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Brighten the Holidays for Everyone!
Donate gifts for patients at Montana State Hospital through “Gifts with a Lift” program.
Drop off gifts Nov 24 – Dec 6 2023 at Bozeman Daily Chronicle, front lobby: 2820 W. College, Bozeman. Open 8am to 5pm, M-F. Or donate online at NAMIMT.org
(GIfts with a Lift, now in its 71st year, is jointly coordinated by the National Alliance for Mental Illness-MT and Montana DPHHS.)
GIFT IDEAS: Montana State Hospital is especially in need of winter coats for men and women in sizes M – 3X. (Larger sizes preferred, no hoodies can be accepted.) Other cozy and uplifting gift ideas include socks, slippers (no laces), blankets/throws, t-shirts/sweatshirts (no hoodies), winter wear (hats, gloves, jackets), playing cards, magazines, pocket games/books, phone cards, batteries, headphones, handheld battery operated AM/FM radios, postage stamps and stationery.
You can also collect gifts or “adopt a resident” at the Montana State Hospital this holiday as a workplace, family or group activity! Print out flyers, shopping lists and coloring pages provided below, and be sure to drop off the gifts you collect by December 6, 2023! (In Bozeman, the drop box is at the Bozeman Chronicle lobby.)
For more details, gift ideas, statewide drop box locations, and how to “Adopt a Resident”, read the Montana State Hospital’s 2023 press release.
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Donate gifts for patients at Montana State Hospital through “Gifts with a Lift” program! Drop off gifts by Dec 6 2023 at Bozeman Daily Chronicle 2820 W. College, Bozeman, MT (Open 8am to 5pm, M-F) Or donate online at NAMIMT.org (Gifts with a Lift is coordinated by the National Alliance for Mental Illness-MT and Montana DPHHS.)
What do you get when you have a pumpkin that won’t stand upright, a few dowels, some clothespins, a long strip of paper and a couple of hours to kill? That’s right, a crank-o-lantern!
It’s a special Christmas, folks. I became a Granny!
To celebrate receiving a perfect grandchild, I published my first children’s book, The Brownpaper Christmas Alphabet. The edition shown above has a big illustration and one warm-hearted Christmas alphabet word on each page. It’s available in paperback on Amazon and downloadable on Kindle.
As a surprise for my sisters to read to their first grade classes, I also made a bigger version of the book, called the Big Brownpaper Christmas Mouse Alphabet Storybook. (It has the same sweet illustrations, but includes a rhyming verse just right for read-aloud time. They loved it!)
It all started when I bought some blocks to draw on for my daughter Wren’s baby shower. After I drew this vole in a vest playing violin, I knew I had to do a whole alphabet.
Rather than drawing on blocks, though, I thought it would be fun to make a book, so I turned to the pile of brown paper Town and Country Grocery bags waiting for their second chance at utility and lopped them into squares.
I got out my Prismacolor pencils and just went to town. I had to take a rest when the thumb on my right hand staged an arthritic protest, but more I drew, the more I wanted to draw.
I kept thinking of tricky details to add to the pictures. Each picture has hidden alphabet words to find! (I included a list of them at the end of the book, but don’t stop looking, because there are even more hidden alphabet words than I listed!)
J is for Joy we feel down to our toes. (But also for jacket, jug, juice, jam, jitterbug, jazz and jump!)
I had so much fun in my little mouse world, drawing and coloring away the dreary November evenings. Come December, the expected heir did indeed arrive, and I was much too excited to wait for Christmas. I gave it to my grandson Ira when he was only a day old! Now, I can hardly wait to start on his Christmas gift for next year. And the year after!
Can you find more words that begin with N? There are at least five in this picture. Want to find more? You can pick up your own copy of the Big Brownpaper Christmas Mouse Alphabet Storybook, snuggle up with a friend and have a cozy holiday season!
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Update: I did indeed finish a second book in time for Ira’s second Christmas. 🙂 He isn’t quite ready to play ukulele yet, but maybe it will be just right for someone you know: The Amazon, too!
Well, instead of making more shadow puppets, I got on kind of a paper grocery bag mask kick.
Bozeman playwright Ryan Cassavaugh asked me if I’d help create some shadow puppets for his latest play, “Mummy Dearest.” This will be his third year of writing an original Halloween-season comedy for the Verge Theater to stage entirely with life-sized puppets. For a flashback sequence in this year’s show, he and his wife/director Sadie thought it would be great to use shadow puppets.
They had seen some cool use of overhead projectors for shadow puppets, but weren’t exactly sure how the puppets were made. So I did a bit of digging and found a VERY helpful guide (PDF) at Shadowlight.org, where they do some really amazing stuff.
