Atherton Family Notes

If you have been looking for the SVG and SCUT patterns, the links below have been restored.

Note:  If you find this pattern interesting, I recommend that you buy the book Kirigami by Jeffrey Rutzky from Barnes and Noble.  It’s our original source for this project and an excellent introduction to an interesting craft that is tons of fun to do as a family.

I’ve taken the 3D kirigami snowflake pattern that we’ve talked about a few times on our blog, and I’ve created a pattern that can be used in a Cricut expression to make the cuts needed for the pattern out of 12×12 sheets of scrapbook paper. Below, I’ve posted the pattern so that you can make the snowflakes yourself if you have a Cricut Expression and Sure-Cuts-A-Lot.
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It’s kind of silly, but one of the things we do at our Gingerbread party every year is set up the old Christmas videos for the girls to watch after getting done with making their houses.  Most of the girls will sit around and watch, and Carissa, Cece and Sadie love to point out their favorite bits to their friends.

One of the really popular bits of the 2001 video is the part right at the beginnning when Sandi is lowering and raising Cece in and out of the frame.  Everybody oohs and aahs over the cute little baby.
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Here’s a picture of our car, all dressed up for Christmas: (more…)

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There’s been an increase of traffic to our site in the last few days, primarily because of this post that I linked to on the Sure-Cuts-A-Lot forum website.  We’ve gotten several visitors from that site in the last few days who came to download the pattern for making the snowflake.
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We had originally planned to go on a short trip this weekend, possibly back to Frankenmuth, but we couldn’t agree on an itinerary and Sandi didn’t want to travel very far anyway.  As it turned out, it was a good thing we didn’t: 3 out of the 5 of us have been down this weekend with a 24-hour stomach flu, and being sick at home is bad enough.  Being sick on the road would be a nightmare.

I spent most of the weekend making cookies with whomever wasn’t sick at the time, which unfortunately, didn’t include Sandi.  She spent most of Saturday feeling like she was going to be sick and then spent Sunday actually being so.

I got to make a lot of interesting cookies, though.  We made lemon meltaways, chow mein noodle Christmas trees, stained-glass sugar cookies (what a lot of work!), coconut-orange marmalade crescents, candy cane cookies, reindeer sugar cookies and cherry-almond pinwheels.  And that was after I cut four other recipes from my list!  Oh well, there’s always next weekend.  

Or maybe not.

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Well, I’m still pushing forward on the video, although I have to admit that I don’t know for sure what it’s going to look like.  Thanks to the illness that swept through the family this weekend, we didn’t get to do any of the fun activities that we usually do that make it into the video.

I finished putting together the soundtrack tonight.  The video is trending toward 4 minutes and 50 seconds long, and since I have the animation storyboarded already (that sounds more impressive than it is — it’s sort of a stretch to refer to what I’m doing as “animation”), I need to find video to fill about 3 minutes of that time.  This will be one of our shorter videos, but I’m still worried that we aren’t going to have enough good video to fill it up.

We’ve gotten a few miscellaneous interesting bits, including what is hopefully going to be an interesting sequence showing the assembly of Sandi’s gingerbread house in stop motion.  I need to work on that next to see if it will work and what the timing is.

My goal is to finish up as much of the video as I can now, and focus on getting good footage this weekend and early next week once the kids are out of school.  We’ll see.

It might snow tomorrow here in Indy.  That might be interesting…

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Christmas 2002 was the first year we were in Germany.  We moved to Neidereschach in May of that year, and we were just starting to get settled in by Christmas time.
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Progress continues on the Christmas video.  Over Sandi’s objections, I’m doing animation this year in the style of “South Park.”  I’ve wanted to try animation this style for a few years now, because regardless of how you feel about the show, the animation is simple and effective.

Here’s a sample of what I’ve got so far (click to see the details better):

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Carissa, Cece and Sadie are all at the age now where they are getting involved in school Christmas programs, and so for the past few years, these programs have been part of our Christmas videos.  Well, this year, Cece and Sadie weren’t in classes that participate in the Christmas program.  At their school, the Kindergartners and 2nd graders do a spring program instead.

Carissa’s class at her school seems to participate every year, though, and tonight was her program.  It was held at the high school this year in a good size auditorium.  Last year, when the program was in the elementary school gym, there were people who literally couldn’t get in the door.  Even with the larger venue, the performance tonight was standing room only.

Unfortunately for us, this meant we had to sit at an odd angle to the stage and due to the way the risers on stage were set up, we couldn’t even see Carissa.  Sandi, who was closest to the center, tried to take a few pictures, but quickly gave up.
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I just finished uploading our 2008 Christmas video.  You can go here to see it.

As I mentioned earlier, we used a “South Park” theme this year.  The caricatures of the girls turned out pretty well and the animation was fun to do, if a bit tiring.  We also put in a little bit of stop motion animation and a green screen effect just for good measure.  

The green screen was probably the hardest thing to pull off, mostly because we don’t have good enough lighting to really make it work well.  It’s important to get the screen lit as uniformly as possible, and we had to cheat a little bit.

In a first for us, the girls sang the song used in the credits.  It’s a song by Jack Hartman that Sandi found while helping out at the school this year.  It came with a music only track that we put to good use.

Anyway, we hope you like it.  Merry Christmas!

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