Sunday, March 18, 2012

Shopping, shopping, shopping...

I think I'd heard mumblings about asos once in a while in my monkeysphere, but assuming it was a US-only and mainstream-size-only website, I didn't check it out.  I could not have been more wrong!  Thanks to one of Plus Model Magazine's Fashion Friday posts, I saw an awesome dress on a woman in my size, and followed the click-through just out of curiosity.  Said dress no longer seems to be available, but wouldn't you know, asos also has a German site with free shipping and free returns inside Germany!  Color me thrilled!  Not only that, the clothes are totally cute, way more exciting than anything I've seen on my usual German go-to sites, Happy Size and Ulla Popken!  There were a number of pieces I loved, but which were unfortunately polyester, which I detest, but there are also a number of pieces which I immediately put into my shopping cart.  I will, however, be saving said shopping cart until after my Paris trip.

Happy Size and Ulla Popken, I might add, are my go-to sites because there's not much else to choose from in Germany (and sadly, the situation is better here than it was in Denmark!).  In all truth, though, I find the former to be mostly boring, and the latter ranging from mostly boring to occasionally godawful ugly (to say nothing of how their sizing charts lied to me, but that's a rant for another day).  Would that there were fantastic new designers like Domino Dollhouse popping up on the German scene (I also intend to throw together a cart for purchasing in about May or so, as I'll be stateside in June)!  I will keep my eyes peeled for them!

On Thursday, I will be travelling by fast train to Paris!  I have three custom Google maps prepared for the trip: one with plus-size stores; one with secondhand, thrift, vintage, and consignment stores; and one catch-all with yarn stores, fabric stores, and a confisserie that I simply must visit.  After printing them out, I even used color-matched markers to sketch in the Metro lines as best I could.  I also plan to go back and number the tags and the list, as Google Maps didn't seem to have an option for this (note to self: have the guys submit this idea to the Google Maps development team).  Naturally I won't be able to hit them all, but there are a number of places where several shops from each map are clustered: Rue de Rivoli, Boulevard Haussmann, and a few others.

Also, Christian's darling little sister Ulrike bought us a Moleskine City Notebook for Paris and filled it with must-sees and must-dos, recalled from the summers she lived there while working at EuroDisney.  I had no idea Moleskine actually made such a thing!  I'll definitely have to get one for the NYC trip!  And possibly one for Chicago, and one for Copenhagen, and one for Berlin, and and and...  ok, let's just stop there. Ooh, one for Munich!  I should fill in one of these for handing off to guests when we get out-of-country visitors.  Oops, didn't stop.  But really, these are too awesome!

On the workshop front: together with the guys and Lars's mentee Bartosz, we packed up my workshop space and brought most everything back, save for the IKEA furniture which will need disassembling, and a couple other pieces of furniture that didn't fit.  Most everything is now in my new garage space, save for the things I'm putting in my room, like my yarn, my knitting books, and my comfy chair.  The garage is definitely a short-term solution, not a long-term one; the floor is warped from housing a car, it smells musty in ways that make me a little worried about my fabric, and the lighting is terrible (thankfully it's about time to stop using my light therapy box for the year, so I have a portable bright light unit I can put down there.  And given how rarely the guys and I game at home, I think they can resign themselves to temporarily losing the gaming table to my work.

On the work front:  I need to make a splash graphic, and pick out a CSS template for Lars to apply, as well as help him design the data structure to house the survey responses, but it mightn't be too long before we're ready to go live with the body type survey!

No comments:

Post a Comment