The Creative Maze: Costume-making for Film.

Hello again, and welcome back to The Creative Maze.

You may remember, from my last Creative Maze post, I promised you a decent image of my finished huntress costume for filming later this year?  Well, here are a few shots...

Creative Maze - Photography

For today's Creative Maze I'd like to share another one of my photographs. One of my favorite things to take pictures of is architecture and I love the ornate design of churches.

This is Bath Abbey in Bath, England and as you can see it's a beautiful place. Over the years that I've been living here, I've visited Bath many times and I always make sure to go by to take a look at the abbey.

One thing that I love about photography is that you can revisit a time and place whenever you want...and all that you have to do is go and look at your photos and the memories come flooding back!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Creative Maze: Costume-making for Film

Hi there.  Two weeks have flown past, and I'm here again to report on the progress of the Huntress costume.

Last time, I'd got as far as sewing the bodice and its lining, which I then stitched together.  This time, I can show you the next two stages of constructing the dress:

Creative Maze - Photography

For today's Creative Maze, I wanted to share this collage that I made from my recent trip to London. I have hundreds of photos of London and so recently I thought that it might be fun to revisit the older ones and put them together in themes.

 These are very recent photos though. Still, I'm in a photography mood lately so I'll be doing more collages like this. It's all about creativity and having fun!

Happy Friday!!!!!

The Creative Maze - Val: Costume-making for film - 3

Welcome back to The Creative Maze.  This week, I have another update for you on the huntress costume I'm currently making for a short film that will be shot in Scotland later this year.  I think it's going well, and here are some photos tracking its progress:

Shoulder strap, stitched, turned, pressed and trimmed with fiddly 6mm brown ribbon. This velvet material is so beautiful, but with a stretch in it, it is a total pain to work with, especially when you are attaching slippery fabrics like lining or ribbon!

Creative Maze - Challenge - Jewelry Making

For today's Creative Maze challenge, I'm here to talk about my revisiting jewelry-making and getting in touch with my creativity again. As I mentioned on a previous challenge post "here", I've decided to put knitting on the back burner in favor of something that I'm more interested in at this time.

So today I thought that I'd talk about some of the tools that I use for making jewelry. Each one has a particular use and they help make the act of creating a little easier. Here are my tools. I'll describe what each one is used for :

 


Bent nose plier - perfect for twisting, squeezing and shaping in areas that long nose pliers can't reach. And this one has a serrated tip to help grip on better.












Long nose plier with smooth tip - good for twisting, squeezing and shaping and especially good for jewelry findings. They have a smooth tip so they won't damage the surfaces of items that are being bent or shaped.









Straight nose internal plier - these are great for twists, coils, and loops for beading. They are smooth so they won't ruin the finish of objects that are being bent.









Side cutter plier - good for cutting and trimming wire, jewelry findings, and head and eye pins.












Long nose plier with serrated tip - good for twisting, squeezing and shaping, as well as picking up and holding small items. This one has a serrated tip that gives a nice secure grip.










So now that I've introduced you to my tools, onward I go on this creative journey!

Until next time...

The Creative Maze: Photography

Once again I'm here with my contribution to the Creative Maze and I want to share one of my favorite ways to get creative again...photography. I love taking pictures...I've loved it as long as I can remember. I love the idea of freezing a moment in time. My hope is to get better technically with photography, so I plan to work on improving my skills over time.

One thing that I like to do is play around with Photoshop in order to see what I can create. Here is an example of my Photoshop antics. I've made some kinda weird things and I'll share some of those in future posts  ;-) But here is an example of a slight adjustment that I made to this picture of a rose.

Do you like to photography? Is there another way that you like to be creative? Please leave us a comment and tell us about how you get creative.

Until next time...

The Creative Maze: Val - Costume-making for Film

Hello again and welcome back to The Creative Maze.  Today, I have an update for you on the costume I am making for a summer film project.  You may remember that last time I had to make some adjustments to the skirt of the original bought pattern.  Well, those adjustments seem to have worked on the calico mock-up and so I've taken the plunge and cut out the pattern pieces in the main fabric - always a scary prospect as you don't want to get it wrong!  So far, so good...

Creative Maze - Joint Challenge

Hello everyone, and welcome to our joint Creative Maze challenge.

Dori - Change to My Challenge

As many of you will know, I have been learning to knit for my challenge. It's been going fine, but I had to admit to myself that I'm not really into it right now. I'm going to continue to learn how to knit but at another time. You know how it is when your heart isn't really into something. Well that's what's been happening with me. I'm interested but not interested enough at this moment to take the time needed to learn.

So today I'm changing my challenge over to something that I would like to revisit. Years ago, I used to make jewelry, but I haven't done so for a long time. Therefore, I thought that I would set myself the challenge of tapping into my creativity again and seeing what I can make. Even though I will be making jewelry, the broader challenge is to tap into a part of myself which has been dormant for way too long...my creativity.

