Last weekend, we took the kids (ages 2 and 6) to FUDCon, and the older one spent part of Saturday writing the story of Sparks and his friend the unicorn. (Spoiler alert: They break up, and he gets a new friend in a bunny named Ruth.) Tonight I showed her Beefy Miracle and the radioactive panda, and she decided to write her next tale about them. Here’s how it went, told by her, transcribed by me. (She’s not bad with the writing, but typing takes forever. She’ll learn QWERTY eventually.)

Beefy Miracle vs. Twinkle the Panda

Twinkle the Panda liked Beefy Miracle. He had a magical power that could make people so powerful. Beefy Miracle couldn’t get the magic power because Twinkle Bear had another power that could keep the magic all the way inside to his bones. And because he’s a hot dog, and the power is only for people.

Beefy Miracle has a very rare power in his ray gun. It can shoot animals and people all the way through their bones. But they’re not dead. They’re still alive, but they have a hole where they got shot. If they get shot a lot of times, they get bigger and bigger holes, and then if it gets so big that they can’t stay alive, they die.

So one day Beefy Miracle came to Twinkle. He wanted to give Twinkle a ray gun because he had an extra one. The ray gun was blue and red, just like Beefy Miracle’s. Beefy Miracle had a powerful ray gun, but when he gave the other ray gun to Twinkle, it didn’t have any power. So Twinkle was very mad at Beefy Miracle.

Twinkle got batteries he found on the ground, and he put them in the ray gun. He shot Beefy Miracle so hard that he got so big of a hole that he died. Twinkle got some foam squares and put them on Beefy Miracle, and then he came back to life.

Beefy Miracle has mustard on his stomach. He gave Twinkle a hug and he got mustard on him. And then Beefy Miracle and Twinkle were friends again. And Beefy Miracle and Twinkle went to the park. The end.

Click the image to see the larger, more readable version.

I’m doing a run of black hoodies (unisex AND girl style!) with the Fedora logo, like the picture below. Well, except that it’ll be on the left chest of black hoodies, whereas this picture is of the leg of my grey pants.

People attending FUDCon in the frozen land of Blacksburg will get the first ones, so if you’re planning to go, let me know in your email, and beyond that, I’ll make them in the order requested. (I expect to be able to do about 30 before then.) They’ll be no more than $28 (or $32 for 2xl or 3xl), plus actual shipping costs if you’re not at FUDCon or in Raleigh to pick it up.

Email rsuehle [at] fedoraproject.org to let me know you’re interested ASAP, along with your shirt size, girly or unisex, and whether you’ll be at FUDCon. Note that if you won’t be at FUDCon, you probably won’t get it until after then, but I’ll keep churning until everyone’s hoodie needs are met.

Hoodies ahoy!

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Blech. What a disaster. Plain text, plain text, plain text. Thank you.

6 cups water
2 cups quick grits
2 cups half and half
1/4 cup grated sharp white cheddar
salt
4 T unsalted butter, cubed
1/4 t white pepper

Combine water, half and half, salt, pepper, boil. Pour in grits, keep whisking. Reduce to low heat until thick and smooth (keep whisking). Add cheddar, let it melt, whisk again. Let it rest five minutes, add butter and stir, then try not to eat the eight-serving recipe all by yourself.

Solidly established here in adulthood, the final four months of the year (how great a word is tertile?) fly. I use Dragon*Con, which is always Labor Day weekend, as the start of this end-of-year fly-by. Once Dragon*Con is over, I know it’s going to be New Year’s Eve before I can blink. In between those two events, there are the Charleston Scottish Games, my birthday, one kid’s birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, our annual cookie party, and all the related holiday parties. That doesn’t even include any unusual events that happen to pop up, or regular traditions that fit in somehow, like our annual trip to a pumpkin farm with the kids.

Third tertile rush is now full speed ahead. I’ll see you in January.

(Only slightly related, you know how sometimes you look at your watch, and it seems like the second hand stops for longer than a second? I always thought I had cheap watches or dying batteries. It turns out there’s a real science explanation unrelated to the watch.

(The previous paragraph was brought to you by generous use of the hyphen key.)

This is also the furthest along I’ve been in a costume–buying fabric, drafting patterns, screwing things together–without having any clue whether it’s actually going to work. Welcome to the Three Weeks ‘Til Dragon*Con Comedy Blog.

