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!