The guide showed how to make shadow puppet joints using fishing line. You simply poke a pinhole through your desired joint and thread a piece of fishing line through it, then burn the ends of the fishing line, so they become little blobs that can’t go back through the pinhole. They worked great and are surprisingly strong!
My Amenhotep puppet for Ryan Cassavaugh’s “Mummy Dearest” comedy at Verge Theater.
I was a bit rushed, so rather than cut out elaborate exacto-knifed detail in card stock, I drew my puppets in Photoshop on my Cintiq display, and printed them on laser transparencies. Note how I duplicated the limbs to provide enough overlap to make the joints (another thing I learned from Shadowlight’s nifty instructions).
I laminated the transparencies to make them more durable. They are not quite as opaque as I’d like them to be, but they’re pretty good, and—most importantly—the shadow sequence got a lot of laughs in the show! (If you’re going to try this yourself, you can click on the assembly images below to see them larger.)
My hope is to create a shadow puppet show of my own to be projected on my front picture window on Halloween! (No guarantees, but if you’re walking down South Grand street in Bozeman on Oct. 31, keep your eyes open.)
“Mummy Dearest” is showing at Verge Theater in Bozeman at 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 2. It’s funny! You should go!
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Poking the pinhole
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After trimming the ends of the fishing line, I used a soldering iron to burn them to blob shapes.
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You can also use the fishing line to make loops to attach sticks to.
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spooky!
I’m helping out with a window display at Wild Joe’s Coffeehouse to promote the Equinox Puppet Theatre’s new original play, “Father of the Bride of Frankenstein,” which runs Fridays + Saturdays Oct. 12-27. The show is a romantic comedy by Ryan Cassavaugh, co-directed by Sadie Cassavaugh and Christian McDaniel. It’s the company’s second full length play for adults (13+) featuring a full cast of larger than life puppets. Coolio!
Anyway, I liked the poster for the show, which has the title text arranged in the shape of a wedding cake, with little Frank + Bride on top, so I thought that would be a fun thing to work into the window display.
All I needed was a giant cake…
So, this afternoon I went shopping. At the craft stores, they sell Styrofoam rounds that you can frost to look like a real cake, but they were really expensive, and they still weren’t quite as big as I wanted. So I decided to try using hatboxes.
I found three in descending sizes at Ross, for cheaper than the Styrofoam would have been. The boxes are pretty sturdy and covered in coated paper, so I figured they might not warp or slump under the damp frosting. I also bought a package of cheese cloth, a can of meringue powder and two big bags of powdered sugar. Oh, and a couple of Frankenstein figurines!
I taped the cheesecloth around the boxes using packing tape, to give the icing something to stick to. (Not sure if that was necessary, but it seems like it was probably a good idea.)
It took two double batches of royal icing to cover the boxes and do the piping.
1 double batch of royal icing =
2 lb bag of powdered sugar
12 Tablespoons of water
6 Tablespoons of meringue powder
I didn’t really worry about getting my icing spread perfectly since it is supposed to be a monster cake! Plus, I wanted it to look like real frosting when seen from a distance in the window display.
The icing stuck to the cheesecloth-covered hat boxes easily. I piped on some wedding-y looking swirls, again, not worrying if they were sloppy, and finished with goopy piping in green, to match the poster. I added more goop around the bottom of the cake to hide my icing mess. Now to add the cobwebs tomorrow.
The whole process took me 2 hours or so, not counting the shopping. Monster cakes are the best!
Here comes Baby New Year!
Happy New Year from Marla, David, Sammy, Kitty, Wally, Yati, Mailbot and all of the residents of Kitschatoria!
Happy Holidays from Marla and David! Ho, ho, ho, beep, beep!
It’s easy to make your own Santa-bot.
Here’s how:
Acquire the following materials:
Filing cabinet
Space heater
Bundt pan
Cream funnel
Candle sticks
Heating duct
Flexible tubing
Oscilloscope
Flashlights
Ceramic kitty cat
Wire whisk (under mitten, so not shown)
Strainer ladle (under mitten, so not shown)
Roasting pan
Mailbox (large, rural route style)
Training wheels
Assorted nuts, bolts, rivets
Drill and bits in various sizes
Next, find somebody with mechanical aptitude who can put it all together for you.
Now, dress up your robot in a Santa hat, a charming hand-knit scarf and a pair of mittens. Don’t forget to wrap a string of Christmas lights around its middle!
DONE!
December is here! It’s time to make your Christmas cookies. Sometimes you might feel like there’s somebody looking over your shoulder, but don’t worry! Everything’s fine! Who doesn’t love Santa?
Goodwerks Creative 
