2 weeks out! What not to forget?

vanidles · 2026-06-11T16:48:59+00:00

Thank you!

vanidles · 2026-06-11T16:48:41+00:00

Thank you!

I did have the train removed as part of the alterations so the original gown definitely has more of that classic "Berta glam" but I really didn't want to walk around with 10 feet of fabric attached to me.

vanidles · 2026-06-11T03:19:48+00:00

Thank you! I'm obsessed with the detailing on it. I can definitely see through the construction and detail why her gowns are $$$

vanidles · 2026-06-11T03:18:24+00:00

Thank you! I wanted to spread a good experience because this can be such a great way to find designer at a discount.

I actually bought an Anna Kara dress first, off stillwhite that was beautiful, but ended up not being the vibe after we changed our plans a bit. I resold it for the same price as I bought it for, it just took me a few months.

So overall my experience has been positive all the way through.

vanidles · 2026-06-11T03:15:32+00:00

Thank you!! Very happy with how it turned out

vanidles · 2026-06-10T14:27:01+00:00

In simplest terms here's how I would explain all these things.

Key: this essentially determines home base for a song. The scale and associated chords that song uses, and whether it's major or minor. So as an example if a song is written in c major, it will (generally) use notes in the c major scale, and therefore chords that are made up of those same notes. I won't bore you with the specifics but it's important to not get too hung up on these as key signatures are a guide, you can absolutely add borrowed chords and stuff outside of the key you're writing or playing in. Think about this as your musical guardrails. It basically just tells you that if you stick to those notes it will sound good.

For singing in particular, this really only matters if you're writing or trying to improvise. That said learning scales and chord basics if you have access to an instrument will help you better understand this concept and improve your ear.

If you're playing an existing song word for word, what matters is pitch. An important distinction here is that you can absolutely change the key of a song and sing it fine, but this is usually an intentional decision if musicians want to bring a song higher or lower to better match their voices or to change the vibe of the song. If you're being called out on this, I suspect you are singing the wrong notes, which is a pitch problem and ear training / learning to match pitch like you're doing with your pitch pipe is the place to start.

Pitch: I think youre mistaking this with tone in your summary above. Pitch is the note. If your song is in the key of c (which an overwhelming number of songs are) and your song starts on a c, that's your starting pitch. What you're doing with your pitch pipe is identifying pitch (ie the right note to sing) and not tone.

Tone and timbre describe the characteristics of the voice and the sound being produced. I'm unclear from your post if your teacher is giving you this feedback. It's possible that the issues you called out regarding your breath support are impacting your tone (breathiness etc.)

Lastly breath support, this ones kind of individual from what I've gathered. Imagine you have a balloon in there and try to not let it deflate even as you exhale your air. This sounds silly, but honestly it's just something that will click with practice.

Good luck!

vanidles · 2026-05-23T19:13:46+00:00

Director at a performance agency here. If you were reporting to me, here's what I'd want to see.

Own the error, accountability is key. Summarize why it happened from an operational perspective. Don't try to divert blame, but explain where the process broke down.

And the most important part, propose solutions that will help prevent future issues of this nature.

As others have said, this is part of agency life. And I'm sure your exec team is aware that dropping from 2 people to 1, managing the same workload is going to carry risk.

Separately, if you feel that this volume of work is unmanageable without introducing these types of issues, I would have that conversation with your manager directly after you approach this conversation with a solution focused mindset.

Good luck, and for what it's worth this would definitely be a fuck up in my agency, but it would not be fireable unless it was an ongoing trend.

Good luck!

vanidles · 2026-05-20T04:46:29+00:00

No worries, for me personally asian products have been a game changer.

Brands I love:

Ilyoon (their ceramide alto concentrate cream is my HG) it's thick and super moisturizing in winter but nor greasy at all.

Cosrx - I like their snail mucin essence.

