Keeping track of this here so i have notes for later on. The Weeping Angel will be here by Halloween. Don't blink! ^_^

Today: Ironed underdress and overdress material, cut out underdress
Previously done: washed both fabrics, dyed underdress fabric gray.

Materials:

Overdress: 6yds 44" cotton, gray, $1.50/yd ($11)
Underdress: 5yds 38" undyed cotton muslin, $0.50/yd ($2.50)
Black feathered wings: premade, given to me (will be replaced with more "cannon" wings in the future)

Dyes: Smattering gray & black dye, soda ash. Not even going to figure cost.

Paint:
DecoArt So-Soft Fabric Paint, Grey Sky, $1.49 ea ($2.98)
DecoArt So-Soft Fabric Paint, Ultra White, $1.49 ea ($1.49)
DecoArt So-Soft Fabric Paint, Lamp Black, $1.49 ea ($1.49)
Chinese Wash Brushes - 4 Stem $0.99 ea ($1.98)
Can of gray spray-paint (not bought yet)

Nylons, 2 pr (not bought yet)
Gray nail polish ($0.99)
Fake nails (have around house)
Hoop to hold out dress (lighter than a hula hoop...)
Plaster stuffs for fake hair (not bought yet)
*Paperclay? Amazon.com $7.99/lb, need 2lb?

Mask (not bought/made yet)
*Also paperclay?


So at the moment the project's cost $22.43. Even if i have to get two bricks of paperclay i'm still looking at coming in at or under $45 for the entire project. And it's going to be one kick-butt project. ^_^ Eeeeeee!

So somehow i managed to weasel into Google+ without really trying. i have no idea how i managed that - just went to the site and signed in with my gmail account info and bingo, i was there. Huh! But if anyone else is geeking over another google juggernaut, can't get in and wants an invite, i'd be happy to send some along.

i'm also going to be testing out something called google+facebook, which should let me see my facebook feed (and post to FB!) from the nice, clean G+ page... Hrm.

Went to Egils with the hubby and the pup this year. It was rainy, go figure, heh. That's nothing new but the ground was already pretty soaked so things became a mud pit pretty darn quick.

i helped run the Viking Ship Races during Sunday Sillies, wandered about, hung with friends, chatted with peeps i haven't seen in a while, and generally tried to keep dry. Kimi was vaugely confused as to why we were suddenly living in a strange little fabric house. ^_^ But she did really well, and we bundled her up and tucked her in well at night and she stayed warm even though it was really cold.

The parking lot turned into a Swamp of Despair so when Justin went to get the car it took him an hour and the help of a couple other people to get unstuck. :(

Oh! And Saturday afternoon a couple of us (me, Justin, Steve, and a guy named Pete)got inspired and wrote a filk (spoof song). Steve and i performed it that night with the help of a kind guitarist at the bardic. We were asked for an encore the next day during prize court, and found out there that we'd won Best Vocal Performance at the bardic. :) Luckily someone taped the encore. Yay!



Home. Dry. Happy!

So i made my whole costume for Ophelia in Hamlet. A lot of it was actually made without commercial patterns, too. I'm pretty pleased. :)

The black overdress layer. It's made out of cotton velvet (from repurposed drapes). i was orignally going to use a commercial pattern but it called for 11 yards of fabric and there was no way i could get everything i needed from the fabric i had. In desperation i turned to the SCA sources i had and found a period bodice tutorial on how to make a pattern to your own measurements. (this was also fueled by the fact that i was making Justin a doublet and there were no good patterns out there - the one i remembered and wanted was out of print). i was able to make both Justin's doublet and my dress out of the fabric i had using period techniques. Go figure. ^_^


The chemise layer. This is the only layer i made with a commercial pattern (though why i bothered is anyone's guess - it's basically a sack with fancy sleeves!) It's made with that fake silk stuff from Joann Fabrics, and is oddly the hottest of the layers i wear. Heh. i was going to go with cotton muslin but the director didn't think it looked "fancy" enough for a fine lady. *shrug* This layer won't be going into my SCA stockpile. It's also the only layer i pulled out the serger for to finish the seams with (everything else got properly flat-felled). i wonder if i can sell it...