Did I mention the main fabric won’t be here until Wednesday, and the EL wire I want to see before I buy the skirt fabric won’t be here until “sometime between August 11-16″? Not that the tracking number is even working. So tonight I focused on where the literal and figurative pain are–my head. (See today’s earlier post about how much I hate figuring out makeup.)

I experimented with some green eyeshadow I had on hand. It is indeed super-shiny. Didn’t try the HD powder on it yet though:

There may not be enough green in the world for these freckles. By the way, I did learn when making the Red Queen costume how to cover up eyebrows from a drag queen video on YouTube, so I’ll avoid the dreaded double-brow. But I wasn’t into picking glue stick out of my eyebrows for an experiment tonight.

Then I tried drafting a pattern for the horns/headpiece. I think for a first round, it came out well. I’ll widen the base a bit. There is the pointier part that turns out at the top, but I made this out of the scraps of duck cloth from some knight costumes I’m making my dad. Did I not say that? I’m also making 13 knight costumes in about the same time frame. Good thing I can’t eat–I don’t have time for it.

It took all the self-control in the world not to go wake up one of my children looking like that to see what would happen.

Finally I decided to work on the pattern for the skirt. The idea is this swirly, consumed-in-green-fire sort of thing. The swirly part requires creative pattern-making, so I decided to take Maleficent to Vegas. I mean, she already has the showgirl makeup going on.

And all that picture shows you is that if I had actually wanted to match up those stripes on a diagonal rather than just make a muslin of a skirt, it never would have worked.

Final note–if you’re wondering how the Thunder… Thunder… THUNDERBOLT‘s front-facing camera does in the low light of one’s bedroom… now you know. Not that great.

This year’s color quandary concerns Maleficent’s skin tone. I thought answering such a basic question would be easy–I could just look at how Disney costumes its characters in the parks. I expected evil brand consistency from the Mouse! But no. Sometimes she’s a nauseated pea green. Sometimes she’s paler, but that one’s expression looks more like she’s about to barf.

I’m not sure where this mask is from, but her face isn’t at all green! Nor is it in this display from Disney World.

This also made me want to know more about costume production for Disney parks. Talk about inconsistency. Check out this Maleficent’s horns–they’re huge!

Their toys, though–those will be a good reference, right? Should I go with nearly gray or ripe lime?

To be fair, some of these pictures, particularly with the toys, have issues with the color that is affecting the comparison. I think the real answer is how she looks in this $180 toy or this merely $140 one. That is to say, something very pale, slightly minty, neither quite white nor green. Agree?

Thus, to achieve the hint-of-green look, I’m thinking that using a green eyeshadow as powder will be more effective than trying to dim down a green cream makeup. Thoughts on that? I went to ULTA at lunch to see what the options were. These are swatches from three of their shades, Sage, Shamrock, and if I remember right, Green Machine (I swear the top two are actually different colors):

The bottom one seems to be closest to the right shade, but it’s a bit… shiny. I wonder if I could cut down on the sparkles with a top coat of e.l.f.’s HD powder?

The limits of AppInventor are interesting. It only lets you create one screen. So imagine an app where you have six buttons on a homepage that take you to six different pages within the app. AppInventor doesn’t work that way. You can create them all on one screen and fake the transition by making the others not visible, but you can’t make separate screens. The second challenge was simply creating a button that would take you to a webpage. I didn’t think ahead that that would require telling the phone to open a browser. (Duh.)

My first idea was for a crafty/sewing app for Android. There are several for iPhone, but a severe lack on Android. So far it does two things:

• Link you to the coupon pages of Michael’s, A.C. Moore, and Hobby Lobby
• Show a chart converting fabric yardage from 45″ to 60″ widths

I’d like to make the second one a calculator, but I’ve only found tables. It would be a lot easier if I could find the actual formula for that calculation.

My second goal is some kind of personal stash catalog, either fabric, patterns, or both. I think AppInventor will let you work with Barcode Scanner, so I think I could at least scan barcodes on patterns to make a list. With several hundred patterns in my stash, just the scanning could take a while! (I wish the pattern companies would release their current catalogs through apps. That would be really handy.)

If you’re brave enough to try it out, you can grab it from my DropBox. You’ll have to tell your phone it’s allowed to install things that didn’t come from the Market, though. (If you’ve installed Swype, you’ve already told it that.)