Days 5 and 6, with a refashion.

For Day 5 of Me-Made May Lite, I wore a skirt I'd refashioned last weekend.


I started with this silk shirt from the dollar-a-pound. I really liked the pattern, but knew I wouldn't wear it as a blouse. On further examination, the sleeves were really stained as well.


So I cut a straight(ish) line across the top from armpit to armpit, then sewed down about an inch of that top edge to make a casing for a piece of elastic (should have done a nice edge finishing, but didn't). Measured elastic to fit my waist, threaded it through the casing, and sewed the edges together. Let the fabric gather around the elastic naturally. And...a skirt!


It's a bit short, so I wore it over a navy dress. I picked the belt and shoes to pick up on some of the colors in the skirt. I really liked this outfit, though it didn't photograph amazingly well (in the one picture I could squeeze out of my almost-dead camera batteries).The shoes, on the other hand...they were the perfect purple for this outfit, but they rubbed my feet in several places I didn't know about until I'd gotten to work. I guess this is why I have a box of bandaids in my office.

Details:
Dress: H&M, thrifted
Silk skirt: refashioned from shirt
Belt: Vintage, Ebay
Shoes: vintage, thrifted
Necklace and earrings: me-made



For Day 6, the jean skirt came out again. I suspect this may be one of my major pieces this month.

Details:
Striped top: H&M, thrifted
Jean skirt: refashioned
Necklace: craft fair
Sandals: Bandolino, thrifted


So good news and bad news about today (Friday). The good news: my college roommate arrives today! (in just an hour or so, actually.) The bad news: I am not going to be able to turn in my thesis today after all. I finally tracked down my last committee member yesterday, and he's incredibly busy and won't be able to read or approve anyone's theses until Monday at the very earliest. So...I had to get a bit of an extension on it and can hopefully get feedback and get the thesis submitted by the middle of next week. But I'm really disappointed about that; we'd all been planning to celebrate this afternoon after turning things in, and were looking forward to finally having these projects finished, but now that gets put off. And not just for me, either...actually, the two others in my group planning on turning in theses today have the same professor on their committee, so none of us get to turn in things today. Yes. Rather frustrating. But I guess this gives me time to proofread it again, right?


And a silly pose for the day. Have a lovely Friday, everyone!

Day 4

So I managed to get exactly one picture of yesterday's outfit before my camera batteries died...

The dress is a thrifted piece I refashioned last year, mostly just bringing up the hemline from something awkward and mid-calf length. Of course, now the hem is potentially too high, so I tend to wear it with this petticoat-like skirt underneath. I don't know why I'm not quite comfortable wearing mid-thigh hems...I suspect because most of what I do these days is go to work, and I don't feel very professional in a short-short skirt or dress.

Dress: thrifted, refashioned
White skirt: Forever21
Tank top: Express
Necklace: garage sale
Purse: thrifted
Shoes: Naturalizers, thrifted

Speaking of work...I'm so close to finishing this thesis, it's really quite exciting. I'm just waiting for the last one of my committee members to get back to me with his suggestions (which really needs to be soon, as I have to implement any changes he wants and get him (and my adviser) to sign off on the final version before Friday). And then my best friend/college roommate will be visiting this weekend, getting in Friday morning, so I am incredibly excited about that. I'll turn in the thesis on Friday, and then can have a nice celebratory weekend! Now, back to Wednesday...

Black Monday

Actually it was pretty sunny...but for some reason I felt like wearing this black wrap dress.


This is going to be a very, very busy week. Thesis draft going in by the end of the week, plus some very important visitors on Friday for whom we're trying to get fancy new things ready to demo. So if I'm sparse here for a few days, you'll know why.


Details:
Black dress: Lola, thrifted
White skirt (worn underneath): thrifted
Gray tights: Hue
Pink top: Gap, thrifted
Necklace: random jewelry booth in Dulles International Airport
Earrings: Claire's
Shoes: 9 West, thrifted




I wish the shoes didn't have marks on them...I don't think I'd noticed how large they were before I bought them, entranced by the pretty colors. I really like the color palette.


Also, I just wanted to put in a couple of pictures of how amazing the trees by the lab look. I don't know what kind of trees these are. With that day of 90 degree weather last week, they all just burst into bloom simultaneously...I've never seen so many flowers!

