Back!

Back in the office for the week, and it's kind of like an oven. Maybe that's why I rarely spend time here... :) They turned on the heat on Thursday, and it's had plenty of time to warm up now. I think I may have to switch to water instead of tea before too much longer!

St. Louis was a blast, and I got to spend time with just about everyone I wanted to see. I never did see Uncle Joe, and Thor was too ill to make it up on Sunday, and I got a message from Shawn wanting to hang out AFTER I got back to Seattle, but otherwise, good trip. We got to do Laumeier and the City Museum, as well as the Schlafly Brew Pub and Johnny Brock's Halloween Dungeon. The picture is from the City Museum, taken from the ferris wheel on the 11th floor of the building. Megan, Vanessa, Bryan, and I all rode it, while Jeremy and Cindy took pictures of us crazy people. :)

We proceeded to spend most of yesterday running around, trying to get everything that we would normally do on the weekend done. We also made a couple of extra stops so I could start getting things for my Halloween costumes. I'm going to have 3 or 4 costumes this year. One of them, Columbia from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I'm borrowing from Megan (assuming she sends it to me on time), and only needed to buy a new pair of fishnets for it. Another is the Twisted Belle costume, which I am piecing together from a yellow homecoming dress and some other yellow fabric.

I'm still a little up in the air for the last one or two. I want to wear my Ice Princess costume, which I've done in various iterations in the past, but I'm not sure when I will actually want to wear a corset for my Halloween activities. That costume may also get remade into a Tin Woman costume (think Wizard of Oz with a twist), since it's shiny and silver. We also saw a cute "Wednesday Addams all grown up" costume at Johnny Brock's, and I'm pretty sure I can reproduce that mostly with stuff I already own. And my Dark Lily (from Legend) costume from a couple of years ago was super fun (and I still have the dress).

Between SteamCon rapidly approaching, then Halloween, and then AmberCon NW, I'm just full of excuses for costuming. Good thing I like doing it! :)

The Land of Oz

The EtsyRain Creative Challenge #5 is on a Wizard of Oz theme, so of course I had to give it a shot. Of course, I will be making more than one Wizard of Oz inspired piece, this is just the first.



It's an 8x10 collage, the biggest one I've ever made (at least within my adult life). The description on Etsy tells you about what the different images represent, but I gotta tell you about actually putting the thing together. :)

I had a basic idea in my head to begin with, about the structure of the piece overall. I wanted the central piece to be the Yellow Brick Road, and I started out with GRAND plans for it. We received an art supply catalog in the mail many months ago, and I've been hanging on to it for use in collages. When the art supply catalog shows off the assorted colors of paint that are available, they show what look like tiny bricks of color. So the yellow brick road is pieced together out of many many many little "paint samples." :)

The other pictures mainly came from a combination of archaeology magazines, kids magazines, and fashion magazines. It's funny to realize that, but when you're making collages, there are quite a few ways you can work with pretty much anything you have available. It's all about looking beyond the original composition of a fashion ad, for example, and picking out the pieces that work for your collage.

I think my main obsession with collages is that I can pretty much just use stuff that otherwise would need to be recycled or trashed. Even the base for this collage was "trash"--it was the piece of cardboard that came inside of a thermal shirt package. It's a perfectly nice piece of cardboard, and now it's even nicer with a Wizard of Oz collage attached to it! :)