A Midsummer Night's Dream

Hey guys!
I am part of a youth theatre group, Celsius Youth Theatre, and right now I'm working on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. 
I'm going to be working on a couple things for this production, including designing the set, designing costumes, acting (I'm playing Bottom) and building the set and costumes. It's actually quite fun.
I get to work with my friend Kelsey (who I'm designing sets/costumes with) and my friend Daniel, who is directing the play. 
Designing a play is a really interesting process. It takes a lot of thinking to get to the point where you can say that everything is figured out. In  the world of a play you need to suspend your audiences belief enough that they can buy into the wonderful world that they see onstage. With A Midsummer Night's Dream, you can really push the envelope in the forest, where most of the action takes place, to create a dreamy, unrealistic space. It is, after all, the realm of the fairies, so you can make things stylized and angular and vivid.
Right now we've almost got our set design finalized (yay!).  Now we need to finish all the costume design.
I'll post pictures of the set and costumes (and costume and set drawings) after the plays run is over in November.

Vive le Shakespeare!
~josh
  
(Okay, technically I can't say "Vive le Shakespeare" because he's already dead, but what ever.)

Rambling about Helvetica

Happy are those who can post in Helvetica!  

Helvetica is a font, as you may or may not already know, that is extremely popular and VERY well designed. 

Helvetica was designed in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, as a replacement for fonts used in signage.

The designers of the font wanted it to be very easy to read and have no particular "character" to it so that it's uses could be varied without lending a certain "tone" or "feeling" to the text.

Helvetica's use is so widespread that it is quite astonishing.  A massive number of corporations use the font in their logos. For example;

Apple,

3M, 

American Airlines, 

American Apparel, 

BMW, 

Jeep,

JC penny, 

Lufthansa, 

Microsoft, 

Target, 

Re/Max, 

Toyota, 

Panasonic, 

Motorola, 

Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless all use the font. 

Even the movie ratings you see on the back of DVD's is set in Helvetica.

NASA used helvetica on the space shuttle Orbiter. The US and the Canadian Government also use helvetica. 

In fact, helvetica's use is so extremely widespread that there was a documentary made about it. (Which, by the way, is excellent.) 

Most road signs you will see are set in either helvetica, or a typeface based on helvetica.

And now I can type all my posts in it.

Life is good.

-Josh, who is extremely happy that helvetica has joined the Blogger universe.

Word of the Day Wednesday #2

Hey guys!
I've been looking at one of my new favorite nerd websites, The Phrontistery, and I found that it has lists of archaic and odd words organized by letter.
YES!
As you have probably noted in my posts, I love odd and weird words and random nerdy/techy/design oriented things and this website is just going to feed the geeky frenzy that is my brain.
Anyway the "E" section of this website seemed especially interesting, since I really don't think that people use that many "E" words. Other that "exciting" and "easy". And "exciting" isn't all that interesting of a word. Whilst I was searching I found this word; esculent. It means "edible" or "fit for consumption." Doesn't it sound awesome!? I mean, it's exceedingly more fun to say than "yummy".  Take this brief exchange with my mother, for example:

Mom: Here, try this cupcake!

Me: Okay. *Noms cupcake*

Mom: Soooo, how do you like it?

Me: It's most exceedingly esculent!

Mom: Why do I even bother?

Yeah, I'm a pretty weird child.  I blame this video.
Anyway, I better stop talking. As some wise person once said: "Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
And thus concludes this word of the day Wednesday.

May all your meals be esculent,

Josh.

(PS, what is your favorite word? Leave a comment below!)
((PSS, YES, I know this is posted on thursday, but better late then never. Right? No? Okay...))

Word of the Day Wednesday

Hi guys!
I have been listening to CBC lately and it seems the new political buzzword is "unredacted".
I don't know about you, but it sounds like a pretty awesome word to me.
Say it out loud, "unredacted" (you know you want to.)
Isn't it awesome!?!
Anyway, I decided to look up the definition of the word.
Here is Wiktionary's definition:

Adjective

unredacted (not comparable)

Positive unredacted

Comparative not comparable

Superlative none (absolute)

1. Not redacted.

Wow, thanks Wiktionary,  that sure helps.
So now I know that unredacted means not redacted.
I continue my search for the definition on Urban Dictionary.
Here is Urban Dictionary's definition: 

unredacted
	verb: redact is more specific than edit, scarcely overlaps with censor, and is genuinely useful: mid-19th century -- essentially, a fancy or technical *synonym* of "edit" -- to this a more specific sense. examples are of UNREDACTED being used as a reference to blacked-out bits of text that are "classified" or "sensitive" -- effectively, as a replacement for the unpleasant participle CENSORED.