Keep on writing, keep on writing...

Pretty much my entire weekend is (should be!) taken up by working on writing my thesis. I need to get a draft done by probably Friday night so I can get it to my adviser...so today has been a whole lot of writing. Broken up briefly by a trip to the Garment District with my mother. And then more writing. This was my outfit yesterday...


I wanted a slightly dressy outfit because I had a busy day with meetings and various events involving new Lab students. This thrifted slightly stretchy pencil skirt is becoming a fast favorite.
Details:
Shirt: H&M, thrifted (dollar-a-pound)
Skirt: thrifted
Necklace: handmade
Tights: Calvin Klein
Shoes: Sketchers


What's everyone doing this weekend? More fun things than intensive thesis-writing, I hope? Though I'm really making some good progress, I think. And when I get myself in the state where I'm really able to just work on one thing (like writing), I end up getting incredibly focused on it and not really being able to think about anything else. So I'm taking a break until I go to bed, I think...and then back at it in the morning!

And the week goes by...

Well, today went back to standard spring temperatures, after we'd hit 90+ degrees here in Cambridge yesterday! It was so amazingly lovely out yesterday (not humid, either) that I ended up just ducking out of the lab after my class ended at 4 and going to play pool/walk around/have dinner with labmates. Did I mention it was a really, really amazing day? I don't know why nice weather makes it almost impossible to focus on work. This is why it's probably a good thing I didn't go to grad school in California!


So this is what I wore today. Yesterday I'd worn the dress I made from vintage strawberry-printed sheets last summer, but my camera ran out of batteries and so no pictures.
Details--
Floral skirt: Express
Black shirt: Ann Taylor Loft, thrifted (dollar-a-pound)
Tights: Hue
Shoes: Sketchers
Mixed-metal necklace: free


Today was actually quite a productive day as far as the thesis-writing was concerned. I stayed home from the lab in the morning to write, made some progress, and then went into the lab...then came back home in the evening and wrote some more. I'm approaching a draft, though a bit shorter than I want it to be as I still need to flesh out some bits. My goal is to have a draft ready to give my readers by a week from Monday at the latest. I think I can do it, though it's going to be a very busy week at the lab next week with some important demos. I'm going to be doing a lot of writing over the weekend. Anyone have lovely weekend plans?

Updates, and a couple of outfits

So I've ended up taking a bit of a blog hiatus due to some things going on with my work at the lab... Basically, I had a meeting with my adviser two weeks ago to discuss the performance I’d had as part of my thesis evaluation. He was quite honest with me, and summed it up as “disappointing”…I agree, I didn’t really push the boundaries of the performance or the technology. But it was very hard to hear that my adviser really wasn’t thrilled with the work. It looks like I'm going to have to make quite a bit more progress on my master's thesis work by the end of April in order for it to be acceptable for me to be potentially kept on as a Ph.D. student. So that's been difficult for me, but it does mean I may have a chance still, if I can do something really impressive. So...hard work on writing and redoing one of the pieces from my performance, having to make it really amazing. Hopefully I can pull that off. So I spent last week being pretty hard on myself about all of that, wondering what I was doing “wasting my time” with non-work-related things like fashion blogging and being with friends and such. But I think I’ve gotten a bit more perspective in the last few days, especially as I'm currently on a bit of a vacation (a trip to Florida with the boyfriend and his family that had been planned months ago before all the thesis-related stuff happened). So I’m back to blogging here and there.


This outfit is from last week on Tuesday…I had work at the lab and a dinner meeting/demos of my work. I hadn’t worn the shirt before, as it’s a recent-ish dollar-a-pound find, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it…the top is an awkward length, hitting me at mid-hip, so it feels too short to wear over pants like a tunic and look good on me, and too long to tuck into a skirt (or at the least, too stiff…there are pockets in it and all sorts of details, so a very stretchy or thin skirt ends up showing the fabric bunched underneath. I’m not sure I got away safely with this skirt.


Also, I really need other flats I can wear easily other than these old Sketchers ones! Luckily, my mother and I went thrifting at the dollar-a-pound yesterday and I did find a pair of flats that I suspect I’ll start wearing very soon. I just have a difficult time with the fit of most styles, where either they’re too tight and cutting into my heel/toes or my heel is loose enough to rub against the back and be hard to keep on my foot. That’s why these black flats with the little strap across work well for me. How do you get flats to stay on your feet without straps, though? Any suggestions?


