This Year's Christmas Projects

I knew the holidays would be busy this year, so I started my Christmas crafting early. As is tradition, there was LOTR-related crafting, this time in the form of painted and wood-burned ornaments:

The Eye of Sauron, painted on a papier mache blank sphere from Michael's (this makes three eyes now in my living room, all ominously watching everything), and JRR Tolkien's monogram and the White Tree of Gondor. 

Things got kitschy and punny real fast when I used the free Sewaholic Stanley Tree pattern to make a chemis-tree out of leftover science-y fabric:

SHB really enjoys hitting it because all the bells jangle madly.

I also made little felt ornaments for my brother and sister:

For my sister, a paramedic in training: a Gumbulance (ambulance on one side, her crazy orange cat Gummy on the other). For my brother, a car enthusiast: a Fenxibaru (the Subaru logo on one side, and his sleeping cat Fenxi on the other). There were many hours of meticulous cutting and blanket stitching. 

And then my mother-in-law unexpectedly passed away and all plans got thrown out the window. While I had the fabric purchased for several weeks, I didn't get around to making Mr. Cation's and SHB's matching Warriors jammies until a few days after Christmas. Thankfully, elastic waist pants are just about the easiest thing to sew, so I was done with both pairs in an afternoon. I'll wager it took longer to actually get a decent picture of them together, because SHB was having a hyper morning. Oh wait, that's every morning. And afternoon. And evening. And unfortunately, sometimes night. 

"Could you stop running around for just two minutes?" 

"Maybe it's easier if we just get Walnut into position first."

"No, this is not easier, because I can't chase him down with a cat in my lap."

I place toddler in Dad's lap. He chooses that moment to imitate a fish flipping out on the line, fighting for its life.

Let's try this again. "Look, I've got a basketball! Don't you want to come get it?"
(Also, check out my not-thought-through pattern placement on SHB's butt. The two Warriors logos slightly overlapped make...a butt. Good thing he's a toddler and nobody will care.)

Toddler tries to ram his head into Daddy's armpit, cat leaves. 

"Okay, sit in Daddy's lap. Walnut, come here."

"Try to look happy, everyone! Dangit, Walnut, I can't see your face."

Toddler seizes the ball, cat decides he's done.

Thankfully, he settles down not too far away. I think this is as good as it's going to get.

Attempts at a brothers' photo work slightly better because Daddy can help wrangle both boys. 

I had plans to make more LOTR-themed gifts for SHB, but those will have to wait until I have time. Let's just hope that I get to make them before he gets too old to enjoy what I have in mind! 

In the meantime, SHB continues trying to bug his older brother into playing ball with him. Typical little brother. 

A Very Mirkwood New Years' Eve

How can the holidays be anything but merry when Party King Thranduil presides? After all, it's now movie canon that he doesn't shirk on the quality of the drink. And I found this gem in Weta's art and design book for the movie (Mr. Cation good-humoredly let me choose my own Christmas present from him):

See that? The open collar symbolizes his rockstar-ness! I think that's as close as we're going to get to admitting that he really is as fabulous as tumblr makes him out to be. It does rather unfortunately bring to mind the vampire Lestat, though...

Gorgeous concept sketches for his throne.

When I saw this in the movie, I was ready to swoon. Much as I liked Rivendell and Lothlorien, they can't hold a candle to how the Woodland Realm took my breath away.

As I mentioned before, my sister Emily and I have a holiday tradition of building things, and this year, it was only logical that we build the Elvenking a throne. I cannot say enough how much I love Alan Lee and John Howe's imagining of what the Thranduil's underground halls looks like, and the movie was every bit as fabulous (actually, more!) as what I had in my head when I first read the book. The challenge was to make our cheap cardboard version do justice to it. Thankfully, we had plenty of large boxes in the garage; the flatscreen TV box turned into the antlers, the vacuum box turned into the top layer of the seat back, and a monitor box turned into the backing.

I sketched out the design onto the box, then Emily cut it out with a box cutter. Gosh, I just love elvish design elements. All those curved lines and intertwining branches! If I could outfit my whole house with Art Nouveau furniture, I would.

