Meanwhile, 24 hours earlier

Look, I did go out!

A picture taken in the Campanile Bathroom before I went out to Pink Punters, and Jane and I hooked up with Siobhan,, Joanna and Isobel.

You can tell this picture was taken on the night before, because I'm a lot less baggy-eyed than I was in the pictures I took last night.

Back by non-popular non-demand

My, hasn't the year flown? Tomorrow is Non Non Photography Day again!

Yep, once again, to counteract the worst excesses of the frankly evil Non Photography Day, I ask you all to spend July 17th photographing everything and anything, just like last year.

Once you've filled your flash cards with images documenting the minutiae of your day (and hopefully thoroughly pissed off a few Non Photography Day adherents with your incessant shutter-clicking) you can upload them to the resurrected Non Non Photography Day Flickr Group which has already started to buzz in anticipation. (Well, a few people have mentioned it, anyway.)

Lets make NNPD 2007 the happiest, snappiest one yet!

We Sparkled

Sparkle ... what can I say?

No really, what can I say? I've run out of new and interesting ways to do post-outing write ups without slipping into tired cliches.

I want to say "it was so nice to see x y and z again", but that would be boring. But then again, I did meet a lot of nice people, both old friends and new. And it was nice. Really nice. I'll just leave out the list of everyone, because you know who you are.

But that wasn't the important thing.

I want to write up a detailed account of the 3 days, but that would probably be boring too. So I'll summarize: I dressed up a lot. We went out a lot. Sparkle happened around us. And in many cases despite of us.

But that's not the important thing either.

I want to write gushing praise for people like Kim Nolan, and the AXM people, and the hundreds of other people who put an amazing amount of effort into making Sparkle happen.

That's important, but that's not it.

We took quite a few pictures:



But, believe it or not, that's not the most important thing.

This is the most important thing: I felt great. And, for the first time in a fair while, I felt like I looked great. Which, sometimes, is the most important thing of all.

This morning I are mainly knackered

Blergh... it might not look it on the map, but Britain is big. Traveling any distance across it is a tiring process.

The main purpose of the trip was a party at Jessica's to celebrate her quarter-century, which was great fun. Look, I dressed!



Yeah, I know it's not that good a picture, but it was the best of a bad bunch and, as Siobhan points out, I'm bound by The Law. If we don't post pictorial proof that we've dressed in public within 48 hours, according to Transvestite Law it never actually happened, and these big black flying monsters turn up to erase the event from history. True! My hands are tied.

Oh, and guess who we went to see on Sunday! Only one of the icons of the UK tranniesphere, that's who! She might seem to disappear occasionally, and she's getting a little long in the tooth, but she's still one of Lancaster's finest. I'm talking of course about, Erin. Well, we were kind of in the neighbourhood, seemed rude not to. She's looking well. Oh, and Siobhan was there too. Which was nice. :-)

Good, despite lack of dinosaurs

"Lets go to the Raptor Foundation!" Jane said. She always itching to get behind the wheel of my hot-rod Vauxhall Corsa to test her newly restored driving skills.

After being patiently convinced that not all raptors are two-legged dinosaur killing machines, I agreed.

It was a jolly good day out. I took some pictures...







There are a few more on Flickr, if you're interested.

Picnik

Picnik is a free online photo editing tool I've been playing with this morning.

It will do all the everyday photo-tinkering functions, without the need for a desktop app. If you've not got a tool for editing photos, or you're working away from your desktop, this is ideal.

Best of all, it integrates fully with Flickr. You can even use it to touch-up photos that are already in your stream on-the-fly (although it does seem to want to reduce the resolution of very large photos by a fraction).

I was quite impressed. And now no-one's got an excuse for uploading bad pics to Flickr! ;-)

Diffraction

Today I mostly went to the beach.

2 months in 10 seconds

In mid-November I stood beneath a tree on the bank of the Ouse, looked up and took a picture of it's gold-green canopy.

This week the Ouse burst burst it's banks, flooding the surrounding water meadows, and today Jane and I took a walk to see the results. Recognising the same tree, now bereft of leaves, I stood in nearly the same spot and took another picture.

In one way, the video below took two months to make. In another way, it took about half an hour experimenting with Morph Age morphing software.

