Squee!

So friend comes over today and he's just sitting around chatting when he notices the sewing machines. And, likely, the dress form, fabric, rulers, cutting mat, pattern boxes, two inches of thread scraps on the floor ... anyway, he picked up the subtle clues that there was a sew-er in the house. So he commented on it with the standard "hey, cool, always wanted to learn, great thing ..." then so casually mentions that his mom sews ... for Disney. She's head of the costuming department for Disneyland. With a warehouse of fabric, a team of seamstresses, racks and racks of costumes, designers finding ways to make two dimensional characters live and deal with all those little technical details like keeping Mickey from passing out from the heat and making sure Belle can get out of her dress without too much trouble. Also she apparently convinced the Mouse to buy what's basically a giant fabric printer so they can print up their own stuff. This woman is my idol. And friend has promised to pass on my contact stuff since his mom apparently loves chatting with younger seamstresses and loves passing on stuff she's learned. Squee!! Seriously, combining sewing and Disney and it's like chocolate covered strawberries - double the fantasticness.

Anyway, had to share my excitement de-jour. :)

Playing with Photos - Old photos

So photobucket has this fun "old photo" filter that I love. I think because it blurs the photo just enough that it hides my mistakes. :) And I grew up watching Disney Channel specials about Disneyland in the 50s so Disney + old photo really makes this 80s child oddly nostalgic. Anyway, enjoy!

Fun with pictures - Black and White

For my aunt's Christmas present I'm giving her a small collection of pictures from our trip to Disney World. We had a terrific time and I especially enjoyed the challenge of finding photo ops of little treasures scattered around that really make the place special. It's the care they put into the little details that really make you feel like you're in another world and that's what I tried to capture. Also I wanted to prove that WDW is a lot more than giant mice and gift stores. I think I succeeded, at least in part - I've got eight of these pictures on my living room wall and a fun game for new comers is to try and guess where the pictures were taken. Usually they think I'm some ultra-cultured world-traveler. World, yes, but only the world found in mid Florida. :) So anyway, hope you enjoy these sample pictures! I enjoyed taking them and playing with them!

PS for Mom - see any pics you like? :)

New Book (?) on the horizon?

Stone gargoyle in Belle's Library in Walt Disney World

Last Christmas my aunt gifted DH and I with a gift to the World - Walt Disney World, that is. With the stipulation that we go at the same time as her and my immediate family. Fortunately they're all only mildly crazy (hey, you knew I got it from somewhere) and a lot of fun to vacation with so we took her up on the offer in a millisecond. As Christmas presents for everyone I put together a pocket sized scavenger-hunt extrodinaire for the World, including the standard "find a stone monkey statue" stuff, points for going on the rides, pressed pennies to hunt down, pages for a daily schedule, abbreviated menus for all the counter service places in the parks, and a full section of logic puzzles, word searches, and games to keep everyone occupied when the lines got long. It was a huge hit.

Since I've sunk all that time and work into it I began to wonder - would other people be interested in this little booklet? Would it be possible to publish this hunt and both share the fun and get a little back from all my research? I'm in the first stages of finding out. After investigating two of the new online self-publishing places, blurb.com and lulu.com, the latter really had the size and prices I was looking for. Check one. So I uploaded my hunt to their site and ... oops, I was under the minimum number of pages. I thought that was a little odd since I had 73 pages and they wanted a minimum of 40 - but who knows how these things are calculated. Added some more games and puzzles, uploaded and ... drat. In order to get my booklets for my family to the right size to carry around - half pages (5.5"x4.25") - I'd set MS Word to print two pages per sheet. So Lulu was showing my stuff just the way Word was told to print it, only with everything shrunk beyond readability to fit onto the smallest size booklet they offer. D'oh. Which, yes, means that they thought I had half the pages that I do, what with the two-per-page and all. So they calculate their pages the same way everyone else does. That makes sense.

So now I'm messing with MS Word and trying to get everything to fit on the newly sized paper I'm forcing it to think it's using. You'd THINK that once everything was standardized to fit onto that original half sheet that just resizing the paper to a true half-sheet size would have everything fitting the same as always. You'd think. Sadly I now have another 7 or so hours of strictly formatting to mess with before I can even think of publishing. Oh well. Gives me time to look into copywrite issues, marketing, and all that jazz. If I'm going to sink that many more hours into this then I DO want it to pay me back, litterally. :)

So that's what's happening over in our little apartment. I've got more just randomness about sewing classes, a possible move, and current sewing stuff to blog about next time. For now I've dawdled enough messing with the Scavenger Hunt, time to hit that there homework with a nice, large stick. Teach it to mess with me. :)

A very productive day

Instead of the sewing I'd been planning on, I spent this day of rest very productively doing very little of tangible value - and I enjoyed every moment of it. One friend invited us and another dozen of her closest friends over for lunch and it was a great time. Or at least it was when the one family left - I love kids (which is good, given my day job) but at an event that's otherwise entirely adults and when the kids really could use a bit more discipline in their lives? Yeah, not so much. Especially since I spent the morning running our Children's Church bit entirely on my own. Which meant that when one kid really needed some time apart from the others I couldn't do a blessed thing about it. But back to the lunch. By the way, if you're child is used to giving orders DO NOT bring him or her around me. I've got a zero tolerance for a child telling me what I'm going to do. It's one thing when we're playing pirates and she tells me that I fell overboard. It's another when a kid walks up to me WITHOUT KNOWING ME and orders me to move. Right. That kid is going to get some tough love very quickly.

For what it's worth my "mom" voice has been known to snap teenage bullies to attention. When I was younger than them. So don't mess with it.

But the lunch. Once the family left (blessedly early) we all had a great time talking about campus politics, quirks of society, and new television shows. Just a great time hanging out with some Dutch Blitz thrown in (I won!).

Afterwards we came home and I indulged my love of all things Disney for a good 6 hours. I'm a certified Disney affectionado, with my greatest love being the Disney parks. I was literally raised at Disneyland, going no less than once a year (and, at some points, once a month) to the park until I was 9 and we moved to the east coast. A few years later my parents tried a "once-in-a-lifetime" trip to Disney World and since then we've gone more times than I can recall. Instead of having Christmas at my parents' this year, my husband and I are meeting up with my family and mom's extended family to spend a week at "The World," or, as my mom calls it, "home." Yes, we're Disney nuts.

And believe it or not, there's a sewing connection to all this.

In my afternoon of reading all things Disney I found this highly informative description of a behind-the-scenes tour of Disney World that includes two paragraphs on their wardrobing department. Did you know that Epcot has it's own costume shop? That it's patterns are drafted on a computer, resized for various castmembers, then printed out? That it has a highly specialized, hands-free cutting table that I would LOVE to test drive at some point? That's the gist, but I highly recommend reading the article for yourself. Granted, had I been the one writing there would be far, far more about the wardrobe department - but what he gives is great stuff. I don't think I'll ever look at those character costumes or cast member garbs the same.