Wedding Recap: The Ultimate Party Trick

A few months back, Matt and I decided to cross-off #114 on our list of life-goals and learn the dance to Michael Jackson's Thriller!, a feat made possible by tutorials from thrilltheworld.com. This website was set-up by a Canadian dancer (the best kind of dancer, if you ask me) who aimed to break the world record for largest simultaneous Thriller! dance. She created a series of tutorial videos aimed at people with little to no dance experience. Now you too can be the coolest person at the next party you attend!

Although the tutorials cover the entire 6 minute version of Thriller!, our friends were already being such awesome sports that we really owed it to them to edit the song down to 3 minutes. Anyway, here is a video of the fruits of our labor from the wedding. Enjoy!

Night of the Living Wed from Sarah Stock on Vimeo.

Mwa-hahahahaaaa!

Happy Easter!

 {Me-likey: Berkley Illustration}

In honor of Easter, I present to you these hilariously sweet animal portraits by Etsy seller Berkley Illustration!.  Check out the whole series - they have formals of everything from a little robin to a T-rex.  How can you not smile at these?

Last-minute wrapping ideas

If you're like me and you've yet to wrap most of your holiday presents, here's a little round-up of my favorite Macgyver-esque gift wrapping projects floating around the internets this year:

Top Row: Paint chip gift tags from A Spoonful of Sugar
Middle Row: Recycled magazine gift bow from Craftster
Bottom Row: Plastic bag gift bow from Creature Comforts

Happy Holidays!

A Christmas (Card) Story...

If you remember our holiday cards last year, you probably guessed that our major inspiration was of course this:

With a touch of this:

And a hint of my mommy's old family Christmas cards:

Here's how we did it...

Supplies:

• Camera with timer
• Tripod
• Natural light (a nice overcast day was key!)
• Winter outfits
• green screen*
• Photo Editing software
• Background school scene and foreground flagpole images for a-layerin' (we used actual images from the movie "A Christmas Story")
• Retro font - ours is 'Leisure Script' from fontdiner.com (You'll notice it is not free - I wont comment on how I got my hands on it - but there are many free fonts at DaFont, 1001freefonts, etc. I LOVE fonts! But more on that in another post.)

*our "green screen" was actually a white sheet. It was pretty easy to trim that out of the background. I am not sure why green is the ideal color to subtract from the background, but I am going to assume that it is science.

Steps:

1. Setting the scene. Pick a spot with good lighting. A bright but overcast day was best for our winter scene. (Besides that, sunny-day photography has a number of unique challenges: it makes people [read: me] all squinty, washes out features on one side of the face and creates harsh shadows on the other, and is hard to photoshop into other backgrounds because the angle of the light source is so obvious.) Now, getting back to picking your location ... ideally (assuming you do not live in an extremely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn, where there is zero privacy and the neighbors already think you're weird) you'd do this photoshoot outside. We of course did ours inside cramped against our living room window. The backdrop consisted of a white sheet draped over a pile of furniture. Yes, very streamlined indeed.


2. Get into costume. Since this was done on a whim one Sunday afternoon - "Matt - the lighting is perfect, it's go time!", we had to use whatever winter attire props were lying around the apartment, so we dug out our own coats and hats that we felt looked the most timeless for our vintage scene. Looked okay, in my opinion ... at least I am glad we didn't spend any money.



3. The photoshoot. Put the camera on the tripod, have an assistant model to check your framing, set that timer, and work-it. We just did this by trial and error. At one point I tried pulling on Matt's ears for extra dramatic effect, but it turns out that he was NOT ok with that. This reminds me of the one of the cherished pearls of wisdom I learned from my mother, which despite all my years of martial arts training still stands out as the best self-defence technique I've ever learned: how to yank a dude's ear off. But I digress. Keep striking a pose until you think there are enough shots to choose from.



4. Post-production. This is where the magic happens. I am in absolutely no position to give photoshop lessons because all I know is from my own trial and error. However, a few key things: it is much easier to blend separate images when they are in grayscale, and, when in doubt, blur edges.



5. Printing. Our little ink jet is a P-O-S, so we had these professionally printed. We could have been happier with the quality, and in hindsight we should have saved money and gotten postcards, but all in all the product was all right.
   

And if you are anticipating fancy cards from us this Holiday Season, just know that we plan on systematically lowering the bar each year from now on. We cant take the pressure!

Neat Old Stuff: Christmas Cards of Yore

Today's Neat Old Stuff features these deliciously nostalgic holiday photo-cards that my mother's family sent out in the fifties:

(1954) Grandma, Mom, Aunt Patty, Aunt Betty, and Gramps

I absolutely love this picture! It was taken by a family friend who was a photographer for the Albany Times Union. I am not sure who did the script at the bottom (maybe another staffer at the paper?), but isn't it great?! (If you haven't noticed from our blog header, I am a little bit ga-ga for vintage fonts.) And why don't they put the deckle-edges on photos anymore?

Here's another:

(1957) Aunt Patty, Mom, and Aunt Betty

This photo was taken by the same photographer at the front door of the house in Westport, NY where my mom grew up. They removed the screen. She tells me it was still warm out at the time, but they donned their gay apparel for festivity's sake. I love the way it looks like the script could have been painted on the door, but this was added in post-production.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Me-likey: Mod Cloth

Quick! Someone invite me to a holiday party so I can buy one of these outfits.

All very reasonably priced at Mod Cloth, one of my new favorites!

Frightening.

My annual rant:

Now I know that Halloween is a time-honored opportunity for the ladies to dress more, um, provocatively than they normally would. There are classics like the sexy nurse and the french maid and what have you. But it seems like lately there is a slut-ified version of everything. I remember holding back gags as the girls on my college cheerleading team recited their plans, which included such ideas as (and I may be paraphrasing): "slut with butterfly wings," "whore with devil horns," "hooker with cat ears," and the list went on. I would then go home and joke to Matt that I was going to dress-up as something like a "sexy hobo" or a "trampy giraffe." I thought I was being ironic, but it turns out that you really can make anything slutty:

To my dismay, alarm, and amusement, these are all commercially available on the internets. A sexy Sherlock? Really? And the "mental patient" one is just downright offensive. Although this nonsense does make me feel like I am taking crazy pills!

Mmmm...brains!

I saw this project on the MAKE blog last week and loved it so much that I decided it deserves it's own post. Reminds me of the cool stuff mom used to do with Nate and I when we were kids.
With only a small seedless watermelon, a veggie peeler, and some knives... presto! a nice juicy brain. The red of the watermelon flesh really makes it! Full instructions via instructables. Imagine this in the center of a snack tray at your next Halloween Party!

And if you don't feel your fruit sculpting talents are up to par, check out this brain jello mold available on amazon.

Use your favorite jello flavor or, for more gore factor, go for this recipe here.

'Tis the season! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!