Either way, I'm kinda proud of it. :-)



You can see the original pictures here and here.

I think I need more food

Hmmm, eggs make a meal out of anything. HP sauce doesn't.

Forget Naan Bolognese. Brown Sauce á la spread, anyone?

...

I need to go shopping again, don't I? :-S

Rain

Lots of the wet stuff about today. Luckily I'm indoors with everything I need, i.e. hot soup and big mugs of coffee.

Wide versus deep

I pointed out a strange fact to Jane today: because of this site, more people know me as Becky than know me as Simon.

She agreed, but noted that although fewer people knew me as Simon, the ones that did knew me a lot better.

Which is also true.

One type of knowledge is wide but shallow, the other deep but narrow. Overall, they're probably roughly equal.

That's all there is to this post... I thought it might go somewhere but it didn't. Ho hum. :-)

Nothing camper than a Campanile

They've done it up! It's all leather sofas and twirly cane things in vases. Feels a bit weird drinking here in male mode.

How to make your own Fetish PVC Witch costume

Hello boys and girls!

With Halloween rapidly approaching, you might be stuck for costume ideas. A lot of outfits can be quite expensive, but I’ve got an idea for a great costume that you can make cheaply at home. This outfit would make an ideal present for a tranny in your family, so you might want to make sure that they leave the room before we continue.

Are they gone? Great!



Take a look at this outfit that Becky’s modelling, looks fantastic doesn’t it? You’d expect to pay at least 2 guineas for an outfit that good from a posh PVC shop in Knightsbridge. But would you believe it cost less than 20 pounds? That’s right!

First you need to make your PVC dress. For this I used a standard PVC maid’s uniform, of the kind that everyone has stashed away somewhere! If you’re not sure where there’s one in your house, just ask mummy or daddy!

One you have the PVC maid’s uniform, discard the satin pinny and badly-made lace headband, as it won’t be needed for this costume. You might want to wash off any obvious stains, although these add to the character of the final outfit!

Next, you’ll need to make the underskirt or “petticoats”. For this you will need about 4 metres of gauzy material, which you can get from that shop in town with the faded sewing patterns in the window that’s been going for donkey’s years and seems to keep afloat even though hardly anyone visits apart from little old ladies on market day who go in for bizarrely coloured wool and a natter with the strangely fey elderly gentleman who’s worked there forever.

He’ll also sell you some black ribbon, about 3 metres will do. He’ll also try to show you some pictures of him and his young gentleman friend on holiday in Tuscany, but politely decline and leave the shop swiftly.

You might want to get an assistant (sometimes called a Tranny Wallah) to help you with this part. You need to fold the material twice along it’s whole length, so that you have 4 metres of quadruple-thick gauzy material. Pin the material near the folded edge to keep it in place, and then sew along the whole length about 1 inch away from the folded edge.



Now you can feed the ribbon down along the sewn edge of the material and gather it together. The gathered edge can be adjusted so that it fits neatly around the waist, and then the ribbons tied and cut to length.

Next the hat. Like me you’re probably thinking “there’s bugger all chance of me sourcing a PVC witch’s hat”, but actually I found one in the first costume shop I walked into. Which just goes to show that children today are all going to grow up perverts.



Finally, add a pair of 5-inch heeled shoes that you just know are going to be torture after about 10 minutes, a set of cheap false nails from a joke shop, and a pair of expensive tights that cost extra because some “designer” put extra holes in them, et voila!

Witching hour

It was great fun. Expect full blog post later this week.

China Girl

I have a habit of pinning things to the notice board in my kitchen and never taking them down, so that new items get pinned to the strata of old ones.

I had a bit of a clear-out yesterday and re-disovered this little gem...

er...

Some explanation may be necessary.

I was working on multimedia learning package in the late nineties, and we were looking through a set of stock photography for pictures of rabbits. We came across this picture of a bunny lounging on a cushion in what looked liked Chinese boudoir.

The rabbit seemed to have a strangely sultry expression. Someone (probably me) suggested that it looked like high-class porn for bunny fanciers. And from that this spoof magazine cover developed.

Don't look at the close up, whatever you do.

Yeah, I know, it's wrong. I'm not into rabbits. Honest. :-/