If Not for the Hair

Sunshine of My Life is a long series that features a lot of unusual elements: a not particularly handsome male lead, a fashion industry story set in France and China, a female lead who is probably the most unattractive female in the cast, and secondary characters who tried to steal every scene they were in (and often succeeded.) The less than perfect leads convinced me to give the first episode a watch, and then I got hooked by everything else and watched the remaining 44 episodes. I'd call this more of a saga than a series, with multiple plot lines, a pretty extensive cast and excellent showcasing of the Chinese fashion industry.

The storyline revolves around Tang Ming Xuan (Zhang Han), the heir to and manager of Ming Yuan Fashion Group, who is entirely career-focused. He collides with Mo Fei (Xu Lu), a postgraduate fashion design student about to head over to France. I love the timing of their meeting, as it's the ultimate monkey wrench to romance. Despite their immediate and serious attraction to each other, they follow their planned paths, and she heads to Paris while he stays in China. Their paths keep crossing despite being on two different continents, however, and they first become business partners and then lovers.

Pros: the romance was oddly pretty wonderful, and more realistic than I expected. The secondary characters were collectively awesome in their roles, particularly the romantic distractions played by Wang Rui Zi and Hong Yao (this guy is seriously impressive and nearly eclipsed Han at every turn.) I also loved the fashion as it was presented in every episode, and even learned a bit more about Chinese embroidery and inspiration for their fashions.

Cons: I think it was a bit too long, and most of the plot twists were a bit too convenient. I would have liked to see more of the fashion shows in China, and how they train their runway models, as both were fascinating. It seems like whoever did the female lead's hair did not like her, or was ordered to make her look ridiculous, because her hair styles either looked messy, silly or entirely inappropriate for the person and or the situation. That's really distracting. Even in the poster up there his hair looks better than hers. I also thought Han was a tad too old to play the male lead, which is why Hong Yao, who is the right age for her, gave him so much competition.

Overall it's an interesting series to watch if you like fashion, extended storylines and a lot of bad hair styles. Available on Viki.com.

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Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

Valerean

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