4月と5月の雑談

4月と5月の雑談

hey guys Teresa here welcome back to my channel Lost My Thread i’m here today with a chatty catchup video telling you what I got up to in the months of April and May [Music] i usually include these chatty catchup sections as part of my mix videos but I had so much to share across the two videos from April and May I decided I needed to split them up so this is not going to be anything about sewing if you want to see the sewing update I will put a link up here and down below today I’m just going to catch you up with what I’ve been doing and I have some bits to cross off my 25 for 2025 one of the reasons I wanted to put these two months together is cuz there are quite a lot of things that I started in April but didn’t actually finish until May and that is both with like my sewing but also things within my general life so I’m going to start by catching up with some of the things from my 25 for 2025 if you are not familiar with that again I’ll put a link down below to the video where I explained a bit more about it but essentially it’s 25 things I’m hoping to do this year and the first thing I will mention is my Tim Burton the year of Tim Burton we’re calling it where I’m working through all of Tim Burton’s films i will put up which ones I watched in April and May because I can’t remember them guys i’m working through these we have one left to go and they’re not always in order the ones that we’ve been watching and it is definitely something that has felt a bit like all right we said we’re going to do it we’ve got to do it i’ve not been loving the tail end i think probably my favorite of the batch maybe was Beetleju Beetlejuice and that is very much there for Beetlejuice fans so it’s a bit of like a you know a nice one to see if you’ve watched the first one but it’s not that great as a standalone movie i also liked Sweeney Todd probably better than I expected to it wasn’t something that I was expecting to enjoy but it was quite fun and it was pretty funny i enjoy Tim Burton when he’s a little bit more funny we have been working through our Tim Burton bingo cards which I told you guys about and we got a bingo so my husband and I just very much coincidentally happened to get bingo at the exact same time which was our fifth appearance of Helena Bottom Carter i’ll pop up our bingo cards from the time I think I took a picture we’ve still been working through them since just to see if we can fill the boards i don’t think we will cuz the was these were things that we just dreamed up that we were expecting to see in Tim Burton movies and they’re not all necessarily going to be there but because we got a bingo at the same time we decided that we were just going to share the prize which was a jigsaw puzzle so in the month of April I was putting together the hardest jigsaw puzzle that I have which is a jigsaw puzzle of the wave it’s a painting Japanese painting you are quite likely to be familiar with i really like the painting and it was a really satisfying jigsaw puzzle to put together but boy did it take time i actually started off pretty early in April and I finished it partway through May and that was just because of all the white space took forever i took a photo of where I’d gotten to at the end of May or end of April sorry just so you could see where I was and how I was having to put the pieces together and I was basically putting together based on like the dimensions or the type of piece so that way I could see what might saw in i will say this was a fantastic jigsaw puzzle one of the best jigsaw puzzles as far as like pieces fitting together because so much of these were essentially like the same looking piece how it was possible to be able to put one in and think “No no this one doesn’t fit this one does.” I honestly cannot tell you how they did it each piece was so unique it when you knew when it fit and you knew when it didn’t it was really satisfying even though it did take absolutely forever even the blue and white portion of the wave took such a long time but it was a nice one to make i honestly did really enjoy it i was just enjoying the slowness of the process so then in May I’d finished that one and I decided that we should just go ahead and roll on to the next one and my husband and I worked together on the Tim Burton jigsaw puzzle that I picked up from the design museum that was so perfect it had a lot of the Tim Burton tropes that we put on our bingo cards it was a fun jigsaw puzzle to put together it wasn’t as good as far as the pieces slotting in it really wasn’t too bad but the thing that was the most annoying was that it was missing a piece this was a brand new jigsaw puzzle one of the side pieces did not fit i have gone back to the design museum and I think I need to go back on a day when a manager is in and do some kind of exchange but I’ve left my my jigsaw puzzle as it was completed because I don’t really want to have to undo the whole thing and then redo it all to get the extra piece if they decide that I need to give them the pieces back with the exchange then I obviously will just have to do that and I will just do the jigsaw puzzle another time but as it stands I’ve left it like nearly completed i think that was a 750 piece so 649 pieces in place hopefully waiting to get their replacement but it was still fun either way we really enjoyed it and my husband has now got the real jigsaw puzzle bug and he’s been enjoying making jigsaw puzzles with me since pretty continuously so it’s nice to have a buddy when I’m putting these together because making a jigsaw puzzle a month is on my 25 for 2025 so I’m really kind of nailing those bits and it was a fun one that jigsaw puzzle definitely even if it turned out to be not fully complete we did enjoy the process for sure something else that was on my 25 for 2025 I was really hoping to do this year is to find cardio exercise that works for me i love my yoga i do my