broken_moons

So... yay, a new year? Had a bit of a rocky start to mine, due to a bit of a freak-out over taxes when something which is stressful for me to start with did not go well at all. I had planned to do some sewing on Saturday as well, but because of the freak-out I didn't start until late in the afternoon.

And then, in the middle of shortening the first sleeve of the white Skyrim dress, I noticed this:


The fabric of the neckline just frayed straight through the stitching :(. I can see two ways to fix it: the first, and probably best way, is to take off the facing, design and make a new neckline shape and embroidery, and sew the new facing on, this time with larger seam allowances. This will take long, though, and I'm scheduled to wear this again on the 24th, so I'll probably go with option 2: tuck in the raw edges, hand-sew it closed and add a blanket stitch along the inside of the neckline both to strengthen the existing seams and hide the fixed area. I can always decide to go for option 1 later, right?

However, after the day I'd had, discovering this meant I shoved my sewing aside and spent the rest of the day reading the latest Shousetsu BangBang issue.

And speaking of Shousetsu BangBang! They announced the schedule for 2015 the other day, and their April issue is going to be about language. Which means they'll accept foreign-language stories or bilingual stories, either with or without translations.

Remember when I wrote Change of Heart, based on a Dutch song about a guy with a wooden heart? I used some Dutch terms and names in it, but even when I wrote it I knew I wanted to do a story where Dutch played a bigger role than that, I just never had the inspiration or push to actually figure it out.

But now! Now I have a specific reason to do this, and a deadline and all. So I signed up, and have been brainstorming ever since. Not sure quite yet what kind of story it's going to be, but I'm having fun already :D

So my new laptop came with Windows Vista. Dandy. I'd already plugged my tablet in for some quick drawing, but I hadn't installed it yet. And until I do, I can't use pen pressure, and I can't sync the screen dimensions of the tablet to the laptop screen. Thought I'd do that tonight.

My tablet will not install on a laptop with Windows Vista.

ARGH.

Is there a way to upgrade my tablet in some way so that it will run on Vista? I don't want to turn around my whole system to go back to XP, and I don't want to buy a new tablet when this one works perfectly. Except on Vista.

ARGH. ARGH.

And the whole point of me getting a shiny new laptop with Vista and a big screen was that I could use Photoshop on it! But without pen pressure (and a bunch of other stuff) that's worth nothing.

ARGH.

EDIT: Okay, I've got a driver for Vista. Will probably tackle installing that tonight. Fingers crossed.

On a slightly related note: last night while messing around in Photoshop, the shortcuts [ and ] for adjusting brush size stopped working. It's done that in the past, too. Nothing I did short of closing Photoshop and reopening it got rid of it. Does anyone know what causes this? It's really annoying when you're painting and keep forgetting that the shortcut doesn't work, so you try it and then you have to do it the long way after all.