Mom's Estate Sale

So my folks are shaking the dust off their heels, starting with house, furniture and a huge collection of antiques. So if you've a mind to, stop by this weekend and have a look at their Estate Sale:
5703 South 320th
Auburn, WA, 98001

I've seen books, electronics, really old dolls, jewelry, and a metric ton of Christmas Decorations on the block. It's starting on Friday and goes to Sunday--9am to 5pm

Update: Friday went really well for them. They sold a lot. If you're considering it, better come on Saturday!

Cleaning and Typesetting

I don’t know what it is but I get super distracted by learning about software. This week I have gotten pretty intimate with my art program: Paint Shop Pro 9. Not to be confused with Photoshop, this is the Corel competitive software. Now, I’ve done a fair bit of playing with PSP9 before. I like to take Yahoo Avatars and make invisible men for Frank’s Facebook profile picture. This involves a whole lot of screen captures including turning on something that is difficult for Yahoo Avatars to load so that the avatar box is empty for a few seconds and I can get the background. (The headless ghost works best for that)

Very little of it do I have to redraw…the back of his empty shirt, sometimes the empty sleeves or if the hand is in front of the torso, then a little bit of that too. The clone tool works great for that. Probably the one I changed the most is the Elizabethan one because I wanted it to look like his Greenwood costume.

This week, on one of my manga Yahoo Groups, a request for cleaners and typesetters came out. No experience is necessary! So I thought…cleaning a scanned newsprint page of manga and adding text would be an excellent way to learn PSP9 better. So I volunteered. It wasn’t a huge commitment. I would be cleaning maybe 5 pages on the 5th and 20th of the month when the newsprint version of the manga is released. The major bonus has been that the person in charge has been writing up these long descriptions of how to do it in Photoshop…from that point I end up searching my program like crazy to find the PSP9 equivalent of whatever she was describing at the time. As a result…boy have I learned PSP9!

I do have a few gripes for PSP9 now though…Leveling…Photoshop makes this nice graph that you can move the selection in to. PSP9 makes a bar slider that’s much harder to manage:

But I should hardly be complaining. I never used Levels before this point. It’s all good.

Knitting

A great tragedy struck one of the nine scarves I made for my entire family one Christmas a few years ago. Namely…it was washed and it happened to be one of the 2 I made of slightly more expensive yawn. This one, in fact, had a large percentage of wool in it. Yep, it was felted. See:

So I am once again knitting a Harry Potter scarf. Mostly I knit on the bus…this I find is a great way to get strangers to strike up conversations with you. Especially since I knit continental-style and very fast. My Great-Aunt Thelma taught me to knit that way and it’s actually a very expedient way to knit. American style requires a person to drop the right needle to wrap the string for every stitch. I don’t think I’d have the patience to knit if I had to do it that way. I put together a demo of my style for this blog:

Continental knitting, German knitting, European knitting, or left-hand knitting @ Yahoo! Video

The source of my pattern for the Harry Potter scarf is:
Free Pattern for HP scarves
Try it.

The Art of Paper Folding

I have always been a fan of Origami ever since I was in middle school and my parents took me to meet a Japanese exchange student. The only thing I remember about her was that she taught us how to make a crane. I was really excited by it so that same year when my parents left us with our Great Aunt Thelma to go to Ashland and watch Shakespeare, they got me a book about Origami as my souvenir. I love that book…I still have it.
These days I’m into making Origami decorations. I like to make Origami quilts:

Also, when I started making lucet and kumihimo demos for Dad’s website and I got bit by the video-making bug, I made a series of how-to videos for some of my favorite Origami folding projects.
The Crane:

Folding an Origami Crane @ Yahoo! Video

The Frog:

Origami Frog @ Yahoo! Video

The Peacock:

Origami Peacock @ Yahoo! Video

The Fish:

Origami Fish @ Yahoo! Video

The Ninja Star:

Traditional Origami Ninja Star @ Yahoo! Video

The 4-Petal Flower:

Origami Ninja Star @ Yahoo! Video

Jr. High School Drama Reunion at “The Music Man”

I thought the Cascade Jr. High School Drama Reunion at “The Music Man” was very fun! Bonnie Bensen found about a dozen of us on Facebook. She also found the director of Cascade Junior High’s drama club from our years there—Mrs. Semen. When she learned that Mrs. Semen’s next school show was coming up she put together a group to go see it. Both Mandy and I went.
We all met at Round Table Pizza. There was a whole table in the party area full when Mandy and I arrived. We were a tad…well more than a tad late to the dinner due to my last online class I had to teach.
There were five or so children running about, but other than that, it seemed like everyone was just the same. It didn’t take long until we were once again making each other laugh. Amy and Scott were there with their three children, a girl and two boys. Anna brought her two daughters who were both uniquely named. Monika brought her fiancé to meet us. Rachel, Kat, Bonnie, John and Heidi were also there but they were alone. So that’s a pretty nice crowd huh?
When we got to the high school, the parking lot was packed full. We were pretty impressed until we marched into the school and found out we were at the basket ball game. Alas. The theater was on the other side of the school and the parking lot was a little bit more what you’d expect for closing night of a musical in high school.
It didn’t take long until we were all greeted by Mrs. Semen. She was very happy to see us. Teachers don’t usually supply much of an audience…directors even less. We weren’t able to do much more than say hello and give her a hug because the show was about to begin. We sat in the back of the very small theater on Audience Left. They weren’t bad seats.
The highlight of the performance for us all seemed to be the Wells Fargo Wagon. It was quite a nice prop and it marched in right in front of us.
The weakest part of the performance was the band. They were extremely weak…especially the brass section which is the most important part of The Musicman’s key song “76 Trombones”. I don’t blame Mrs. Semen. There are two possible reasons why this happened I would guess. In my senior year, we fired the band of “Guys and Dolls” for zero commitment to the show and, in general, playing awfully. You see the director of the musical that year was a community volunteer and she didn’t have work ramifications of such an action. Our band director consistently put the high school musical on the lowest priority bracket beneath his own performances, competitions and football game pep band performances. If that was the case here…who could blame Mrs. Semen? The other possibility is the WASL. My sister says that if a kid doesn’t do well in the WASL then they aren’t allowed to take any electives and must take remedial courses. This has severely depleted several bands in high schools…because how well do you think a kid with musical or kinesthetic intelligence is going to do in a test like that?
If that was the case then the kids were trying their best but weren’t capable of pulling it off. I do have one suggestion for Mrs. Semen though in either case. As a member of an ensemble…there is nothing that makes us play our best more than when we are recorded. Since you can’t see the band anyway—pre-record them. Trust me…they’ll play it over and over again to make sure they don’t miss a note.
After the show, we were reluctant to part from one another. But we had to bid adieu to the parents with children in the crowd. The remaining eight of us went out for deserts and drinks at a local restaurant. As a completely unplanned bonus, Mrs. Semen showed up there with a small crowd of her own and told us once again how pleased she was to see us all. Before we parted ways for the night, we pledged to get together once again. I hope we do. The reasons were all still there why we all became friends in the first place, even after all these years and a great deal of maturity was added to us all. We are still birds of a feather.

Weekend Alone Report

With Frank off to visit his cousin Mande and spend a few days in Portland (and see Wicked), I was faced with a weekend alone with the cats.

Saturday:

I had a class to teach virtually…so my voice and my computer made an appearance in Greater Prudhoe Bay. But though we offered 4 classes total for the weekend, only the first one on Sunday filled. So I was free after that. I got an invitation to a birthday party be a new acquaintance in the puppet guild. As I would like to turn that acquaintance into a friend, I determined myself to go.

