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Ninja Baby Written by David Zeltser Illustrated by Diane Goode .                  .          .Chronicle Books   11/01/2015 .                        . 978-1-4521-3542-7 .                        . 32 …

I had the pleasure of meeting Arree at an SCBWI conference schmooze and I was struck by his dedication, enthusiasm and humility.  [JM] Illustrator or author/illustrator? If the latter, do you begin with words or pictures? [AC] I consider myself … Continue reading →

I’m just a teensy bit late with this Halloween post. Our little man just had to, had to be the green ninja from Ninjago. It was a bit of a trick figuring out how to make up the costume, especially the sword-holding thingy in the back, which, according to my son, was absolutely essential.

I bought cheap green jogging pants and used gold fabric paint (the kind you squeeze out) to make the little gold shapes on them. On the figure they’re actually silver but, whatever.

The top is a green fleece I refused to paint on since I wanted him to be able to wear it plain later. I did add black cardboard-and-toilet-paper-roll epaulets on the shoulders, tacked on with thread. These were only semi-sucessful. You can see them hanging off his shoulders. We probably should’ve skipped them.

The headpiece is another simple balaclava I made like the ones for the knight costumes, only with a silver piece sewn on. The green is a thrifted sweatshirt and the silver from the same thrifted sweater that I used for one of the knight helmets.

The black belt is actually Daddy’s bathrobe sash. Ha! And the sword-holder-thingy in back (sorry, no picture) I made by cutting slits in a small cardboard box that I painted black. Four slits for the swords, then some small holes for the ties cut from sweatshirt material. We then tied the ties around his chest to hold the box on his back.

It’s not fancy, but it worked. This is kind of my costume philosophy—-I want them to be comfortable and re-usable but inexpensive and quickly slapped together. Thrifted knits are great for this.

For other low-sew costumes with thrifted parts, check out our fireman suit, knight, and turtle costumes. Oh, and here’s a princess for good measure, with maybe a little more sewing involved.

In other news, I’ve been doing some development work on secondary characters in my novel, using this questionnaire. The questionnaire was originally written for role-playing gaming, but totally works for novel-writing, too. I’ve been surprised at some of the interesting things that are coming from it. Hope I can put them to good use.

Northern friends, I hope you’re not stuck in the snow, or at least if you are, that you’ve got power, food, and board games.

Ninja or Pirate?

I learned my ninja skills early.  I don't know if my brother Gene who is five and a half years older than I am really wanted a little brother, but he always treated me like a boy.  We had wrestling matches on his bed, and the first one to fling the other one off the bed and across the room was the winner.  There was lots of blood and busted sheetrock, but I learned how to swipe kick both of his legs out from under him by the time I was six-years-old.

some ninjas for last week's drawergeeks topic.

-me :)

I'm a pretty decent guy. I've got my faults of course; I'm sort of boring, kind of shy, sometimes I don't shower into well after one in the afternoon, but overall I like to think that the pros heavily outweigh the cons when it comes to your friendly neighborhood Steven. I'm sort of funny sometimes, there are a few people out there worse looking than me, I'm patient, understanding, and if you can manage to get past the Alcatraz-like that I tend wall that I put up, I'm a pretty good friend as well.

That's right, go me! NERD HIGH FIVE!

It's because of one of these good things that I agreed to take five or six hours out of my day last Saturday and put together the six logos above for my wife. The kids in her class at school came up with table names (some of them pretty creative) and she asked me if I would make a logo for each table.

I of course pretended like it was going to be a pain in the rear end of the highest order...you know...to make her more appreciative of the efforts, but in all honesty it was kind of fun. There were some pretty creative names in there, that sparked a lot of ideas, so I can't complain all that much.

Some of them actually came out looking pretty good.

That's right, go me! NERD HIGH FIVE AGAIN!

(I really should stop with the nerd high five thing...I'm starting to look like a nerd).

Steve

Dani has two loves in her life, baseball and boys- though not necessarily in that order. Determined to get a boyfriend this summer, Dani comes up with the perfect idea. She and her best friend will each convince their parents to host a guy from the local collegiate league team for the summer. Their houseguests will be the girls in to getting to know the team and finding their summer romances.