photo experimentation (and ciabatta)

So for my digital photography class, our assignment is to make a Hockney-inspired collage.  This is my experimentation with Photoshop:

Interesting, yes?  You know what is also interesting?  Bread recipes that don’t tell you when to add the flour and what don’t rise nearly enough.  Bah.

I wish there was a pill to make all diseases go away immediately

And while we’re at it, how about a pill to make me a concert pianist?

Sigh.

Summer Playlist

I am deleting Starbucks songs that I don’t like.  Unfortunatley (or fortunately?), that’s a lot of them.  There are only a few that I really like. I used to look up the songs and listen to them before I bought them, but I got lazy and don’t do that anymore.  Now they’re cluttering my computer.  I have to sift through layers and layers of pointlessness to get to the good music.  Oh yeah.  I made a summer playlist.  It’s trying to be retro, but you can decide how retro it really is…

Surfin’ Safari – The Beach Boys
Here Comes the Sun – the fake Beatles
Love Song – Sara Bareilles
The Monkey’s Uncle – Annette Funicello & The Beach Boys
Mrs. Robinson – Simon and Garfunkle
Blow Away – A Fine Frenzy
Let’s Get Together – Hayley Mills
Blue (Da Ba Dee) – Eiffel 65
American Pie – Don McLean
California Sun – The Ramones
Bruises – Chairlift
San Francisco – Brett Dennen
The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room – Disney
One Piece at a Time – Johnny Cash
You Are My Sunshine – Elizabeth Mitchell

Some of them are whatever random 60’s stuff I could get my hands on.  Hence Disney.

The Many Faces of Shannon

Hello blog-land!  We here at the Sherwood household have been busy these past weeks performing The Sound of Music with a local youth theater company.  Throughout the course of each evening I dressed myself in four different costumes and danced upon a stage of…stagelyness.  (I just sort of ramble without thinking of what’s coming next; can you tell?)  Anyways, I was alternately a nun, a townsperson, a puppet, and a rich lady at a party.  In that order.  I sang and I danced and I cried after the last show, but I’m alright now.  I’m going to the cast party tonight, provided my cold doesn’t act up again.  Yeah.  I only sang for the first weekend because by the next weekend I had no voice.  Here are some pictures from the show!

Here we have the persona I like to call “Sister Shannon.”  This disguise is used when attempting to blend in as a penguin, or alternately, when infiltrating an Abbey.

And now we have “Confused Townsperson.”  Perfect for roaming about Salzburg, especially during WWII reenactments.

Expanding on our Townsperson line, we now present the “Mama Goatherd” costume.  You’ll fit right in with your frumpy skirt, woolen shawl, and hand-painted puppet cheeks!

Last but certainly not least we have the “Ball Gown” which will enable your to hobnob with the richest sea captains and their baroness lady friends.  Keep in mind when wearing this costume that the floor-length gauzy skirt is easily trod apon by others, especially while waltzing.

Dress.

So I finally (after having the pattern for almost a year and the fabric for a few months) finished my regency dress.  I made it with Mrs. Chancey’s pattern from her website, Sensibility.com.  The fabric is a white cotton with little raised blue dots – very light and flowy.  I used a blue grosgrain ribbon around the waist and for the bows.  This pattern is so easy, I really ought to have finished the dress a few weeks earlier, except I cut the pieces wrong and – whoops – ran out of fabric.  I don’t actually have any shoes that match yet.  Haha.  In these pictures I was wearing my old dirty pink flats…which looked pretty bad.  I also need to fix the back of the dress.  >_<  I evidently made it a little tight and one of the buttons popped off.  Arg.

Close-up

Would you…

read a story that started:

Prince Harry was shy, and it was for this reason that it is generally accepted that he ran away from home.  It was well known that he had been betrothed to the Lady AnnaBarbra for some time, but without affection, and most waited for an eventual breaking of the engagement.  Harry’s lack of interest in his fiancé was obvious whenever the prince and duke’s daughter went out together.  Why AnnaBarbra would stick around for a boy who appeared in no hurry to marry her baffled both their parents.  It also disturbed the citizens of their country, who were eager for their marriage, if only in anticipation of the free-flowing booze inevitable at wedding celebrations.  So, when Prince Harry disappeared, ostensibly forever (though with royalty, who knows?) and AnnaBarbra retired to her own mansion in tears, it was only reasonable to think that the Crown Prince finally had the gumption to turn her down once and for all, and then escape himself to avoid repercussions.
But as there always are when intrigue arises, there were those looked skeptically upon the whole matter.  Harry, they argued, was much too small and pliable to have turned out Lady AnnaBarbra of his own accord. So it must have been the Lady herself who had walked out.  But for what reason?  Something big, exciting, and scandalous had to have taken place behind those thick, cold, stone walls.
What this observant minority had failed to identify was only the magnitude of the act that had indeed taken place.