You know what that means, right? Yep, I showed up at yet another party where the only people I knew walking in the door were the host and hostess. theBut I struck up a few conversations and wouldn’t you know it? There were actually 2 people there I had met before…at an SCA event with Dad where I demonstrated the Takadai for them! Amy and Alex knew my father from other events as well…of course…in the SCA we all dress so differently that you can hardly blame both Amy and me for not recognizing each other out of that setting. Guess what? I’m almost convinced that Amy is a polymath! She is a knitter, for one. She has a few lucets too also one could argue that knitting and luceting are the same subject. But as the conversation went along, I wasn’t thinking she was much into costuming, since they stick to the basic tunic in the SCA, until she told me she was also planning on going to the Steampunk Convention in Seattle and was currently working on her costume too. How about that? Two subjects at least!

Oh as for the party, you’ll be proud of me, Mom…I brought a whole plate of homemade deviled eggs. I dressed up a tad…the host had originally asked in the invitation for people to wear something different, so I wore the Chinese top Mandy gave me…I’m glad I didn’t go too crazy though. No one else wore anything “Different” but the host and me. He wore a very tall top hat, in fact.

Sunday: Put on my Sunday clothes, there’s lots of world out there! We saw the show at 5th Avenue and we closed the town in a whirl! Yes! Mandy and I saw Hello Dolly at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle. We began our evening by putting on nifty clothes…I wore my little black dress with my silk michiyuki over it…Mandy wore hers with a black and red Chinese top and a red shawl. We looked good. Check us out! We had dinner at Red Lobster because Mandy was dying for their cheese bread rolls. I enjoyed the clam chowder like I always do. I got stuffed mushrooms too but they weren’t anything special. Our waitress was very envious that we were off to see Hello Dolly and said “I wish you were just coming back from it so you could tell me how it is!” Well, I think both Mandy and I could now tell her that we enjoyed it very much! We had cheap seats way up on the balcony. But it was a good day to go because right before the show began we could move way down. The balcony was only 2/3 full…maybe less. We rented binoculars, which I would do again now having done it once. It was so nice to see close-ups! During the show we giggled, laughed, and mouthed along with the songs we love. Oh! Musicals are wonderful and Hello Dolly is nothing short. The costumes were great and I was taking notes for my Victorian costume. Mandy and I both agreed that it would be a great thing to show up at the Harmonia Gardens and have a Hello Dolly welcome. Hello Elly and Hello Mandy would both work in the song, you know. So we had to take top-of-the-stairs pictures in the lobby. Note to Mom: you would have loved it too! They are doing South Pacific next year. I’m just sayin’…

How Interesting!

At Scrabble on Monday night, my father told me that my Aunt Sandy got invited to a Steampunk party. She had turned to him for help with costuming as Dad is pretty active in the costume scene, but it was not a costume style covered by the SCA--where Dad sells his lucets. He'd never heard of Steampunk in fact...Aunt Sandy said he thought she was saying "Steam Trunk". Well, Dad passed the information off to me and asked if I would give Aunt Sandy a call. So I did. It seems she has some time...the party isn't until June. So I gave her the numbers off of the patterns I've gotten so far.
You see, the Steampunk style costume is my next big costume project. There's a Steampunk Con being given in Seattle in October. I am planning on build both Frank and I outfits for this event. So I am doing what I usually do--collecting patterns! You see, Steampunk is loosely based on Victorian costumes and there are lots of patterns for that era out there. I am going company by company as they go on sale for less than $2 a pattern at Joann's. As you can see, I've got the Butterick ones! Unfortunately...I may have to spend the big bucks when I pickup the Folkwear patterns. But there is no such thing as too many patterns! So Aunt Sandy lucked out.
However, I do plan to delegate two tasks. Namely, I don't plan to build my own Victorian corset. Nor do I plan to make hats if I can avoid it! Buying the Elizabethan Hat from Tall Toads was just too cool not to do again if I can. Plus the costuming stores online are usually Made-in-America small business production companies who more often than not create one-of-a-kind items...can't hand-make two identical hats!
Plus...there are some pretty awesome hat makers out there!