After that, it was just a matter time, paint, wooden chopsticks to stabilize the antler points, and plenty of hot glue before we had a throne. As always, things started out looking awfully dubious, but then it all came together spectacularly in the end (as my mother once again grudgingly admitted...poor lady, I'm sure she thought that a mess of cardboard scraps and the threat of paint on her white carpet should have ended once her daughters became adults).

Brown, black, white, red, and gold acrylic paints can transform cardboard.

It's really too bad the boxes had so many folds in them, though; it really messed up the painting.

If we'd had more boxes, we could have built up the sides more so that the back wasn't so narrow. Considering that we spent zero dollars, though, I'd say it turned out pretty dang well.  

Welcome to the Woodland Realm, mellon. Check out my fabulous throne (and not my hideous seam allowances).

We broke out the Christmas decorations after that and had entirely too much fun taking pictures and trying to get the cats to cooperate.

I need Oonaballoona's expertise in coming up with an appropriate cocktail for Thranduil. 

You know it's a good party when the Elvenking starts throwing tinsel boas in the air?

Celebrating the fact that my son's not pledged to a lowly Silvan elf!

Gummy got interested and came over to check out the bar. 

Oh hello there, fey creature! Would you like to party with us? You're welcome as long as you're not a dwarf.

Have you been a good cat this year? What would you like in your oversized hosiery?

The answer: Gummy would like to not be roped (boa-ed?) into such shenanigans. 

I'm not really sure what's going on, but I know I look good.

I thought about apologizing for the ridiculous spate of Thranduil posts this past month, but then I'm not actually sorry. I guess I'm sorry that I'm not more sorry? Anyway, now that 2013 is almost over, it's time to start thinking about my year-end wrap up. There's been rather less sewing than in previous years, but it'll still be interesting to see how my making has changed in this last year. Thanks to Gillian for organizing a way to reflect on the year; without her helpful lists and guidelines, I'd probably be too overwhelmed to even start!

A very happy new year to you from Party King Thranduil and the Party Elk!

Have Yourself a Mordor Little Christmas?

I really didn't intend for there to be any more Tolkien-related posts this year, but when the creative juices flow, well, you just have to run with it, right? Last year, Emily and I "built" a pathetic little Christmas tree; this year we decided to dream big and build Barad-dur. We used a few boxes from Costco, an IKEA Rutbo lamp, several yards of black butcher paper, and quite a bit of tape. As with most of our crafts, my mom was dubious when we began, but conceded that the final product wasn't half bad. I'll let you judge our work for yourselves, geeky readers:

Left: before decoration. Right: all decked out with tinsel, lights, ornaments, and presents!

We did our family Christmas pictures by the "tree," the way you're supposed to.

We couldn't get a picture where Walnut looked normal. 

And just to top it off, Emily and I made a crango (cranberry-mango) cheesecake for Christmas dessert:

With the help of some judiciously placed mini chocolate chips...

Yup, that's just the way we roll. It was quite tasty and I'm sure I could spin it somehow to say Christmas is about the triumph of light over dark (we destroyed the eye of Sauron by eating it!), but I'll just leave it at this: I hope you all were able to eat good food and enjoy being creative, and that you had as lovely a time with your dear ones as I did. Oh, and totally independently of our dessert choice:

"The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned...For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever." 

Isaiah 9:2, 6-7

I actually intended to post this before Christmas, not after, but Walnut had other ideas. Our darling fur baby decided that Christmas Eve was a good time to start peeing blood; a panicked trip to the vet revealed that he has a couple of bladder stones. He's going to have surgery to remove them tomorrow, so if you think of him he could use your prayers and good wishes for a smooth procedure and quick recovery!

Poor guy has no idea what's coming to him. 

The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria

The completion of this project marks the end of one of my most long-standing UFOs* -- it languished for eight whole years.

Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy of movies came out when I was in college, and for the three years that Elaine and I shared a dorm room, our walls were wallpapered with LOTR articles, magazine covers, calendar pictures, and other paraphernalia. I wish I had thought to take pictures, but alas, there is no evidence that we ever reached such a level of geekery. At the height of this obsession, I began working on painting the Hollin Gate on a huge piece of canvas. Unfortunately, life and and schoolwork got in the way, and at the end of my junior year I sadly took down my uncompleted project. I had only finished the white outlines and a fraction of the gray background, but I folded up the canvas and stuffed it into a storage bin, and somehow managed not to lose it despite moving eight times in eight years. I always thought I'd finish it someday, but after ROTK came out I lost some of the fervor and consequent motivation. Well, apparently a birthday party is sufficient motivation, because I finally finished it!

All Christmas-ed up and ready for picture-taking on Saturday! 

The arch is actually blank, but I cut out runes to say "happy birthday" so that I can change out the greeting depending on the occasion!

The real inscription on Durin's door doesn't actually say happy birthday, of course. Besides stating the riddle one has to solve to open it ("speak friend and enter"), it also proclaims that Narvi made it and Celebrimbor made the symbols, but that's silly and non-applicable in this case, so I opted to leave the arch blank. 

I actually have no idea how I managed to sketch out the design for this on such a large scale; I didn't have a projector or transparency machine to help me out, and the only reference picture I had was the tiny one in my copy of FOTR, but somehow I managed to capture the very recognizable look of the West-gate of Moria. It's a good thing I did such a thorough job those many years ago, because it was quite easy to finish up the painting of this. Probably the most difficult part was pacifying Mr. Cation while this giant canvas took up all of our dining area, as that's the biggest non-carpeted space in our apartment.

It reaches almost from the floor to the ceiling!

It's a good thing I covered surfaces with garbage bags, because the paint definitely seeped through. I learned this lesson the hard way junior year: when I took down the canvas from the wall a day before I had to move out, there were all of these dark gray blotches all over the wall! I panicked for a little bit before realizing I could whip out my paints again and paint over all the blotches. Good thing I was able to match the whites and get my deposit back!

Summary: 
Materials: Three yards of 54" wide heavy duty cream-colored canvas from the UCSD Bookstore, two 16 fl. oz. bottles of white tempera paint, one 8 fl. oz. bottle of black tempera paint, several different sizes of paintbrush
Time required: I don't remember how much time I put into this in junior year, but it took me about ten more hours to finish painting this. Even though it was just mindless filling in of space, it was tricky mixing the same shade of gray every time, and the canvas was also extremely hard to paint, with all its divots and ability to suck up huge amounts of paint. I managed to watch The King's Speech and listen to several episodes of Radiolab and EscapePod while working on it.

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Will you do this again? Is it crazy to want to do my whole (imaginary) house in LOTR decor? Mr. Cation got me the Hobbit art book that has all of Tolkien's original artwork for my birthday, and I'm thinking that the Elvenking's gate would make a fantastic living room mural. I don't think I'll ever paint such a large canvas again, though.
Total cost: A little less than $50, but most of it was so long ago it feels much cheaper than that. $6 in paint, $30 for the canvas, and another $10 in paintbrushes. If I were doing it again now, I would know that canvas can be gotten for much cheaper with coupons at Joann's.
Final thoughts: Last year's Christmas decoration was just a cardboard fireplace...I'm thinking that this is taking the DIY holiday focus piece to a whole 'nother level! Also, unlike the fireplace, which we ended up recycling, this is something I can fold up and keep and bring out at appropriate occasions. When we move to somewhere more permanent, I'd love to actually stretch it out onto a frame so that the edges don't look so grodilated. I thought about binding the edges with some extra-wide bias tape, but I don't much fancy trying to sew through canvas covered with a thick layer of paint.

Walnut looking especially fuzzy in front of the door. 

Mr. Cation also got me the first Hobbit Lego set: Riddles for the Ring. It's just a tiny set, but I appreciate that Gollum's arms are articulated, as well as the ring's hiding place behind a couple of "rocks." It's also nice that they included an extra ring, because a piece that size is just asking to be lost... LOSSSTTT, my precious! Curse us and crush us, the precious is lost!!!

Walnut makes a reluctant showroom model. 

Gollum comes with a nice fish. "Give it to us raw and wriggling! You keep nasty chips!"

Lego made minifigs for each of the characters! I love that there's a warg!