while he’s away? Last time he toured I became extremely adept at a game on my phone where you smash bricks with a little ball. Maybe it helped to be distracted, maybe it helped to smash things – who knows. At any rate I reached a rather mammoth score of 9,000 and while that is a victory I will be regaling delighted peers with until the day I die, I thought that this time round I ought to do something more productive. So welcome to Seeya Sweetie, a diary of keeping the homefires burning and enjoying having the house to myself so I can redecorate it, spread art materials all over the floor and stay up til 4am painting the kitchen (true story) with no one to tell me that's a silly thing to do, all while my boyfriend shows the world how you pummel a double bass pedal in style.

Bird. Xxx

 Footnote: I started out with a little market research and typed “boyfriend on tour” into Google, and here’s a few little snippets I found, from women in similar situations to mine. Not all were negative but... well, a lot were. Thanks to anyone I quoted here.

 “Good luck, girls. It doesn't get any better. My boyfriend of 11 years is in Europe right now…”
“The veteran wives I know have been in this for 25 and 40 years, and they are bitter and resentful. Just to let you know, we all have college degrees and traveled when we were younger! We are not jealous, insecure people, but they keep doing things to make us feel second fiddle.”
 “If you want a guy who loves you more than he loves his job, DO NOT MARRY A MUSICIAN! Sitting with my cats at 5 a.m. and I haven't heard his voice in 10 days.”
 “I don't think I can handle it anymore-I can't stand the clubs and the drunk chicks. True I could be called insecure and all the things that are my issues, but really I would just rather not need to "try".”
“i know he misses me too but i just feel so far away from him and lonely...im also afraid that he isnt thinking of me as much because hes out having fun and im at home...”

 Also, praise be, just as I was about to commit myself fully to a whining, clingy, inconvenient, complaining, embarrassing existence as a pregnancy-entrapment plotting "band girlfriend" who is apparently also a stripper, I thankfully found cavemancircus.com and their delightful list to help me avoid all of the above ideas, entitled "Pay attention ladies! Here are the 23 rules for dating a musician". Most of what you need to know about this website is that it has a search-and-replace function set to turn the word "ass" to "booty." This means that words like "embarrass", "assume" and "passion" actually, genuinely, truly in the course of the article become "embarrbooty", "bootyume" and "pbootyion". But, as with most insane rants, there was one solitary pearl of wisdom in number 23: "Keep the band separate from your everyday life. That’s your boyfriend’s pbootyion, find your own". So while this blog might have been indirectly caused by my boyfriend's pbootyion, the pbootyion for design is all my own.