Six Short Stories About March

So much has happened in the last couple of weeks that life has become a blur! In lieu of my usual long, rambling blog post, here are some quick snapshots of my March:

1.) I bought A LOT of Angelina fibre. I'm all about the glitz these days, and I set out to order 3 or four colors. But Laura from Legacy Studio kept tempting me. In the end, there are 18 baggies in 8 colors. Oooooh, sparkly!

2.) My son's production of The Rocky Horror Show opened last week, and it's fabulous! Funny, sexy, and waaay over the top! I designed the set (sort of), Steve built it, Brendan produced, directed and designed costumes. A bit of a family affair. Brendan has done a marvelous job of surrounding himself with passionate, talented and...interesting people, and will probably not need his old Mom the next time around, but it was a thrill (and a bit of stress) to be involved with this project.

3.) For some reason, it seemed like a good idea to handcard 60 orange heather rolags one afternoon. Then for some reason, it seemed like a good idea to have a hot bath and rub Voltaren on my shoulders and not do anything for two days.

4.) There was a lot of orange spun. The darker orange is a Corriedale/silk blend. Spun worsted, lace-weight (about 50 wpi), 320 yards. The heather is still being plied, but so far, I have one skein of 305 yards, woollen, about the same grist. There is one more orange yarn in the planning stages, then the project will take shape. One hopes!

5.) To relieve the stress, I spun a little corespun mohair yarn. There are 95 yards at about 24 wpi. The core yarn is lace-weight Corriedale top (with a little left over), spun S and plied Z, and the outer layer is hand-dyed mohair locks that were loosely carded. Mmmmm, soft and fuzzy!



6.) You may have read about Karen Wolverton, co-owner of Lush Canada, painting herself red and laying on a bloody Canadian flag to protest the seal hunt. Well, part of that is a lie. She did not paint herself red, my daughter, the lovely and talented Miss Lexi Boyd, painted her.

Those are just a few things that happened in March. There was also a sweater completed, a soccer tournament (knitting + soccer mom=tink), a birthday, exams, and a minor collapse from exhaustion.

Bring on April!

No Strings

Hey! Remember me?

Yeah, it's been a while. I was trapped in that time-warping black hole that is Theatre again.

On Tuesday, March 10 and Wednesday, March 11 Thickwood Heights Theatrix presented their 24th annual production. This year's show was No Strings Attached, a Pinocchio story with a singing and dancing cast of 58 children ranging from grades 4 to 8. And, of course, a stellar set design by yours truly.

We started about a month ago, with Steve and his crew building sets and me and my crew painting the backdrops...

...while the kids rehearsed in the music room and the gym....

...then we hit the big stage at Keyano Theatre.

Here are The Cricket and her bug chorus, giving Pinocchio what-for.

And there was mayhem when Pinocchio and his buddy Dipstick run off to the land of Hedonia and get turned into donkeys.

My favorite piece of the set, though, is the giant shark that swallows Gepetto. This guy was so much fun to design and build. He is a wooden boat with a copper tube frame covered in an amazing translucent silver fabric from the bargain corner in Fabricland. (I wanted to buy the whole bolt, but cooler heads prevailed.) Mr. Sharky opens his mouth to reveal Gepetto sitting in his boat inside. Too clever, by half, if I may say so myself.

Sadly, Mr. Sharky wound up in the dumpster on Wednesday night, which is the downside of set design. I all gets torn apart and thrown away when the actors are done. Which is sort of a downer for the designer, let me tell you. But, as my very wise husband told me once, " Nobody goes home from a musical humming the set."

I've been thinking about the old metaphor that making theatre is like having a baby, and I see it clearly now. The first few months, you're all excited, but a little nauseous. Then things start to grow, and you start anticipating the future. And when you get to your due date, you are pretty sure you don't want to go through with it. Then it happens, and you're thrilled and exhausted, and pretty sure that's the last time you'll ever do that! After a few months, though, the stretch marks fade and the memory of the pain becomes blurry, and you start talking about when the next one will come along. This is why I have 3 kids, and why I have done the Thickwood Heights Theatrix productions for 10 years now.

(The big difference is that you get into a lot of trouble when you throw your baby into the dumpster! Oh, my poor, beautiful Sharky!)

I also pitched in backstage as the make-up designer and artist, and to offer moral support to my Miss Julia, who played Pinocchio. I believe I may be taking the stage mother thing a little too far, but I have yet to yell "Sing out, Louise!" for real.

All in all, it's been an exhausting couple of weeks, and I have been away from my spinning wheels so long that there is dust on them!

