Christmastime Houses

Lindsey and I made Gingerbread houses!  It was her first time ever to decorate a Gingerbread house and I think she did a fabulous job!  We had a great time decorating the houses while Cornbread and Michael Bacon watched some really bad silly movies.  We all ate way too much candy, and had delicious pizza from Filippi's Pizza Grotto.

I used the Elfin cottage pattern from my 1982 Wilton Celebrate!: Christmas book.  I had a batch of gingerbread in the freezer that was left from last year's house.  And I made one batch of the Grandma's gingerbread from my Wilton book.  They both baked up pretty well.  But cutting out the pieces and baking a gingerbread house from scratch is really hard work.  I miss my cast iron gingerbread mold!  Maybe next year...

I've also been busy making more cardboard glitter houses.  The little green two story house is a pattern that Howard from littleglitterhouses.com shared on the cardboard Christmas forums.  I was going to wait until next year to make it, but then he surprised me with an adorable Santa figure.  I thought I should make the little guy a new house and I did the whole thing yesterday.

Howard suggested repainting the Santa and giving him a clear coat.  I did repaint him and add some glitter to his base, but I'm still deciding if I want to clear coat him.  I only have gloss clear coat right now, and Michael says he likes him flat.  Maybe I'll try to find some flat clear coat, but for now Santa has a new home.  Thanks, Howard!

I also made another one of the Urban Debris mini Putz houses for my Grandma's Christmas present.  The vintage-looking tall tree, Santa and silver gift boxes all came from WalMart.  I just hot-glued the little scene on the top of a Christmas tin and I plan to fill it with candy and sweets for her. 

We're having a boy!

Right before Thanksgiving we had our anatomy scan. Of course the actual purpose is to check fingers and toes and make sure the little one is developing properly. But, what most parents look forward to, is the big gender reveal. Our sonogram tech was great. She told us right away that he was a boy. Neither one of us were surprised in the least. Michael swore he saw the goods at our last appointment, and he was confident that he knew he was a boy. I couldn't see the screen at the last ultrasound, but I just knew from the moment I thought I was pregnant that it was a boy. I have absolutely no reason for it, I just knew. 

 After the tech chased him around for what seemed like forever, she was able to get all his measurements and my Mom got to come in the room. She was so excited! This will be her first grandson. Everything looks good with the boy. He's extremely active and doesn't sit still for very long. And he's long too! His femurs measure about two weeks ahead. I knew there was a large Viking boy in there! Someone with long legs has been trying to kick through my belly button. 

 We decided way back when we started to talk about kids, that our boy will be named Korben. So he'll be Korben Dino Bacon. That was a very easy decision!

After we had a great dinner with my Mom, we went to Ikea and Michael got his baby boy some toys. He got him a giant shark and two dragons. We had to get each a kitty a baby dragon too.

Our Christmas Village Has Been Deforested

And this is the reason. 

 Our darling, adorable little kitten, RacerX has been wreaking havok on the village. He's been very curteous with the houses, but the trees and Santa were not so lucky.  Especially Santa.

This is how the village started out yesterday.  But it didn't last long.  It was soon demolished.

So I put all the trees away in a safe place. And this is how our village looks now.

I'm probably going to be putting the Christmas tree up sometime this week.  I fear for it's safety with these two little guys.

Santa's Got a New Gold Bag

Our Putz Christmas village needed a Santa and sleigh.  I searched all over eBay until I found one that I was happy with.

I chose this Santa because I liked the size for the scale of our village. He's a little big, but he's not too huge. I also liked that he was one of the only ones that had actual brown reindeer. They aren't pictured because they didn't need a new paint job like Santa did. White reindeer have their place, but I think Santa's reindeer should be brown. Santa had seen better days. His paint was badly cracked and peeling and he lost his reins. So I gave him a bath in pure acetone to strip off all the old paint. And I did the same thing with his sleigh.

Then I carefully wiped off whatever paint particles were left in all the crevices and gave Santa and his sleigh a new coat of paint. I'm not sure what the original paint was, but I used Tester's model paints on both Santa and the sleigh. Originally, Santa's toy bag was a very dark, chocolate brown.  But, the set of model paints I was using didn't come with brown and I lean more toward the gaudy, metallic side of Christmas decor.  Luckily the paint set did have a lovely shade of shimmery, metallic gold.  So I painted the toy bag gold.  I love it!

And here's Santa with his all his reindeer:

(this was before Rudolph's time)

I still haven't come up with how I'll replace the reins and I think I need to add some miniature holly and maybe a tiny Christmas tree to his sleigh.  But, for now, he looks much better!

The Bibble

Wow!  My last blog post was about PREY?!  We've had lots going on since then.  But the biggest development is the Bibble.  Yep, that's the very first picture of our first little monster taken at my first appointment back in August.  The EDD is April 10, 2012.  We're nearly half-way through already!

We're very excited and we can't wait to find out more about our little one next week at the anatomy scan.  We already know that the Bibble is growing right on track and is VERY active.  So active that after 4 hours of ultrasounds we were not able to complete the NT scan.  But I just got the results from the 2nd trimester blood tests and everything is just fine.

