Digitally Crafty

In keeping with my personal theme of family-wide collaboration (and my personal goal of our girlies someday having two independently-employed stay-at-home parents), I've been thinking for quite a long while of ways to incorporate my Matt into some of my crafty work. I learned right away, at about 8 pm on the eve of my very first big craft show, that Matt, although full of big promises--"Sure, I'll help out!"--is completely mentally/emotionally unsuited for actual crafting, or preparing displays, or even helping to set up or boothsit at actual craft fairs, although I make him do those last two things anyway because he has muscles and a girl's gotta browse (and pee).

And while a ton of other ideas that I have (I always have a ton of ideas of varying degrees of impracticality), such as tutorial zines or patterns, could incorporate Matt, those aren't really creative uses for him, more just utilizing his graphic designer expertise in Adobe Illustrator CS4.

There are ways to do craft digitally, though. Not only are there some graphic designers who do handcraft, like the lastest EtsyBlogger featured blogger--

--but handcraft is one area that really appreciates good design, and I've noticed, especially lately, a lot of digital design being sold in the supply market. Shabby Princess, for example, sells (and gives away), these really elaborate digital scrapbooking kits with papers and fonts and realistic-looking embellishments and journal tags and stuff, all digital, and there are a lot of shops on etsy that have been selling digital collage sheets for printing and incorporating into physical craft work.

And that explains why Matt's working right now on a comic book-themed digital scrapbooking kit for my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

On account of we're still big dorks.

In other news, awesome Matt went out to run some errands on Friday night and came home with chocolate and . You might remember that I'm a big fan of the first books (though I'd rather just forget that the last book even happened; as far as I'm concerned, she wrote The Host instead, not along with), and I was really eager to see the movie, despite the mixed reviews.

My opinion? A mixed review.

Some of the negatives, mind you, are hard to remedy and are just really part of the product--for instance, I think it's a very rare child who can act, and therefore I accept the fact that unless a film is extremely carefully written and directed or unless an extremely gifted child actor is chosen, the young actor will just not be that great. And that's something you just have to accept. So it really didn't bother me that the kid who played Edward Cullen, or the kids who played all their friends, had pretty spotty performances. Seriously, Daniel Radcliffe can't do EVERY acting role available to young men, now can he?

I did think that the role for Bella was written in such a way that the actress could and did perform it well. Bella's supposed to be a loner at first, cautious at first, a little wary of showing emotion at first--this mostly requires that the actress look solemn and non-reactive, and she nailed it.

The various reveals of the various plot points were also a little spotty, as if the writer and director couldn't decide if they wanted you to have read the book first and therefore know what's going to happen or not. Again, part of the film-from-book product.

Okay, but the point is that I thought the movie was both terrible AND awesome. The cinematography was terrific--evocative of the mood of the film, and that and just everything else about the film was just so modern-day gothic that it was really, really gluttonously fun. So maybe you didn't have to take the GRE Literature and thus didn't read The Monk or the The Mysteries of Udolpho or any of that stuff, but as a former literary scholar I just ate it up! The music fit, the forest scenes REALLY fit, and hell, even the melodramatic acting really fit in with the overall theme.

And that's why every time Matt was groaning in disgust during this whole film, I was going "SQUEAAAL!"

Because I'm smarter than him.