So, to sum it up, I have spent the last 3 weeks making No Strings!

(Ba-dump-dump Ching!)

Hats Off!

Whenever I scroll through my blogroll and find that a blog isn't being updated a lot recently, I always assume that the blogger has absolutely nothing going on, or waaay too much. That last one would be me! Computer time is a few minutes in the morning and a possible few more in the evening these days--and that is mostly spent getting my ass kicked at Scrabulous.

So what, you ask, has kept me so busy? Well, I'll tell you...

...I've been working a lot on the DAAGBF cardie. Then frogging and working a lot on it again. I'm making it up as I go along, so there are always revisions. And stupid mistakes in the really very simple lace pattern. Do not try and knit anything while watching "Sweeney Todd" on DVD--let's face it: do not try and knit anything while watching Johnny Depp on DVD! Too distracting.
Anyhooooo, I have divided for the armholes and am working the left front panel right now. It started out as a crew neck, but this time around, I am working it as a subtle vee. Time will tell which it stays in the end.

I am also quite immersed in rehearsals for "Angels in America", as I have mentioned before. This past week was fairly intense with the blocking and reblocking of the entire play, now we are into working the in scenes more detail. This means that my rehearsals are a little more spread out and that I actually have a few evenings off, plus all day Saturday, so I can go to the Ravelry meet-up this week.

I have a lot of time on my hands during rehearsals, too. I am playing four different characters who are spread out throughout the play, with long spaces of time between them. This can only mean one thing--more knitting time! I started out with a little watchcap, which I completed during the course of a run-thru, so I decided that I could make a hat per rehearsal. Last rehearsal we only did Act 1, so I made a baby hat. The rest of the cast and the director are quite amused by the concept, and I have already had one request for a custom hat.

The director also joked that I should write a play where every character wears a hat, and I countered that I should write a play where every character IS a hat! Perhaps even a musical! So that got me thinking--if you were a hat, which hat would you be? A tam? A toque? A cloche? Or perhaps a non-knitted hat, like a bowler or a sombrero?

It should also be mentioned at this juncture that three of my four characters wear hats. Hmmmm, I am beginning to see a theme emerging....it's all about the hats. Isn't it always?

OL's, FO's and an OMG

Excuse me while I gather the remaining shreds of my sanity and regroup....

...because I am still recovering from two weeks spent immersed in children's theatre!

Thickwood Heights Theatrix production of Willy Wonka Jr. was a huge success, and a hell of a lot of hard work! As usual, I designed the set for the production, but this year I thought it would be wonderful to make the kids part of the set. Great concept, especially with a cast of 74. What I didn't count on was that the reduced building time would turn into increased time working with the directors and kids on making the set work! Lots of time put in, but it was enjoyable time. For the most part, the kids were energetic and cooperative, really excited to have things to do, so they were a joy to work with.

The design concept, such that it was, was "a world of pure imagination", and we let the kids use their imaginations in bringing some of the scenic pieces to life, such as the chocolate river...

...and the nut chute that the squirrels throw Veruca Salt down!

And even the giant Wonkavision TV.

There were still several large set pieces to be built, such as the Bucket family's shack and the factory gates, which meant several evenings spent in local high school's carpentry shop with our crack set-building squad.

On top of all that, I somehow found myself volunteering at the last minute to do the make-up for the show! There were 23 Oompa-Loompas alone, not to mention all the little candies and squirrels, along with the "parents" and ''grandparents". It made for a pretty hectic two hours before each perfomance, but I had a lot of help from the kids. Between set change notes, make-up notes and costume notes, I must have written the phrase Oompa-Loompa a hundred times--thus the short-hand OL arose. OL became the catchphrase for all things pertaining to large groups for the remainder of the past week!

Of course, there was the requisite backstage drama, what with a predominantly junior high-aged cast and a couple of stage mamas thrown in, but in the end, it was well worth it as the Oompa-Loompas took their bow!

In my free time (cough), I managed to weave off the last of the Sunshine Scarf and give it a wash and a block. I'm really happy with the results, but I think it will become the first member of my "for sale" stock. Weaving it may have been what kept me from strangling OL's!

The other FO this week was Miss Lexi's Socks. She chose the yarn while I was out in Vancouver visiting and I have been putzing at them for a couple of weeks now.