This outfit was a couple of days earlier than the other. This wrap dress is probably one of my favorite dresses...I thrifted it a couple of years ago and it's gotten quite a bit of wear since then. I really like the print and the colors...and it's proof that a wrap dress is an easy option!

Tuesday Shoesday!

Another time out for these gold shoes in honor of “Shiny Shoes Tuesday!” And did I pair them with this striped shirt a couple of weeks ago as well? Hmm, I think I might have! The perils of keeping an outfit record...I suspect I'll start repeating myself a lot fairly soon. Or I'll figure out how to be more creative/wear the pieces that stay in my closet most of the time. Preferably that second one.



Kind of a busy day today, so I wanted to be comfortable! Group meeting, a demo (which ended up not happening, but still…), working on a class project, preparing for a presentation I’m giving tomorrow, starting to get set up for a big lab open house at the end of the week. Makes me wonder when I’ll have time to start writing this thesis. At least I don’t have several days of rehearsal a week now, so I might even start to have a life outside of work again? Maybe? I'm not entirely even sure what that would look like. I'll be going down to NYC to visit the boyfriend this weekend (the first weekend I've had without rehearsal for two months), so that'll be nice.






Also, another outfit to catch up!


This was Monday’s outfit for my day at the lab…felt like some color, and this red cashmere sweater seemed to suit the mood. I finished my performance thing on Sunday night, and it went pretty well! However, I was a bit down in the dumps on Monday because it was all over and I wasn’t fully satisfied with all of it…well, I was more satisfied with it as a performance event than as a fitting test of this gesture technology system I’ve been working on. Plus, I’d asked people for their critical feedback…and, well, that ends up getting me a fair amount of criticism! But I’m feeling better about it today, and I’ll have a lot of interesting things to discuss in my thesis.


For instance, something that's interesting for me to think about is what happens to the audience's perception of a performance piece (especially a dance piece) as soon as they are told, "This is a dance piece that uses technology!" I gave a very brief introduction to the work in which I introduced it as part of the evaluation of my master's thesis work in gesture technologies for performance, and asked for the audience's feedback. I purposefully did not say anything else about what the gesture system was, how it worked, what sort of things they should be looking for, lest that color their view of the piece. And yet, even just saying, "there's technology, and it has something to do with the movement," invites an audience to observe the performance in a very different way, trying to find the connections between the technology and the choreography. Additionally, asking for feedback may have put some audience members in the position of watching the piece more critically...


In any case. Lots to write about in this thesis. The writing should start soon, I hope!

What I wore to the show!

Yesterday was the second performance of the set of dance pieces I choreographed as part of the evaluation of my master’s thesis in new gesture recognition and mapping technologies…so I felt like dressing up! I’d found this amazing shiny dress at the local Goodwill a couple of weeks ago, and when it fit me I knew it was coming home with me. This seemed like an appropriate occasion to bring it out!


I'm debating cutting it down to right above the knees so I can wear it more regularly, though I'm not sure about that yet. The hem's definitely pretty frayed and has a lot of metallic threads hanging off it, so I can justify it on that front...and I do think I'd be more comfortable wearing it on a regular day if it were shorter...but I also don't want to ruin such a pretty dress! Any thoughts?


Look at that print! I love it!


The performance on Friday (the first one) went went quite well…technology worked fairly consistently, nothing crashed, the performers were great. Last night’s show went…less well, due to a set of technology issues that I didn’t have much control over. Realistically, had you been in the audience, you wouldn’t have noticed anything different (except for the long, long three-minute pause between two pieces during which I was frantically rebooting my computer...but no one knew that part of it). But that was fairly stressful on this end. I was shaking throughout the performance. One more show tonight, and hopefully all will be well! I'm going to try a few strategies to hopefully avoid (or at least fix more quickly) the problems I'd encountered yesterday, though they don't have anything to do with my code...so I may just have to keep my fingers crossed. Tonight's the one I'm most worried about, though, as my advisor will be coming to see it tonight, so I'd really like things to go smoothly.

Long week ahead...