yoga i’m not going to stop doing my yoga i think it’s great for my joints i think it’s great for stretching deep breathing like there’s so much that goes on in yoga that I think is very beneficial however it’s not really like intense cardio it doesn’t get my heart pounding doesn’t get me breathing heavily and I know that type of exercise is really good for me in other ways so I had been thinking of wanting to do some swimming i love swimming generally i like being in the water i grew up with a pool in our backyard in Chicago that I spent so much time in in the summers but my pool was an above ground pool it wasn’t a huge pool i couldn’t do laps or anything like that but it was fun to play and splash around in i know I’m a bit of a water baby so I knew that I would enjoy swimming but I never felt like I knew how to swim laps very well like breaststroke i took swimming lessons just for like safety basically if you’re going to have a pool and so I can tread water I can do the doggy paddle I can do the butterfly I can do a bit of a a backstroke but I felt like if I was going to be doing proper laps in a swimming pool I really wanted to get some lessons and I’d looked into this previously and didn’t really see anything around but I found that my local pool does offer adult swimming lessons from like beginner to intermediate and I thought “Okay cool i’m not an absolute beginner but I feel like I’m not I’m not an expert i don’t feel like I could do the lanes.” When I’ve tried to do it before I felt like I was overstraining myself not doing the right stuff as far as like the rhythm with the breathing and things like that the main issue that was holding me back though was finding a bathing suit i’d mentioned before on my channel I put on a little bit of weight i’m basically a size bigger than I was maybe a year and a half ago and before that and unfortunately the bathing suits that I made for myself no longer fit i mean in fairness those aren’t really like sporty swimsuits anyway and so I wanted to find something i didn’t want to sew a bathing suit especially because I’m in like body fluctuation phase at the moment i just wanted to buy a bathing suit but I was not anticipating how difficult that was going to be buying a bathing suit with a fuller bust and getting good coverage and support is really really difficult i was finding a lot of swimsuits were like cut in way too much like total side boob in a ridiculous way not much support at the front either so things were kind of either like revealing too much or not really feeling like I was being held in tightly enough i struggled i ordered from like three different bathing suit companies did not like what I was finding i ended up finding one from a random I think it’s called like Bratop or something website i’ll put up the name of the brand of the bathing suit that I liked because that was definitely a winner for me and it’s just like a basic black swimsuit but it works it does a trick for what I wanted and then I went along to the swimming lessons which basically as soon as I explained my swimming experience she was like “Yeah this is not the class for you.” The instructor was saying I was I was not supposed to be in that class but I paid for the class she was going to give me a hand we were in like a 4ft pool so it wasn’t really a proper deep pool it’s a kiddie pool training pool but really honestly I felt like I just needed to understand what I needed to do as far as like the rhythm with my breathing when to breathe how to like hold my neck straight and all those things she gave me some pointers to basically get me to the stage where I felt like actually I can just do some laps and practice now i know what I need to do so it was definitely worthwhile doing that and since then I have been doing laps in the pool it’s a pretty big pool it’s like 33 m which is quite significant to me like compared to what the the pools that I had growing up in Chicago when we go to the local pool they were not that big at all so doing like a a lap back and forth or like a you know a full lap around is quite a lot for me so I’m doing laps like one end and back i’m taking breaks where I need to i might get out of the pool do a little bit of reading for a bit and then go do another lap for me it’s not about necessarily the number of laps that I’m doing or comparing myself to anybody else the whole point for me is pushing myself so if I go and do a lap and I’m feeling out of breath and I feel like that’s enough then that’s enough but I am trying to do like three at the moment if I can do I feel quite happy with myself but the main thing is I feel like I’m definitely pushing my body my heart is pounding i’m breathing a bit more deeply i’m needing to take breaks and that is telling me that I am making myself do this cardio exercise that I really wanted to do so I’m going to cross that one off the list because basically since I’ve started doing it properly in May into June now I’ve been doing it twice a week and really enjoying it so I’m going to say that’s definitely one to cross off so number 22 find cardio exercise that works for me and right under that one number 23 I also did in May which was to visit Q Gardens in the daytime i’ve been to Q Gardens quite a lot and I’ve shared on my channel for the Christmas lights i’ve gone at nighttime and had a little walk around it’s a botanical garden in London it’s a really well-known one it’s a beautiful botanical garden but I hadn’t actually seen it i felt like I’d only just wandered around in the dark and it was really nice to go in the daytime there’s it’s huge really so we didn’t get to see everything there’s so much to it it was fun to be able to go into some of the houses as well and see what’s in there i think it would be a place that would be just amazing to go all different times of the year i would love to go back again at some other point but it’s nice to be able to