The yarn is DG Confetti, self-striping in colorway 02.001. The socks are knit on 2.5mm needles, using my usual plain sock pattern with a short-row heel to preserve the color pattern. The cuff is 14 inches long, not quite knee-high, but close, so I started with more stitches than usual and did a little calf shaping with matched decreases. I really liked the evenness of the stripes and, wonder of wonders, both balls started at the same point in the pattern, so the stripes match on both socks!
Some of the knitting on these socks was done in the company of other knitters--yes, I have found fellow knitters in Fort McMurray! (Shout out to my Homies!) Or rather, they found me, via Ravelry. I now have somewhere to hang with people who speak my language without having to travel too far. The adventures have already begun, and will not doubt continue--what a great group of women!

And now the OMG. Overlapping the Willy Wonka madness, rehearsals for Angels in America began last week. What have I gotten myself into?!? My recent theatre experience has been pretty easy-going, but I now face creating 4 different characters over 3 hours of long monologues and gruelling blocking. I'm just a little overwhelmed by the scale of this thing right now, and the amount of work facing me--OMG! Help!

Not only that, but I am down to having one project on the go. One! How can that be? Nothing on the wheels, nothing on the loom, nothing more on the needles. I feel like something is terribly wrong...I must go cast something on before the universe implodes into the vacuum!

The Cure for Grey

It's mud season again. That's the time of year that is not quite winter anymore, but spring is still a week or so away. Everything is grey and mucky, and this is what I look out my window at right now.

The good news is that this will only last a couple of weeks and that it has to be warmer to make snow into mud. It is not quite time to pack away the parkas, but, for now anyway, sweaters are working just fine.

I am still knitting away on my grey DAAGBF sweater, the view is muddy and grey (as are my floors) and a few unpleasant incidents over the past week have put me in a grey mood. So what's a gal to do when she is mired in grey? Warp up her own sunshine, of course!

A great big fat singles yarn, spun by Ellen Munroe, and space-dyed in reds, pinks and yellows for the warp and the matching red for weft. Sett at 5 epi on the rigid heddle and mostly woven at this point.

Ooooh! Happy colors!

The other cure for grey has been the wonderful people in my life. It's Theatrix (the school theatre group that I work with) production time again, which means I get to hang out with a lot of really committed and enthusiastic creative kids and adults for a couple of weeks. This year's production is Willy Wonka Jr., and I'll tell you, nothing recharges the batteries like 37 Oompa-loompas dancing around you! The curtain goes up a week from tomorrow, with sets and make-up design by yours truly--check it out at Keyano Theatre if you're in Fort McMurray! (I'll take pictures for those of you who can't make it.)

I will also be starting rehearsals for Angels in America tomorrow evening, so my time will get much tighter for the next 6 weeks. I have no mindless backstage knitting to keep me from mischief. I do have a pair of knee-high self-striping socks on the needles, but those will be done by the weekend (she says optimistically). We shall have to go stash diving soon...but first, let's weave a little more sunshine!

Hansel and Gretel

The last of the major non-fibre commitments has been completed...Thickwood Heights School's production of Hansel and Gretel has been an enormous success. I designed the set, Steve built it, Lexi did make-up and Julia played Gretel. The principal referred to us as the "first family of theatre" at Thickwood Heights. Aww, shucks.

The building of the set is always an enormous undertaking with five or six really great volunteers and whatever borrowed shop space we can find. I deliberately designed things to be modular and portable this time around because we did not have a shop available to us, so I figured we'd be building in garages and basements. Fortunately, the acting principal of the high school right next to the theatre happens to be married to the costume designer for the production and, voila! a shop was at our disposal.

I did not get a lot of pictures of the set because I spent a great deal more time than expected backstage helping with frazzled nerves. We have a wonderful teacher who each year serves as BOTWA (Bridge Over Troubled WAter), but she wound up needing to focus on one particular student who had a spectacular attack of stage fright, so I stepped in as assistant BOTWA. Not much to it, but it gave chief BOTWA the peace of mind so she could focus on our nervous Nellie. It's pretty scary when I become the voice of reason.....

This is a wide shot of the gingerbread house. It is a fly, constructed of masonite with a spruce frame. The embellishments include cinnamon hearts (styrofoam), hard candies (styro balls in cellophane), and gumdrops (plastic Easter egg halves with glitter). There is actually a boatload of glitter on the whole thing, but it doesn't show well with this lighting.

Full cast shot. There were 54 students ranging from grade 4-8 in the cast. And they were great kids, for the most part. For just a few minutes, they each got to be a star and have their moment in the spotlight. Children's theatre is a special experience--go watch it, volunteer to help, or support it with donations. It'll do your heart good!