?

Random Haiku of the Day, Pt. 4

Photography is
My way of expressing my
Uniquenessism!

(I know that isn’t
A word, but it had to fit
Five-Seven-Five time!)

By Shannon of Sherwood

Photo Hike.

Dad and I went on a photo hike a couple weeks ago.

It was supposed to be landscape photography, but I don’t do so well in that department.  (Plus, the lighting was bad.)

So I started taking pictures like this:

And this:

And this.

I just love barbed-wire fences.  I don’t know why.  They make me feel happy and grungy and like a country girl.  I never really wanted to be a country girl, however much I love horses.  There are no large hairy spiders in the suburbs.

One reason I love macro shots is because they force you to notice the details in everything.  I could totally count each little gill under the cap of that shroom.  In the picture of the pink flowers you can see how the light catches the edges of each blade of grass.  I always love it when the light catches in just the right way, or when my focus is just right.

This is my favorite shot from the day.  I have always picked puffballs and made wishes on them.  This one is particularly lovely because it isn’t perfect.  Because the little seed feathers are falling off the base of the flower.  And on the same stem you can see unopened dandelions.  I love it when things aren’t perfect.

Like this rose.  It isn’t perfect.  It has personality.  It has a history.  And I’m sure it was a very interesting history, but since this rose is long gone I guess no one will ever know the story.

But it must have been very nice.

Hoorah for High C

Voice class was canceled yesterday.  Sadness.  But I persevered.  Joan, Rachel, Petrina, and I simply hopped-skipped-and-jumped down the stairs to the practice rooms.  By 1:30 Joan and Rachel were in a room and at 1:45 I got into the room next door.  We practiced together and had some good fun singing Italian Ariettas about…trees.  No, seriously, we sing about trees.  The poetical idea of Selve Amiche, Ombrose Piante (which translates Friendly Forest, Shady Plants) is that my soul is burdened and I can find peace deep among the trees.  Woo.  It’s a very pretty song in any case, all operatic and whatnot.  While I was warming up, I attempted to get to high C – bad idea.  But, I have to hit it.  In Sound of Music, I am a Soprano 1.  Which means, among other perks such as being able to sing MELODY I already know, in the finale, we have to hit the C two octaves above middle C.  My voice stops making sound at about the A two above middle C.  This is…not good.

I’m going to go play my guitar.

To Kill a Mockingbird

I wonder if whacking a mockingbird is a sin.

I have a mockingbird that sits across the street from my house and calls far into the night. He makes a variety of different noises, including imitating frogs. While he doesn’t bother me at all (I fell asleep with my light on last night – shows how disturbed I get), he keeps my mom from getting her required allotment of sleep each night. Now, this may be changing, because he recently moved from the tree near the master bedroom to the corner across from my room (other side of the house) but those birds are LOUD. I’m sure he can still be heard by my mother. She wants to know who it was that thought that mockingbirds don’t do anybody any harm. Mom is certainly wishing to commit sin, if killing a mockingbird be sin.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird last year for school and LOVED LOVED LOVED it. I adore Scout Finch and her innocence in the face of racism and court. . .drama. Wow. I sound cheesy. Someone stop me now.
Okay, anyways, so my mom wanted to know why those people in Maycomb county thought that mockingbirds don’t do anyone any harm, because they did her some harm. They don’t just make music for us to listen to, they make music for us to NOT GET TO SLEEP TO.

In other news, rehearsals for Sound of Music start tonight. I am ecstatically ecstatic. And a little on the nervous side. Hoorah.

In other other news, I am reading Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald and loving it.  I read MacDonald’s books The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, and liked Goblin better, because Curdie…ends wierd.  I don’t want to ruin it for anyone, but it’s all fine until the very last page when MacDonald comes along and crushes all the happiness that might have come from a Happily Ever After Ending.  *wiggle*