Okay, thanks Urban Dictionary, that's much better.
So I guess it means uncensored.
Hmph.
I was expecting something more dramatic, like "not life-threatening" or "unalterablenesses" (Yes, that's a word!)
Therefore I hereby decree that because of the unalterablenesses of the word "unredacted" I shall lose my train of thought and forget my point.
If I even had a point....
If I had more points this blog would be much more interesting, wouldn't it?
Anyway, I thought that you guys should all here about the word "unredacted".
May the forces of evil get lost on the way to you front doorstep,
Josh.

(PS, what do you guys think of Word of the Day Wednesdays?)

(PSS, I used the word definition 4 times! Yay me!)

Valentines day Papercuts

Hey there guys!
I wanted to show you these papercuts I made for my Mom for Valentines day.
Yeah yeah, I know, it's April, almost May, but better late then never???
Yes? No?

Once again, I used these patterns designed by Cindy Ferguson, (She honestly has the BEST papercut patterns available!) and I did two in matching blue and brown paper.

I'm sorry that the pictures are so bad, I didn't glue the cutouts to the background paper so I couldn't take pictures without the glass.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy them!
~Josh
(PS, I'm going to try a blogging schedule, twice a week on Sunday and Wednesday. So if I miss a day just leave a comment to remind me. :P Thanks!)

Tree Climbing

Ah, I love climbing the tree in my backyard.
I've been wanting to build a tree house in the tree in my backyard for quite a while now, but I'm not sure how to go about it. Apparently there are a myriad of ways to build your tree house. You can suspend it from wires or attach it to the tree directly, you can suspend it between two trees, you can connect it to one tree and suspend it from the other. You can have it entirely independent from the tree even, but that doesn't seem like very much fun. Mostly I just want a tree house to sit and read in, nothing big, probably just a platform to sit on with a little railing. Of course I still think of building one like this. Although not that big, of course. *wink*
There is one branch I climb up to now that is almost level, so it's quite comfy to sit in. It's still not very nice to read sitting on it though. (I was Wicked up there yesterday.)
Anyway, here are a couple of pictures I took today from my viewpoint in the tree.

Looking up at the sky

A leaf left over from last year

There's nothing quite like sitting in a tree when the wind is blowing and you rock back and forth a bit.
That's all I wanted to say today,
~Josh

Portraits

Hi there,
My friends and I decided that we were going to read Les Miserables together, and when we finished we decided to have a little party. And since we are all amazing geeks (NOT amazingly geeky, but close...) we also decided that we should Swede Les Miserables.
For those of you who haven't seen Be Kind Rewind (where the term "sweded" comes from) "Sweding" a movie/book is basically taking a movie/book and making a super campy 5 minute version of it. Youtube has TONS of sweded movies, of which the Princess Bride is my favorite. After I finished editing the footage our version weighed in at a little under 10 minutes, but for a 1400 page book I don't think it's all that bad. You should watch it now. (it has bloopers!)

Anyway, since reading Les Miserables is quite an achievment I though I would make gifts for the other people in the reading group, and I thought that I would make them each a portrait of themselves.
Here they are, first I have Daniel's,

And then I have Kelsey's,

And then I have Nicole's,

And then I have Bronwen's.

They turned out fantastically better than I expected, and I am quite proud of myself.
It's kind of sad though, because I only actually have one of my papercuts, all the other ones I've made have been given away as gifts.
Now I'm going to start making some for myself. *yay me!*
Anyway, you should check out DudeCrafts tutorial for how to make these, he makes super amazing tutorials!
*yay for people who make super amazing tutorials!*
Okay, I better end this post, it's getting pretty long and ramble-y now...
So long for now!
~Josh

Alice in Wonderland paper cut.

Hi guys!
I wanted to show you a paper cut that I made that I have been meaning to post about for quite a while now. *cough*

It is, of course, the tea party from Alice in Wonderland. As you can see it is cut of two separate pieces of paper and then slotted together to make a table centerpiece. (You can check out a video of it here.)
It is probably the most intricate paper cut I have tried yet, although one I recently finished (which will be in another post) comes pretty close. I really like the final look of this, it turned out better than I expected. The little holes in the center of the flowers drove me crazy, so I punched them out with a hammer punch, but other than that, everything else is cut with an X-acto blade. Also, this pattern is by Cindy from the Scherenshnitte blog, which you should go check out right now. She posts some really amazing free patterns (this one was from a book she was featured in) and she also has an awesome Etsy shop where she sells some paper cuts and really really nice prints of her work.
Anyway thank you for checking out this post!
Au revoir!

~Josh

Vonderfull Blanket

Hello all,
I got an awesome birthday present this year.
And guess what,
It was home made!
Vanessa from Homemade Holiday Gifts made me an awesome cozy TV blanket made from recycled antique sweaters!


It's REALLY cozy and warm, and is just right to sit with a book and read.
Some of the patches and made from an old hand knit sweater with some really cool cabeling. Yay for really awesome gifts! Thanks Vanessa!
Josh.
(PS, if you want to learn more about the blanket, and how to make your own, check out the tutorial here and poke around the website, it's really cool!)