Recently, I submitted an entry into a sewing contest. For it, I motivated myself to finally learn how to make an ao dai (ow-yai, meaning long garment), the national garment of Viet Nam, my country of origin. I used a pattern for a base, Folkwear 139. However, I customized it to fit a 5’10” friend who was my sewing model. I also fixed how the shoulders were done because sewing it as instructed left a very jagged shoulder “dart”, which was essentially what I was doing more than sewing it together as a seam. Then I extended the neck line from the body up so it didn’t leave such a big collar. Finally, on my real garment, I redrafted the front and back pieces to remove the vertical darts so as not to disturb the beautiful big print, and took out a dart on the sleeve.
Author: Digital Citizen
BBMI is the New BMI
You might have heard by now about a new, pretty extensive, study that suggests having belly fat is more deadly than general fat all over the body, for impact by obesity. To summarize, forget Body Mass Index (BMI) that is a ratio between your height and weight. Just make sure your waist measurement divided by your hips measurement, is less than 0.9 for men, and less than 0.85 for women who generally have wider hips than men relative to their waists.
Basically, it’s your belly to butt or bum measurement ratio, which is why I’m calling it the Belly Bum Measurement Index or BBMI for short.
A Long Form Census Restoration Joke Meme?
Can someone create a meme about the restoration of the long form Census in Canada?
FYEAH!
As an analyst, I know the value of this form and what Stephen Harper was trying to do in abolishing it, making sure nobody has any evidence to point to the impact of anything he did while Prime Minister. So today, in celebration of the restoration of the long form Census, I offer up this joke to make sure to send Stephen Harper one of these mandatory forms once I saw the fabulous photo on the CBC. 😉
(not sure who to credit the photo as it was only an icon to the story I saw on Facebook)
My Haiku Collection about my Trip to Viet Nam
I have just started to the haiku collection I wrote mostly in March 2015, during my life changing return to Viet Nam, 35 years after fleeing as a child refugee. It is called Tales of an Expat Tourist.
This is the backgrounder to the collection on my poetry blog. It has a link to the first of 62 haiku in the collection, with notes to give more information on its subject matter, as will be done with all subsequent haiku in the collection.
If you like poetry, very personal travelogue style writings, Viet Nam and/or Vietnamese culture, I hope you will give it a read. Thank you.
What Symbolic Meaning Would You Give Stitches?
That title probably has a lot of people asking W? If not with the additional two letters. It was an accidental idea I just had upon seeing some graphic about tattoo symbols meaning various things, but which resembled stitches on a sewing machine stitch guide!
Life is full of symbols. I don’t have to enlighten anybody to that. But there are none for stitches so I figured, what’s a few more? So try this exercise. Look at the stitch graphic below and tell me what symbolic meaning you would assign to various stitches (by their number)
Digital Citizen 