cross that one off the list as well so number 23 visit Hugh Gardens in the daytime so that is two more now crossed off the list i do feel like the list is looking pretty bare but I think so much of that is because a lot of the things I’m doing I’m doing like peace meal over the month and I know there’s other progress on there that isn’t necessarily easy to see one of them is number 25 to read 25 books this year and I did finish one book in May that I started in April it basically took me the whole month of April and the beginning of May to finish it and that is because it is quite a chunky book it is Hopscotch by Julia Cordazar i feel like the best way to describe this is like a deconstructed novel so it is a novel but it’s not necessarily in order that you’re going to read it so when you start reading the book it tells you you can read it from beginning to end if you want to however they also have a layout which is the recommended layout where you read a chapter and at the end of the chapter it will tell you which one to go to next so you’re doing a little bit of like a all back fourth middle moving all around some of the chapters are like a fair decent you know 10 pages or so some of the chapters are just like a paragraph or half a page so it’s a little bit hard to know where you are in the book so I often will look at like where my bookmark is and know like okay I’m about this way through i have an idea of how much more I’m going to be reading but this one it was not very easy to tell but they do have at the beginning they showed you like the order of the chapters in case you got a little bit lost or confused but I think if you did get lost you probably wouldn’t remember which chapter you were at last time so best is to just try to keep to it and try to keep organized with your bookmark so you do not get lost i will say on the whole I wasn’t super interested in the main narrative of the story the kind of characters that they were telling the story of they were okay it was kind of interesting but I was more just enjoying the process and the style of it and there was basically like the novel itself was at the beginning and then at the end there were some parts that some of it were characters and like things going on kind of interspersed from the novel but some of it was just like poetry or like sections from other fake books or just I don’t know like what their definition of love is and things like that so it was a little bit all over the place but like I said it was a fun and interesting read i wouldn’t necessarily say it was my favorite book but it was fun and I’m definitely glad that I read it and after that I moved on to some old favorites so I got these books for my birthday i had previously read them from the library but I wanted to own them cuz I really enjoyed them and it is the Madam Trilogy from Margaret Atwood now this was the first Margaret Atwood that I ever read and I hadn’t really I kind of heard her name around but I wasn’t that familiar with her this was before Handmaid’s Tale came out as a TV series it was after Handmaid’s Tale had come out because that came out like in the 80s but these books came out in like the 2010s they over a period of time i think the last one might have come out in 2013 and I think I read these books not long after that and the second one I’d seen in the library which is how I found out about it and I picked it up i read the back i was intrigued went to the front desk to check it out and the librarian made some kind of comment that made it very clear that this was actually not the first book in a series so I ended up having to then look up and see okay what what actually should I be reading before this and I ended up taking both books out which meant I had 3 weeks to read two very long books but well and truly these books are so enjoyable to read i love these books i absolutely breezed through them in the 3-week period and then was really excited to get the third part of the trilogy and as I reread them it was very much the same experience i was keeping these books around with me wherever I was so I could just flip through read a little bit more it is such a fun trilogy i think the thing that’s so nice about it is that it works so well as a trilogy and it it’s the first book is from one character’s point of view the second book incorporates a lot of the things from the first but from other characters points of view and the third is kind of similar but a little bit ties it together a little bit more and adds in some extra characters as well but I felt like I really did enjoy these these are basically dystopian future novels which can be a little bit tiring there’s a lot of those out there i don’t think it was as kind of outdone overdone at the time when these books did come out but I do generally just really enjoy Margaret Atwood’s writing style i think she has really great characters and I think these were really fun the only thing I will say is that there was some really dark stuff in the first book some really nasty stuff with like mentions of things about child pornography which was a bit tough to read i do think all this was intended to like paint the picture of what was going on in the world at the time but I just want to give that as a bit of a warning for heads up if you are interested but it’s weird that basically these books are about some pretty dark stuff but they were quite fun and enjoyable there’s a lot of humor sprinkled in there as well there’s a lot of humor in Margaret Atwood’s writing in general and I think these are my favorite books of hers that I have ever read and I’ve read a lot of her books so it was nice to actually get these again so I did end up finishing the first book Mad at No Orcs and Craig in May and then the Year of the Flood the second book I finished also in May and I read the majority of the third book Madam in May i did finish it in June but I’m going to mention