The shift! I'm really most proud of this. I'm wearing bike shorts under everything and the lightest i have are grey, so you could see them right through the chemise. i couldn't find peach/tan/nude leggings to save my life! So i decided to make a shift to go under the chemise, as it would hide my underros as well as act as a barrier between my sweat and the clingy fake-silk. I used the bodice pattern that i had made for the overdress as a basis and then modified it further, putting in a seam under the arm and one down the front over the bust. I cut it out of muslin and pinned it on and then had Vandy help pull in the seams further until it fit right against me. The front is laced up with a (probably not period but very ingenious) system that i discovered online. Two ribbons are sewn into either side of the opening, tacked down in an alternating pattern, and then a third ribbon is laced between them. Works brilliantly! I'm definitely making a nice overdress from this pattern in the future, and probably a hula dress if i can find some nice fabric. :)


And finally a close up of my hair. A gal has been coming in every night to braid it up for me since i'm incapable of doing this on my own. :) It's a french braid that starts behind one ear, goes all the way around my head and then ends with a braid over my shoulder. The ribbon was originally braided right in with my hair but it kept getting swallowed up so this time Karlia sewed it in after the fact with a tapestry needle. :)


And that's Ophelia! Unless you count the "zombie makeup" i put on to make it look like i've been up for a week crying in the fourth act. (or doing meth, as some of my fellow actors say, hee!) If you want to see pics from dress rehearsal, there's piles taken by a pro over here at Chris Graamans Hamlet Blog (inlcuding a few shots of Zombie!Ophelia)

Ushered for Jesus Christ Superstar tonight. Our locals once again did an incredible job (on what is admittedly a fairly weird play when you think about it, but i enjoyed watching our people put it on).

Hamlet opens in two weeks, April 1, and closes on April 23 in the evening.

We met the director for one of the next upcoming shows at JC tonight.

These two fact collide here: on April 23 in the afternoon, we will be auditioning for the next show.

Yeah, we're officially nuts. >_< But rehearsals for the next show won't start for a couple of months, so we WILL have some time off (hey, we had a WHOLE MONTH between Comique and Hamlet!) And hey, to be part of a big musical again will be worth it. Especially when the musical is something as wild and goofy and fun as The Full Monty.

Yeah, we're going there. :) It appears Rocky Horror opened a lot a doors in terms of what we're allowed to pull off (in this case, literally!) in our small town. ^_^

Saw Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows (pt 1) today. i will admit that it wasn't as long, drawn out and "dull" as some people let on. i personally appriciate the quieter moments of a plot, and reconize that this actually creates a lot of tention - When will something happen? Is danger just a few moments away? The quiet before the storm can be a terrible thing. Most people nowadays though (it seems to me) have the attention spans of a ferret and can't focus on somthing unless it's constantly hilarious or exploding. >_<

All the same, i'm kind of bummed they weren't willing to make longer movies of some of the earlier films in the interest of adding a bit more information. i understand why this one got more attention - it's the last one, after all, and there are some pretty epic things that will happen. A) they didn't want to completely scrap all the quiet moments just to do the epic justice and B) $$$$. But. BUT. Of all the movies where you could move things along a bit, make creative changes to speed things up, you might have been able to move this half along with less impact than the other movies. Just sayin'.

Spent part of the evening working on music stuff. Make the (hopefully final) cut of our new song for Hula - i didn't get the transition between the two songs i was merging together in quite the spot that our Kumu Hula wanted. So! One more go-round.

i also played with some music and made up the intro and outro bits for our podcast. Yeah, the hubby and i are undertaking yet another time suck. :) We've been inspired to make up a little podcast of our own. We're calling it Word Salad (at least a the moment) and will be covering a number of topics. It's going to be "spotlight" heavy - sort of like reviews but more varied. We're probably not going to straight up review things, but rather do some comparisons. For our first month our Spotlight will be "Refried Movies" - films that have been made twice (or more) for different markets. One of the pairs i know we're going to talk about is Eat Drink Man Woman (filmed in Chineese) and Tortilla Soup (filmed in English). They're both the same plot, down to scene-by-scene translations in places. But they're both their own thing, too. i wish that the American version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was out because we'd talk about that too, but our third person (a friend of ours) is going to be working up a more extensive list.

So first month expect our Spotlight on Refried Movies, a "walkaround" episode where we introduce ourselves and our town, an Interview With An Interesting Person (not the final title), and a rousing game of Slap the Dickens (possibly with other games thrown in for variety.) It's all going to happen in February!