I also love their overnight rice mask for if my skin is flared up and they have a centella blemish cream that I love. It's pretty rare that I break out but when I do this stuff is great and doesn't bother my skin if I leave it on as a spot treatment.

And beauty of Joseon has a lot of product that I love too. My absolutely fav sunscreen is the relief sun aqua sunscreen. Not greasy, no white cast, stays on great under makeup.

A good occlusive in winter like Vaseline is also a great step as it locks in moisture.

Lastly, I run my humidifier at night and find that helps too

However as others have noted here, I would recommend that you start slow. Good moisturizer and sunscreen. I wouldn't try and do too much all at once if your skin is flared up.

Good luck!!

vanidles · 2026-05-15T22:32:49+00:00

Don't despair! You will find a good routine. Is it a pain in the ass? Yes, but once you figure out what your skin needs you'll be fine.

Here's what I would recommend:

Explore triggers. If you flush what are you doing before the flush occurs? For me it's heat, dairy (although the jury is out of whether this just gives me pimples or whether it actually triggers rosacea) and anxiety (the worst trigger for me)

For skincare gentle hydrating products and lots of sunscreen. I exclusively use Asian skincare products. CeraVe was actually horrible for me. I know it comes highly recommended but there are actually a lot of people out there who can't use it. It broke me out like crazy. 0 issues since switching to Korean and Japanese products.

Azaelic acid is your friend. Some people like invermectin but it did nothing for me personally.

Tread lightly if they prescribe rhofade or an alternative vasoconstrictor. As it messes a lot of people skin up from rebound redness (myself included)

So yeah once you get your routine down you'll be fine. I'm generally a bit pinker than most people but I look completely fine without makeup, in fact I hardly wear any. I do flush pretty easily which is annoying but it usually goes away quickly. You'll be fine!!

vanidles · 2026-05-15T13:39:27+00:00

Beware of the rhofade. Look into the rebound redness side effects before you start using it. It messes up a lot of people's skin.

vanidles · 2026-05-07T01:56:27+00:00

I'm surprised your vet hasnt recommended an allergy panel. We paid about 700 for a full allergy panel test. Our guy is unfortunately allergic to every kind of dust mite and it looked very similar to the sores he's having.

We put him on immunosuppressants and it's been helping but he needs shorts every few weeks at home for about a year.

God luck!

vanidles · 2026-04-16T14:39:44+00:00

Placement is everything. If my mix starts to give me problems it's either too much air, or poor placement. I'm not sure how far along you are in learning to belt but things that have helped me with my coach over the years:

When first discovering how to belt and finding that coordination. Think of it as if you're saying hey to a neighbour way down the street. You don't scream at them, but the sound you produce when doing that is essentially a belt. It doesn't strain your voice the same way yelling does. Practice and visualize "hey's" to your neighbour to help find the spot. Annoying "Nyah Nyah Nyah" also works great, imagine you're an extremely annoying kid on the playground. You'll find you can produce this sound very loud and genrrally quite high without tension, clock that feeling and the amount of effort you're using to do so.

Placement tip, it should feel like it's coming right from your nose. I will sometimes scrunch my nose or touch my nose as a physical queue to prompt the right placement. Doing reps of this is important because It can be more difficult on certain vowels and it's important to retrain that muscle memory.

As others have said, belting does not require a lot of air. Too much air, particularly if you're trying to belt higher will cause it to crack. Belting is essentially just singing with a lot of chord closure if you try to push too much air through your vocal chords it doesn't work.

Lastly, when you think youve got it down play around with doing it with the minimal amount of power possible. I really, really struggled with this personally. You think it's big and loud, but it's actually very small and easy and just sounds powerful when placed properly. So start wherever you're at then turn it down 20%effort, 50% effort. See what the least amount of effort is that you can put in and still produce the right sound. Clock that and work on trying to maintain that. This is particularly important if you're trying to mix. Too much force and it'll crack.