I've been feeling pretty good.  I've been very lucky that the biggest pregnancy symptom I've dealt with is fatigue.  I felt a little sick in the beginning, but nothing too bad.  Michael has been absolutely wonderful.  He keeps on top of the litter box and puts up with me with extreme patience.  He's been taking great care of me and the Bibble.  I couldn't ask for a better partner in crime!

In the meantime, we already started adding to our little family.  We adopted two little baby boys a few weeks ago.

Bridget, one of our anatomy instructors, found these adorable little guys in her yard when they were just barely two weeks old!  She raised them by hand; bottle feeding them and doing a little litter box training and now they are happy wild little men.  Bridget is really an amazing person.  Two weeks later she found the rest of the litter and she's fostering them until she can find the best homes possible.  The big boy on the green pillow is Blade.  He's all black and fluffy and he loves to eat and bite fingers.  The little guy that's sleeping is RacerX.  He's very dark grey with black stripes and a curl at the tip of his tail.  He's very independent and loves to play with Judo.  And our little Judo is doing very well with her new little brothers.  She plays gently with them and licks them all over when they come to snuggle with her!  They are all such happy kitties!

PREY

A few months back I took out our trash and this huge roll of kaki green fabric was sitting by our dumpster! I was so excited, I always dreamed of getting to find fabric in the trash just like Peter! I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but there was no way I was going to turn down free fabric...
So I made sand bags. We had a flourescent light bank fall on the first day of shooting PREY. And we were SO lucky that no one was hurt. But we learned our lesson and Michael put in a request for sand bags. So I just wipped out my stash of sport zippers and rainbow webbing and put together 4 sand bags. For free! We went down to the beach and filled up gallon ziplocks with sand, and in just a few hours time we had plenty of weight to keep our lights upright on set.

Last night (and this morning) was our second day of shooting for PREY. This is just a little sneak peek of the props we used. It was great having Michelle on set working her magic with set dressing and props and lots of stickiness! And Eric at Morb Fx wowed us all with the awesome blood and makeup FX!

And, of course Mark brought the creep-factor as the twisted serial killer "John". I made his shirt from my vintage, 1956 McCall's 2118 western shirt pattern. It looked amazing drenched in blood!

Birthday Weekend for Michael

Michael's Birthday was on Sunday and we started celebrating on Thursday night with a special birthday SBiG. We watched Hobo With a Shotgun and had pizza and a very sad German Chocolate cake.

I don't know what happened with the cake. We did use a milk chocolate cake mix instead of German chocolate. But I didn't think that would matter...

The cake just fell apart. All over the kitchen!

Saturday morning I made a homemade pop tart recipe from Smitten Kitchen, recommended by Paul. Here is the link: Homemade Pop Tart's.

I used a roasted apple filling recipe that I found here. And I just thinned some powdered sugar with milk for the icing. They were pretty good and the crust was absolutely delicious. But I made them way too thick. After eating one pop tart you feel like you've consumed an entire apple pie. Also the filling was a little spicy for our taste. I would cut the cinnamon back to 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg to 1/4 teaspoon. But the long-roasted apple flavor was really good!

Then we headed out to shop for wardrobe for our upcoming short, Prey. We checked out a couple thrift stores and didn't find anything and then we headed over to Everything A Deal (AKA "The Chola Store") to pick up some outfits for the girls. We found some great stuff and Michael has pics posted on his blog.

When we got home I decided that I needed to make a Birthday banner. I love those paper banners that say Happy Birthday. I always pick them up at the dollar store and just toss them afterward. Well I started thinking about how wasteful that is. I've probably gone through close to a hundred party banners over the years for birthdays and other occasions. So, I started working on the Bacon family Birthday Banner. I had some bags of felt scraps and craft squares left-over from different projects. So I pulled those out and started free-handing block letters. There are 13 letters in Happy Birthday!

Then I tried to coordinate the pennant colors with the letter colors the best I could with the bigger felt pieces I had. And like the crazy person that I am I hand-appliqued each letter on each pennant with 3 strands of embroidery floss. But I'm so glad that I did because there is just something about felt appliqued with a blanket stitch that I LOVE. It feels like home to me.

For now, the pennants are all just pinned on to a 4-strand braid of some white chirstmas yarn that has silver glitter in it. I'll probably end up had stitching them on to the yarn with color coordinated embroidery floss.

I'm happy that we have a Birthday Banner for every birthday from now on. No more wasting paper banners for us! :) It's kinda like our Birthday plate. When it's your birthday you get to use the special plate for all your meals (and cake).

Michael's actual birthday was on Sunday, and we had waffles with homemade strawberry sauce and then just relaxed at home all day. He ate his on the birthday plate.

Happy Birthday my love!

My First Night With the 5D

A couple nights ago Michael gave me his Canon 5D. He just purchased a 5D mark ii as a second video camera, and he uses his 1D regularly. So his 5D still camera wasn't in much use anymore. We spent a couple hours at the kitchen table just taking pictures of the ceiling fan while he taught me how to use all the settings.