Meep. Bedtime. i need to make better sleep habits. :)

Eeeee! So the hubby and i decided to do something fun and auditioned to be part of a podcast as voice actors. Long story short (too late!) the first show we've been involved in is now live. :)

Want to listen? The podcast is Quirky Nomads. There is a little bit of language, nothing horrific, most often use of the F-word to express disbelief and in this particular show one of the songs being sung uses the same word in a more literal sense.

And if you want real entertainment, imagine me recording my lines for the response section of that song. Three times. And cracking up every time.

Saw How to train your Dragon today. Go see it. LOVE! i have to see it in 3D now.

In other news, my dog is adorable (despite the fact that we forgot to close the bedroom door and came home to find various underwear festooning her bed. :S ) We've been working on getting her to pay attention to us when we have treats in our hand. Prior to this it was easier to just tell her to "lie down" repeatedly until she did it and then make a fuss over her. Because when you have food in your hand this dog is FOCUSED. On the FOOD. She will stand there and lick her chops until judgement day.

So a few days ago i stood by her bed with a cookie and just kept saying "lie down" until finally she did. Cookie! The second time a day later it took about half as long for her to get it. The next time she responded immediately.

So today i decide to try a different command. Kimi has a habit of stretching by doing (appropriately enough) the Downward Facing Dog pose a la yoga. Every time she does this i say "Bow!" Because i am nerdy enough that someday at an SCA event i want to be able to walk past the Pointy Hats and say "bow!" to my dog and have her actually do it. ^_^

So there i stand with a cookie in one hand and a very FOCUSED dog in front of me. "Bow!"
*licks chops*
"Bow!"
*licks*
"Kimi, Bow!"

She gives me a look, looks at the cookie again, and then dashes over to her bed and lays down

OMG my dog is too freaking cute for her own good.

It's really amazing to literally watch something go "click" in a dog's mind.

We've gotten Kimi to play fetch with us, of a sorts. Often you have to retrieve the object from wherever she dropped it, or tell her to drop repeatedly to get her to give it back to you. But she always loves the "catch" or "go get it" part - just hadn't figured out the "bring it back and give" part.

i'd tossed one of her toys for her a few times tonight before she seemed to lose interest, flopping down on her bed and leaving the toy in the middle of the floor. i returned to internet diversions.

And then a while later she suddenly popped up and grabbed the toy again. i got up and she immediately spat the toy out at my feet. For a good five minutes we suddenly had a real game of fetch - her bringing it back and dropping it for me each time and watching with obvious joy as i got ready to throw it once more.

Something went "click". :)

Overall a nice weekend! Slept in a bit, took the puppy to the dog park twice so she's nice and exhausted, popped into the second hand store and found a sweater to unravel, and had lunch with the hubby.

The big hurdle this weekend was trying to get my stupid macros running again. i had something set up where i could chug my word documents though and it would automatically find all the italic and underline and bold bits and surround them with the appropriate HTML tags. When Kaylee died i couldn't get the macro running for a while before finally finding out where the dang thing was saved on Kaylee's brain and getting it to work on Sophie.

But then i tried upgrading to Office 2007, it didn't work out & in reality i didn't like the way it was set up because i couldn't find anything. And i found out that the upgrade had scrubbed my recently-found macros. >_< I removed the 2007 version and reinstalled the old version. Then i went to haul the macro off of Kaylee's brain again.

And it wasn't there. >_<

So i spent a frustrating afternoon trying to get the original script working. I updated office, tried tweaking the script, and somehow, for some reason i'm not entirely sure of, it began working again. Yay! But in my poking and prodding i found more info about macros, and began making up some of my own to automate some of the other things i did to format my chapters. And THEN i figured out how to string all those individual macros together into one huge macro. Hooray! So now all i have to do is push one button and i get my LJ-cut put in, my section breaks replaced with astericks, the tabs replaces with line breaks, and my formatting HTML'd. Woohoo! If any of my other LJ friends want the script or it i'd be happy to send it your way. :)

Anyhow, a nice weekend, and i'm glad to be home from the conference. Nothing like sleeping in your own bed. And not having trains going by at all hours, or people playing the saxaphone outside your room. ??? Eh.