Friday, December 16, 2016

berkat-berkat

sneaking an entry during lunchtime while drinking my vitagen collagen and uh, no food. maybe instant pasta later on in the day?

these past few weeks have been so hectic and my body failed me - i fell sick and finally took an MC on wednesday and got some rest. nose is currently still a leaky tap. been working from home for the past 2 days since and i guess this freedom to work off site has really been a blessing (we get to take 5 days a month of work from home, and usually i take them during reporting period, which is now).

since i've decided to use less instagram and blog more, here are some things i've been up to!:

a shoe box?

my parents in law are super sweet. they usually pack food for us when we go over so we can get to taste home, and this week we didn't go over cos of our schedules. hy's papa dropped by with 2 portions of macaroni in a shoe box haha i really need to start cooking 1 dish meals for my husband soon

meeting up with my jellyfish buds

 because julie lo is late

 just right for 3 people

 fabric shopping for my adorable baby niece! need to start sewing the christmas clothes ASAP.

the husband saying a little prayer every morning hehe

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Other sartorial escapades

My bridesmaids' dresses, lhy's and Gabriel's (my ring bearer) suits were less of an emotional affair.

What i regret though, is that we didn't carve out time to take much photos together in our outfits.

My bridesmaids were super relaxed and we didn't have to go shopping cos I just picked their dresses from Taobao. Most of the stuff there were ugly and I decided to go for a sweet heart neckline since it was supposed to be flattering for most body types. I wanted them to look chio and not puffy!

Gorgeous girls

There was still my sister and Zel but they were so busy with the church prep. For Cass, Juls and Hui Yi, I didn't give them much to do. Their objective was just to look pretty. Ha.

Anyway, the Taobao dresses were pretty cheap - all in with shipping worked out to be around $28 per dress. But most needed pretty simple length alterations and we paid additional $10 per dress.

Gabriel's spiffy suit was also from Taobao and cost about $35 all in. He looked so smart! I also bought him new shoes for about $25 but they were too small for him!

As for han yang's suits, we procrastinated for so long! He wanted to tailor make and I went to enquire rates with CYC (which is kind of my dream gift for him, with a monogram shirt) but they were so expensive (1k up per suit). My colleague also recommended a thai tailor who would make trips to Singapore for tailoring appointments but I wasn't very impressed with their quality.

Went online to search for some good tailors in Singapore but they all didn't fit the budget. I found out there were a few tailors in JB and one of them was Men's Focus in Holiday Plaza. Even though I knew Holiday Plaza as a lok-kok, run down shopping centre in the middle of JB, I liked that they took photos of the suits they tailored and posted them online cos you can actually inspect the cut and quality and also get a sense of the tailor's style. Overall I was impressed as the suits looked extremely fitted and smart. There was also a sense of the price range from some of the comments online (his prices started from S$250 and up), and this made me feel safe knowing the tailor was not going to overcharge me if he knew I was from Singapore. With that we took a trip down!

Haha before we went into the shop we pakat to speak Mandarin with malaysian accent. But in the end fail cos tak practice. Anyway I was very impressed when we met the shop owner Lawrence Chia (i think). He is this no nonsense sartorial-nazi who couldn't be bothered to upsell stuff.

We requested for a bunch of fabrics and he handed the swatches to us, and just rattled off the pros and cons of the different qualities. The prices were all written at the back of the swatch booklets.

lhy and I decided to go with 2 suits with quality that was mid-range:

1) Tweed like dark blue with hints of black (for dinner). We paired this with a brown inner vest.
2) Teal, for the church wedding. This was really a 20 second gamble cos after 20 minutes of looking, we were so set on boring brown, and suddenly came across this colour, and because lhy has a red skin tone and so fair, it looked pretty good when we held the swatch against his skin

Lawrence proceeded to take lhy's measurements and I was so impressed because he spent almost 20 minutes on it. lhy told me that usually his tailors take much less time. He was very meticulous and kept asking about his preferences - whether pants should be tapered, whether button should be 2 holes or 3, whether collar should be thinner. He took great pains to explain which was more traditional and which was more in fashion.

I took this time to explore his work space and noticed that he was extremely neat too! Things were really in order, and his own shirt didn't have crinkles and his hair flopped neatly in place. In my mind chided myself for being such a mess whenever I sew. My workspace is perpetually full of thread, pins, loose cloth and I could go hours without eating and washing up. I almost always look like a monster when I emerge from my room. Much to learn! For Lawrence, I think he's the one that does the drawing and cutting, and he probably sends them to a factory to get them sewn.

A happy us having settled everything in a day!

And this was how his suits turned out! My extremely handsome husband.




If i'm not wrong, we paid about S$400 for each suit, and an additional S$100 for the vest. we probably could have gotten something within that range in Singapore for lousier quality materials, but it was extremely satisfying to pay the same for much better workmanship and quality of cloth. And much to learn from Master Chia!

Men's Focus Branded Taste Tailor
G59, Holiday Plaza, Jalan Dato Sulaiman,
80250 Taman Century, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

Monday, December 12, 2016

mighty morphin

the obsession started 2 years ago, when his dad pulled out an album full of his baby photos.

i couldn't get over how much his features hadn't changed much and his ears were already so huge and flappy then. whenever i missed him when he was on his work trips, i would look at his baby photos hahah! how can anyone look so cute:
apple face

recently i got his dad to show me more photos and i found out that lhy used to be an old man before his cute days:
 HAHA i was so shocked when i saw this photo cos i couldn't recognise this old man at all. look at his double chin and how the width of his face is wider than the height. if i had a fat and pale baby like that i would be so amused.


 baby fats squishing his already small eyes and his lack of a neck. and look at how the face and shoulder width are almost in the ratio 1:1. sharp and defined nose starting to take shape.


 this is where he starts to morph into a baby and his ears start to stick out and he starts to have really cute expressions.

 on some days he looked like baby swee pea

and his eyes became slightly bigger cos some of the baby fats disappeared

 and then he learnt how to roar like a dinosaur

because i want my eyes to look even smaller. 

i would be very pleased if our not-so-near-future offspring resembled him.

so these few days he has been away again and i have been looking at these photos, laughing to myself. 
love-sickness makes one crazy. i can't wait for him to be back!

in other news, i've uninstalled facebook and instagram mobile in efforts to increase productivity. i've since finished 1/2 a book in a span of a few days of travel time, cleaned up the house a little and traded my beloved sewing machine for a better model.

loving my new lifestyle.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

小白船
what my dad used to sing me to sleep.

a lovely cacophony of our different cultures. 

heard this live 2 weeks ago at the SSEAYP Singapore opening! 
Totally wasn't expecting such a treat, but they sounded even more exceptional in real life. 
I must say, watching Teng's inception till now and just hearing how their music has morphed over the years makes me feel strangely proud of the few whom i once did music with.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

breathless

Work has been consuming me these past weeks as I spend a bulk of my time settling things not within my scope at work. I know I gotta just pull things together now in this season to help out in areas that lack, but I constantly question when it will end, and how these things are taking me away from

1) free time for personal growth/ reflection
2) God
3) breathing space
4) building up the more important skill sets like analysis, broadening and deepening depth of industries I'm more interested in, exploring new ways of research.

I'm tired. Really tired.

I guess, the only thing that is making me hang on to this thin rope is watching how my colleagues put in so much effort to make things work out.
hola 你好 selamat datang