I look forward to sharing my journey with this challenge which I am really excited about. Watch this space :-)

*******

Val – Piano Challenge

 

 

It’s  been a few weeks since my last posting, and I haven’t got very far with the piano practice.  ‘Life’ seems to have got in the way, with other things taking over and bleeding into my precious practice time.  Never mind – that happens, doesn’t it?  I’ll just have to dive back in next week and stick to a more rigid timetable!

I have managed to learn a new piece though, and have moved on from using the odd sharp to introducing flats, so the little practice I have done has been quite interesting.  It’s amazing how many things a pianist has to do all at the same time, but then, perhaps, in time, it will become second nature...a bit like driving a car.  Well, I hope it will anyway, because right now things are a bit all over the place!

You can watch the ‘Russian song’ video here, or go to our Labyrinthus XXI YouTube channel and see it (and others) there.  Bye bye for now... 

 

 

 

Have a great weekend!

The Creative Maze: Costume-making for Film

Hello again, and welcome back to the Creative Maze.  Today’s post concerns costume-making, as a certain member of my family wants to work in the film industry when she’s older, and has asked me to make some costumes for a film she wants to shoot in Scotland later this year.  I thought it might be interesting to document the progress, and, hopefully, they’ll turn out alright!

Sewing has always been part of my life.  My mum made dresses for me when I was a little girl, and knitted cardigans and jumpers too, and I wanted to have a go and be able to make wonderful things like she did.  Mum taught me early on how to use her sewing machine.  Sewing was just something we did, and I loved it.  In fact, I don’t remember not sewing –  I recall patching small pieces of fabric together, and trying to make little dresses for my dolls when I was quite young.  It’s great that these sorts of skills are having such a huge resurgence at the moment, and I’m particularly enjoying the second series of The Great British Sewing Bee currently showing on the BBC.  I think it’s so important to be able to divert from the digital in the modern world, don't you?  Anyway, I digress, so back to the costumes...

The Creative Maze: Photography

Hello there! So this is our next entry in the Creative Maze series and I'm here to present a way that I like to get creative. Last Friday Val featured her crafting skill as she demonstrated how she made the Yellow House flag for my sixth anniversary over at my blog. You can read that entry here.

I have a lot of interests in different areas of creativity as many people do. One of my favorite things is photography. I have loved taking pictures for as long as I can remember. I even used to make believe that I had a camera as I ran around our yard when I was a kid. I'd pretend to take pictures of our pets and the different birds. 

So as I've grown up, I've held onto that interest and I'm trying to become better at taking pictures. Even if I never get great at taking pictures, I'll always do it for the love of it, you know? Sometimes the love of something just fills your soul with happiness so it doesn't matter about anything else :-)

Here's a photo that I took last year. I pulled it out because it makes me think of the daffodils that are blooming now. When I took these pictures originally, I decided to play around with my computer and I put them into a kind of collection in one place. So here's the result.

I'm hoping to do more creative things like this with my photos and I'll be showing them here. Do you have any ways that you love to express your creativity? Why not let us know in the comments :-)

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

~Dori

The Creative Maze: Creating the Yellow House flag.

Hello there, happy Friday and welcome to the Creative Maze.

A couple of days ago, you may have seen this post celebrating Dori’s six year anniversary at her ‘From a Yellow House in England’  blog, and as we had decided to embrace creativity here at Labyrinthus XXI, I thought it would be fun to design and make a flag for her.  Having never made a flag before, I sort of made it up as I went along, apart from the initial sketch that I scrawled on a piece of lined paper during our recent Skype chat.  This post shows you in pictures how I did it.  I’d really love to hear what you think of it, so please feel free to leave a comment below, or email me through the link on the sidebar.

The Creative Maze

Val      

Hello there.  Today Dori and I are launching the ‘Creative Maze’ – you know, that monster I hinted at yesterday that has gobbled up our alternate Friday challenge posts?  This ‘monster’ evolved through one of our many Skype meets, where we were discussing our challenges and the way we deal with and present them to you.  We felt you might get bored if our individual challenges didn’t show any major progress, and that updating every two weeks didn’t allow enough time for either of us to make any great leaps forward.  Now, this isn’t a cop-out and we’re not shutting down our challenges.  We’re just going to extend the time between our challenge posts, and we think it will be better to update you with our piano/knitting progress in a joint post once a month on the last Friday of the month from now on.  You can see we’ve kicked this off today with an update from both of us. 

I’ve uploaded two new videos to our Labyrinthus XXI YouTube channel – one of me playing a simple tune (but one I couldn’t have played before this challenge), and one of my daughter playing ‘Arriety’s song’, a really pretty piece of music.  She’s only been playing for three years, and I hope I can learn to play as well as she does.  You can watch the embedded videos at the end of this post, or view through YouTube, if you like.