It was in the mid-forties today, so I really wanted it to be spring..,thus, the cheery skirt! I’ve been running around quite a bit getting ready for this performance I’m having at the end of the week — quite stressful! There are a lot of details to be taken care of, from the gesture recognition technology to the lighting to the dancers to the sound design… I really hope this turns out all right. I keep going very back and forth on what I think about the project…I suppose I’m my own worst critic of my performance work. At least, I hope I’m my worst critic, and there’s no one even more critical!


I'm pretty worried about this thesis project because it doesn't quite have the emphasis on the technology that I was hoping, and I don't know exactly how folks at the lab will react to that. I should remember it'll be fine...but I'm nervous now, going back and forth from okay to not so okay.



But yes, The outfit. I quite like this skirt that I found at a garage sale last summer, so I started with that and based the rest of the outfit around it. I’m still trying to figure out a great way to wear the skirt, which may have to wait till spring or summer.

Is it spring yet?

Despite the fact that we were going to be hit by a number of inches of snow yesterday, I was drawn to this little dress I’d gotten recently at my favorite pay-by-the-pound store. (Any Bostonians/Cantabrigians out there who know about the Garment District's Dollar-A-Pound-Plus? You should come shopping with me…) I think this is intended to be a little dress for going out in the evening in the summer…it’s a thin drapy fabric, and has a semi-open back. But I put a black shirt under it, along with a ruffly skirt (for a bit of extra shape), and two pairs of tights. Thus, winter-appropriate and warm-- at least when paired with my latest thrifted coat!


Though we did get hit by a lot of snow...heavy, thick, wet snow. It's supposed to be warmer today, so perhaps it won't stick around for too long.


And yesterday was productive in terms of the thesis performance/rehearsal progress. Code and sensors and gesture recognition started doing what I wanted. Always a good thing…I might be able to pull this off yet? I actually felt really productive, which was great. And I had a good rehearsal in which the technology was (mostly) on my side. I also figured out that a change I made (trying to recognize gestures only after triggers, rather than all the time) took my program down to needing around 20% of my CPU, rather than around 80%...so.





The belt is also from the dollar-a-pound. I've gotten pretty decent at pulling out interesting things there, I think...

However, this is what happens when I'm doing self-photography around midnight:

I suspect I should leave the jumping style pictures to those slightly younger than I am! Or at least save it for when I take pictures outdoors...

Catchup from Friday

So, as I may or may not have mentioned, I joined Chictopia at the beginning of the week when I started doing these outfit posts. It's already been quite interesting. I wore this on Friday, inspired by the colors of an outfit I saw on Chictopia (from accessorypirate). I wanted to try my own outfit with navy blue and black…I took the easy route, a bit, as the dress has both colors in the pattern already. But it also gave me a reason to wear these navy heels for the first time… I happened to be walking through the campus center a few months ago and saw a couple of pairs of shoes in a box labeled “free.” So of course I took the ones in my size (especially as they were still new with tags!). However, as they’re a pretty high heel, I hadn’t gotten around to wearing them yet. I really liked them for the first part of the day, until my coworkers and I went to lunch at one of the Indian buffet places a good 15-20 minute walk from the lab. Then the fact that the shoes were not broken in yet started to get to my feet. I need to figure out how to wear new heels without them rubbing the sides of my feet too badly (though it's better in the winter when at least I have tights on...)





Another part of this outfit I like is the necklace, which is self-made from a modified vintage brooch (which had chipped paint and therefore got a new color with nail polish) and a chain my grandmother gave me. This is a trick I've been doing recently, pinning a brooch to a chain to serve as a pendant.



I wore this on Friday to work, for a demo of my research, and to class. I was planning on going to see a play after work, or potentially go meet up with some friends, but was so tired I decided just to head home. It was a long, busy week! And, actually, it's been a kind of busy weekend...though I did a fair amount more resting and reading blog posts and going thrift shopping with my mother than I probably ought to have given the amount of work that I have to do on this thesis performance before the end of the month. Which is a lot! Finishing the costume design, getting the gesture recognition software to work better, designing and programming sound and visuals and lights to be controlled by the gestures and qualities of movement (some of that is done, but there's still a lot to go), finishing the choreography and rehearsing as much as possible with the gesture sensor systems...yeah. A fair amount of work for three weeks. On the plus side, after that I'll primarily just have to write the thesis.

And back to Monday, soon, and the regularly scheduled work/class/meeting/rehearsal week!