Then, tonight we decided to go out on a nighttime San Diego photo safari. We started at Mount Soledad. It wasn't as exciting for photography as it is for making-out. I tried to get a good picture of the Mormon temple. Not really that exciting.

Then we went over to Coronado and took pictures of Downtown from across the water. Michael did a really cool time-lapse sequence with his camera. And I just tried to get my exposures correct.

I'm proud to say that I used the camera in manual mode the entire night.

Michael says this is my "money shot".

The Vintage Vogue Search

In March of last year Pattern Junkie posted over at Sew Retro about the Vintage Vogue Pattern Search.

I always believed that Vogue had some magnificent archive of patterns, and just pulled gorgeous vintage patterns from it to be reissued. Well, apparently that is not the case at all. They DO NOT keep a pattern archive! Isn't that sad?!

When I heard about the pattern search I knew exactly which pattern needed to be reissued.

Vogue 4743, of course.

I submitted an email and I snail-mailed in a scan of the pattern also. A few weeks later I got the email that my pattern was chosen! How exciting!!

Well, just this morning I received another email that they will be available in the Summer catalog and online right now!

So here it is...

Vogue 8729 is now available to everyone!

The Singer 20U

Last night I was pulling the beautiful old Morse out of my cabinet and getting ready to take it to put it in storage and Michael asked what I was doing. I told him that it's out of timing and I break needles constantly. Rather than get it serviced again, I was going to go pick up one of my good old Singers and get it serviced. Because I trust the old Singers and I know they'll sew like the wind when they're in good shape.

He wanted to know if there was such thing as a high-end sewing machine. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a "high-end" home sewing machine anymore. The new ones are all plastic and I've just never been happy with them. And I have sewn on other brands besides Singer/Brother. Well, he just didn't believe me. He asked what they sew on for Project Runway, and what do professionals use. I told him about the industrial dressmaker machines. And he said well, why don't you have one of those? I explained that the closest I can get to one of those with my money, is the old all-metal machines. And he got curious. So we went on the Singer site and looked at all the industrial machines. We found that most machines were VERY specific. Some machines only do buttonholes, some only sew buttons on, and one does nothing but sew the binding on mattress edges! And then there was the Singer 20U...

It does exactly what I need a sewing machine to do; zigzag, straight stitch (which is a zero width zigzag) and back stitch. I never use all the pretty decorative stitches that most machines come with. And if I want a blind hem I'd much rather do it by hand. I'm really a nuts and bolts kind of sewist. I want buttons and levers, not a touch screen. The digital machines scare me like fire scares a cave woman.

The 20U is a perfect match for me. It's all cast iron and it can run for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Singer has been making this machine for over 20 years and it's become an industry standard.

So, much to my surprise Michael jumped right on eBay and bought me a brand-spanking new Singer 20U-109, the latest and greatest model. And it comes with the Singer 300 stand with the big 3/4hp 550W servo moter, a goose neck lamp, and a thread stand! It's like the Hummer of sewing machines!

I couldn't believe he actually just bought me an industrial sewing machine right before my eyes! This man has already gotten me two beautiful vintage Singers and now he's just purches the Queen Mother of sewing machines? I was in total shock!

I'm completely obsessed with learning everything I can about this machine. And I've found that industrail machines are a whole different ball game. Instruction manuals, parts diagrams, and even service manuals are all available FOR FREE everywhere online. Regular consumer sewing machine manuals are at the cheapest a $10 digital pdf. So, of course, I already downloaded and printed the manual. I'll be reading every word of it this weekend.

I'm so completely estactic to be getting a brand new industrial sewing machine coming to my house for me to sew on! Michael Bacon is amazing!

"you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs"

In my never-ending quest for Easter figurines to put in my sugar panorama eggs, I have discovered a new source.

I was seriously considering it when I was looking for miniatures for my Halloween and Christmas Putz villiages, but I just couldn't bring myself to follow through with the destruction. Dollar Tree carries miniature snowglobes at each holiday. They're just under 3 inches tall and the figurines inside the globe look to be the perfect size! So, yesterday I gave in to my temptation and bought a few Easter globes.

I wasn't sure what would happen when I tried to harvest the figurine from it's globe, so I put the whole thing in a shallow tray and covered the glass with a paper towel before I smashed it with a hammer. The glass is super thin and it really only takes a tap to break it. The liquid inside is just a non-toxic glycerin solution. And it turns out that the base of the figurine is actually a rubber stopper that's used to plug the globe when it's filled.

So I smashed all the globes and cleaned up the figurines. They all have a nice high gloss finish and I think the rubber stopper will stay because it can sink into the icing and the little guy will sit at just the right height inside the eggs.

Of course I don't plan to make enough eggs to use all of these figurines. I'll probably only make 1 or 2 eggs this year. But I'll save the figurines for future Easters. It makes me feel better to know I have Easter acessories ready for making panorama eggs at any time. Am I a hoarder?

Two of the globes popped right out of the base cleanly, so I'll save them and use them for something else. Maybe I'll put an airplant in one or make a tiny little Easter basket.