The End of 2013

Hi Everyone!

I haven't been overly active on my blog but I have been extremely busy offline.

A recap of 2013 month by month:

January: Aren and I rang in the new Year at home with friends. Aren's brother, a DJ stage name Foxhound, and some other local DJ's Beat Reynolds and Sunny Phono put on an amazing show. I performed with local Rapper Stretch-9 and had an amazing start to what would turn out to be an amazing year.

February: My dad's birthday. Aren and I were busy planning our upcoming vacation to Japan. This has been a dream of his for many years. His brother and my sister will be joining us.

March: My parents set off on their holiday to Cuba. All of us kids chipped in to send them on their first all inclusive tropical vacation to celebrate their 30th Anniversary.

I had the opportunity to sing with all of the lovely Sunday School Children at our Easter Service. There are some very talented young kids in this group!

April: My Artwork was displayed in the Tumbler Ridge Art Space.

May: JAPAN! We traveled to Japan for a three week dream vacation. It was one of the best vacations I have ever been on and I hope we will be able to return again someday. The Japanese people are very warm and inviting and made our stay unbelievable. Aren and I celebrated our 7th Anniversary while in Japan.

Life Size GUNDAM!

GUNDAM!

June: I announced my retirement at work. It was a challenging and rewarding experience to work at the Mine but the time had come for me to say goodbye. I will never forget the people or experiences I had while working at Ekati.

Photo by Nahanni Construction NCL

June 22 - Sang at a show with Stretch-9 at The Coal Bin. If you haven't heard his music yet you should check it out. Stretch-9 on Reverbnation

July: My niece Evangeline was born!

In the newspaper on my birthday! I was asked to sing at GrizzFest and our local paper ran an article about each performer/group. I also received a Nexus for my birthday.

 

A new track from Stretch-9, featuring yours truly was released on SoundCloud. Ms. Miss.

Have a listen if you haven`t already.

Listen Now!

August: Sang at Grizz-Fest with my friend local rap artist Stretch-9. It was awesome to get up and perform for people, some friends even came down from the Yukon to see us! Other performers included George Canyon, The Real McKenzie's and Dragonette. It was pretty cool to share the stage with these people.

Backstage at Grizz-Fest

 Aren and I began renovations to our house. Lots of work!

September: Still renovating....!

Aren's sister moved in with us and started school here in town.

Kailee and Kia

October: I won the Best Costume prize at the Hallowe'en party we attended. Aren should have won with his HAND MADE Daft Punk helmet. I don't think people realized that he wired all of the LED's himself and fabricated the helmet out of Fiberglass. He is pretty amazing!

I began working on some Musical collaborations with DJ's around the world.

November: My favorite sports team the SASKATCHEWAN ROUGHRIDERS win the Grey Cup! Amazing! Our family was then featured in our local newspaper!

December: I entered 5 pieces of Artwork into the South Peace Art Societies Member Show at the Dawson Creek Art Gallery. This was my first show as a SPAS Member.

My first collaboration was released on SoundCloud with musical artist nberk. 

Have a listen if you haven`t already.

Listen Now!

 

Community Choir Concert - I was blessed to be able to join this group of talented people and had the opportunity to sing a special number during the concert as a trio with Bob and Michael (last names kept anonymous in case they don't want internet publicity!) I was also able to create a number of original Art pieces which were used as a part of the visual display during the concert.

Church Christmas Pageant - I was asked to play Mary and had a fun time participating in this event. I bet it was the first time Mary had blonde/blue hair! Disclaimer - not my baby but my wonderful friend Jen's bundle of joy Edward.

Christmas with my family and our new niece Evangeline!

Our Christmas Tree

I updated my Art Website with new work so please check it out:

www.lydiahibbing.com

I have prints available for purchase now as well.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hallowe'en 2010 - Starcraft Nova Costume

Hey everyone!

Last time out I was consumed with making my Hallowe'en costume from scratch. I hope you will enjoy these pictures! WARNING: This will be a long post as there are a lot of pictures. : )

I found out that I would be out for Hallowe'en only two weeks before the date, so I didn't have a lot of time to construct my costume. I decided that I wanted to go as Nova (Ghost) from Starcraft (a computer game).Tthe costume ended up being a lot more work than I thought it was going to be.

First I have a whole bunch of photos of the finished costume. I borrowed Brendon's Air Soft gun for the pictures but didn't take it out with us as it looks too much like a real gun.

In this one you can see a lot of the lights that we incorporated into it.

Aren told me I wasn't supposed to smile because people with guns don't smile. I'm not very good at looking serious for pictures.

Now on to the construction phase of the costume:

What a huge mess!!

This is my original sketch for the bodice armour. I decided afterwards that having the shoulder pads point downwards was going to be much too restrictive.

These are front and back flat sketches for the one piece. All of the style lines are included, although modifications were made in the final garment.

I drafted a pattern for the bodysuit and initially I was going to make it all out of PVC. Well that turned out to be a horrible idea as it pulled and bunched all over the place. Luckily I had some bamboo stretch fabric at home that I could use. I drafted the pattern and made two different prototypes before I finally made the suit itself. All of the piping is black PVC, tricky to sew!

I constructed the body armour with PVC, tape, glue, papermache and LOTS of time. It took me forever to get it properly formed.

Nova's suit lights up so of course I had to have LED's and EL wire in it. The store only had 6 blue LED's though so I am hoping to work on the costume more and add more lighting to it.

Yes folks, ALL of the piping was hand made by moi.

Piping and sewing part of the bodice.

Piped in the middle and piped around the outside. PVC is sticky when it sews so I had to buy a roller foot.

Inside of the outfit.

Outside of the outfit.

The foam served as pattern pieces for the PVC as well as gave the bodice extra shape. There were battery packs hidden inside here and the backpack as well.

While We Were Out:

Me with Master Chief. You can see the lights better in the dark.

Aren and I. He didn't have as much time as I did to make his costume but he was a Nintendo controller and SUPER proud of it. He made the whole thing on Saturday before we went out. He said he is going to do some more work on it and make sides and stuff too. It was super sweet either way!

Did I mention he was Super proud of being a Nintendo controller? This is us with two of our friends.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures of our costumes.

As I said earlier, I plan on putting more lights on mine and reworking some elements. I had no idea it would be quite as much work as it turned out to be and would have liked a bit more time on some parts.

Until next time,