Musicals

Last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to see a professional performance of the musical Les Miserables.  Boy, was it neat to watch!  And I think one of the best things about it was to get back to work on Monday, tell my coworkers I had seen it, and have two different people instantly say, "'Bring Him Home' is such a good song!"  (I love my coworkers.)  That, and I overheard someone afterward saying "I thought he was going to jump off the bridge rail and just face-plant on the stage, and I was thinking, 'Uh... that's not going to sound like water.'"  Which, if you don't know Les Miserables, won't make any sense, but if you know it, you know what I'm talking about!  I had to try not to laugh, because I wasn't meaning to eavesdrop.

I'm in love with musicals.  Music has such a powerful effect on emotions, and I think the idea of telling a story through music is pure brilliance.  So here, for your enjoyment, are some of my favorite songs from my top three favorite musicals.

Comic Strips

First of all, I want to thank everyone for the responces, encouragement and advice I recieved on my last blog post and on facebook as well.  Being able to share this with others and hearing back from them really helps a lot, and I'm very grateful to everyone.  THANKS, GUYS!  YOU ARE AWESOME!

Secondly... remember that thing I said about how I wasn't going to mention Trigun in my next post (ignoring the Post of Angst I wrote last time)?  Well... I kinda... lied... I had thought that I would spend the week making a necklace for my sister and then blogging about it, but instead I've spent a whole lot of time doing nothing.  But I did mention an Easter comic that I was going to blog about and it... might... maybe... involve... characters from a certain anime, the name of which begins with "Tri" and ends with "gun."

SO ANYWAY, here's a belated Happy Easter to everyone!  Please enjoy my belated, silly, and kinda crappy comic that I made.  (And don't worry, you won't have to know Trigun to appreciate it, although it might be a little helpful to know the guy in the suit is a priest.)

We interrupt this program...

I'll start with an apology.  I had drawn up an Easter comic this weekend and intended to post it as my blog post for the week.  But, unfortunately, you'll have to wait for the funny, because I'm taking a moment to talk about something more serious.
I'll give a second apology.  This post is almost entirely just to get something off my chest.  There's something that I really want to talk to someone about, anyone will do, and so I'm talking here, since there's no one here in person, and since I'm really quite terrible at talking about emotional things in person anyway.
My third apology is that I'm going to ramble quite a while until I finally reach present day in my narrative, so hang in there.  If you're impatient, then I'll skip to today: I cried this evening for no good reason and I'm very very upset about that.  Okay, now I'm going to go back and explain everything.

Tailoring, Part Two

I want to start off by saying that I am wearing my Milly Coat even as I type this.

Trying my Hand at Tailoring.

Note:  This blog post is about something I'm CURRENTLY working on, but it takes me a while to get to the point.  Just keep reading.  You'll get there eventually.

I sewed my first item of clothing when I was about eight years old, if I remember right.  It was a pair of shorts made from purple flowered material, and my mother wouldn't let me wear them out of the house.  (I don't blame her, although back then, I thought they were AWESOME!)

My mother did a lot of sewing when I was very young, and would make matching Easter dresses for my sister and I every year until we were old enough that we thought that was kinda uncool. As such, I learned a lot about sewing when I was little.  In fact, I even remember doing those little lacing cards where you thread the yarn through the holes to outline a cartoon character, and I was always annoyed that the string wasn't long enough to do a back-stitch.

Project Completed: Vash the Plushy

I'd like to introduce you to someone.

Now, this blog is called Adventures in Creativity, not Adventures in Anime, so I’ll forgo explaining his character and his show.  I’ll just let that introduction suffice.*

*Vash is the hero and a good guy, but also an outlaw, so he's a little hesitant sometimes to throw around his name.

Who I really wanted you to meet, though, is this guy.

I finished him up just a couple days after my last blog post, but I was slow to post him on here because I’ve been really busy... busy being lazy I mean.  So, what I’d like to talk about is how he was made, and tips I’ve learned in plushy-making, so that other’s can take a stab at it if they like.

The Huggable World of Plushies

"This is Scrump.  I made her.  But her head is too big, so I pretended a bug laid eggs in her ear."
~Lilo, Lilo & Stitch

I remember the day I discovered the craft of plushie making.  I was poking around corners of www.deviantart.com that I had yet to explore and stumbled upon it.  Making your own doll was a completely new concept to me.  The idea of making a doll for a child was within my realm of reasoning, although it conjured images of Raggedy Ann dolls and things with button eyes that came just a little too close to resembling something you cast voodoo spells on.  And it seemed a bit silly to go through so much trouble when you could go to a store and by a doll that wasn’t creepy.  But here were people (lots and lots of people) who could stitch together completely adorable little dolls of just about any fictional character they wanted.  They weren’t creating Raggedy Ann for the sake of giving a toy to a little kid, they were creating cute, huggable versions of their favorite characters for the sake of owning cute huggable versions of their favorite characters.

A lightbulb came on.  I could hug anyone I wanted!  All I had to do was figure out how to make them!

It was as though I had seen the light.  Someday, I would hug the crap out of one of my favorite characters while squeeling like a little girl.  It was my destiny!