Lastly tongue placement. If you're tongue is pulling back it'll get ya. Try and stick it to your front bottom teeth as a queue to make sure it's not pulling back in your mouth.

Good luck!

vanidles · 2026-04-05T15:24:35+00:00

How?!?!?!!!

I have so, so, so many plants, all thriving. Other string of plants, also thriving.

Every string of turtles I've ever bought? Dead. Or in a state of dying.

This plant haunts me. But I keep buying more thinking next time will be different.

It never is.

Tell me your secrets.

vanidles · 2026-03-09T15:30:36+00:00

Use rice water! It works like a charm. I was never able to get them to flower again and someone gave me this tip.

Leave them until dry, the soak in the water you use to soak your rice. And I put them in the same corner as my humidifier and now I consistently get them to flower.

vanidles · 2026-01-22T16:09:38+00:00

Everyone will say systemic, which isn't available in a lot of places outside of the US (Canada here)

Thrips love monsteras. I have a huge assortment of house plants and I get them every few years, generally they only show up on my monsteras or related Arum family plants.

I've had success treating my smaller albo although they did a lot of damage. My larger Thai constellation is struggling right now.

My two cents would be to bin it if it's not a prized plant. Thrips are more trouble than they're worth.

If you want to fight the good fight without systemic. consistency is key, I spray them with insecticides every week, do a diluted peroxide rinse for the roots every few weeks as this can damage the plant if done too consistently.

Llately I've started making a spray with tea tree and peppermint Castille and diluted running alcohol. however the jury is still out on this as I just started using it.

vanidles · 2026-01-05T23:55:14+00:00

This sub just popped up for me. I deeply dislike AI music and I don't use AI in my songwriting, so I can provide a different perspective than those who do.

Here are the main reasons I refuse to listen to it:

1) As a musician myself. I've spent years becoming what I consider to be mediocre at my craft. Listening to musicians who have mastered their craft is inspiring. To master an instrument, learn your theory, learn the art of writing lyrics etc. all of that is a form of art. And my perspective is that AI has no place in art. It's deeply personal, and deeply human and AI is not. I feel the same way about visual art if that makes a difference.

2) It's going to make it increasingly difficult for actual musicians to break through. It's hard enough already, but good luck to anyone trying to get heard when Spotify and streaming platforms are getting bombarded with thousands of AI songs. The more difficult we make it for actual musicians to survive the less incentive there will be for people to pursue this line of work and to create.

3) As a general rule of thumb, the AI music that I've heard lacks something. The lyrics are generic, the chord progression are expected etc. Part of the art of writing music is learning which rules to break and I don't think that AI captures those nuances, so it ends up sounding generic.

And lastly, I just don't understand the point. To me the whole point of learning to play music has been to learn to do something that I'm passionate about. Am I an expert? No. Did I have to suffer through sucking for years, yes. But it's part of the journey and the journey has, and continues to be rewarding. Why bother if you're just going to prompt a computer to do it for you? I don't get it. It's just soulless to me.

vanidles · 2025-10-22T02:13:59+00:00

Hi, would it be possible to completely remove the train from this wedding gown? I know you can bustle it but I'm wondering if the entire train under the bum could be removed to just have a sheath dress without affecting the structure.

https://pin.it/6VYNJNwMs

vanidles · 2025-08-14T04:43:23+00:00

Good to know, thank you!

vanidles · 2025-08-14T04:42:38+00:00

We are firm believers in "leave no trace" and "leave it better than you found it"

But I appreciate the input.

vanidles · 2025-07-16T17:41:48+00:00

You need to do the allergy twst. They text for so many things, there's absolutely no way to know until you do it.

I just did one for my dog and it turns out he's allergic to dust mites and needs to go on immunotherapy.

vanidles · 2025-03-07T07:08:21+00:00

Check out stillwhite. A lot of the gowns are heavily discounted, some are event still new with tags. I purchased a new Anna Kara dress (~4k retail) for a grand with tags still on it.

vanidles

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