it cuz I feel like they kind of go together and it wasn’t far into June by the time I finished it considering the amount of pages I’m pretty impressed with how much I did manage to get through for me it’s about the amount of books on my 25 for 2025 and I am putting down below like my like rating out of five for all the books that I’ve been reading with a little tally of where I am for my 25 books and I think I’m on track and definitely I do really recommend these books if you are curious to check out more Margaret Atwood they are fantastic i also celebrated a birthday in May and I had a very fun birthday my husband and I went to the Sachi Gallery which is one of my favorite art galleries in London we went out for Mexican food for dinner which is my favorite kind of food so definitely a big win and then after that we went to go see Buork’s Cornicopia which is a concert film it was such a great show i really enjoyed it i love Buork so I’m definitely I was going to enjoy it it was really interesting visually so impressive if you’re a Buork fan highly highly recommend she’s such an incredible artist and it was a really fun birthday all around one other big thing that I did in May was to paint my living room this is something I’ve been talking about because my husband and I got some new furniture last year we had previously had like kind of hand-me-down things and it was nice to be able to pick out things that were more our style and we generally tend to go for things that are quite colorful and we weren’t quite sure what to do with the walls that would kind of bring everything together and we decided on a kind of color that we wanted and we were trying to find the exact match and the one thing that we decided was really the closest that we wanted to go for was a Weezer album cover it’s they call it the teal album and I’ll put the image up so you guys can see i I mean the album is fine and I’m not like super crazy about the album and Weezer are a fun band they’re not my favorite band but it was just the right color so it just was what it was and so we ended up finding it is B andQ has this brand of paint it’s called Valspar and you can do like a dropper thing where you can upload an image and it will find the exact match for you and so we found one called Sail the Seas that I think is honestly like spot-on such an impressive match it was a whole thing to paint our living room mainly just because the amount of stuff the amount of media like books and CDs and the TV and video games and DVDs it took a lot to move it all we did it over a few days it was more complicated than expected because then the curtain rail fell down and we had to replace that but it looks so good we are so happy with the outcome i love the color and I feel like it really brightens the room up and then one other fun little thing from the month of May if you are a sewing magazine reader and you have seen this copy of the Simply Sewing magazine I think it’s the May edition issue 134 if you are to flip yourself through to page 53 you may see a familiar face so I got my photo in the Simply Sewing magazine and that was because of these two gorgeous ladies Sam and Ruan the Yorkshire so girl and Frugalisima who organized the so frugal challenge the article is all about that challenge it’s a really lovely article and I’m so happy for them so excited to see that they got to be in there but they were asking for some examples of things that people have made for the So Frugal challenge and they’d asked me if I would be happy to upload some photos for them or send some photos through to the magazine that they could use for the it’s the Westcliff jacket that I made from the Peppermint magazine i love that jacket such a cool jacket it’s all completely patchwork using scraps from old previous projects all made of corduroy it’s definitely one of my favorite things that I’ve made for the So Frugal challenge and so I’m glad that they asked me for that particular garment i thought that was a nice one to be able to include and that was just a fun little bonus to get to see myself in the magazine this is going to be my last video for a little while because I’m going to be going away soon so there will be a gap it might be like 2 3 4 weeks depending on how I can get myself together once I do come back from my trip i know I’m going to have lots of wonderful things to share with you guys i would love to hear what you guys have planned over the next month get me to feel excited about your sewing about your life what’s going on with you guys i feel like it’s really nice to be able to share the other side as much as it is fun to share all the sewing stuff i hope you guys did enjoy getting a bit of a catch up with me please do give me a like if you enjoyed my video make sure you’re subscribed to my video to see upcoming videos and I’ll see you guys as soon as I’m back bye

This is a chatty catch up video with an update on my 25 for 2025 goals.

Mentioned in this video:
April Sewing Makes

Make 9 and 25 for 2025

January Makes where I share our Tim Burton Bingo cards

———————————————————————————–

Books I read this finished this month (with star ratings out of 5)
9. Hopscotch by Julio Cortezar (3.5 stars)
10. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (5 stars)
11. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (4.5 stars)
12. Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood (5 stars)

———————————————————————————–

If you are enjoying my videos and want to support my channel, please consider donating to my Ko-fi account: https://ko-fi.com/lostmythread And consider telling a friend, which will help my channel to grow!

Thank you so much for watching! If you want to see more of my makes, you can follow me over on instagram: www.instagram.com/lostmythread . You can also send me a DM there or shoot me an email at theresa.lostmythread@gmail.com , if you want to have a more detailed chat!