Whimsic Alley Holiday Craft Faire

On Saturday, I returned to Whimsic Alley for another craft faire (I think it's legally mandated to spell 'fair' with an 'e' in this circumstance). Even though they had just had a Halloween craft faire two weeks ago, the vendors were all completely different, so that was a nice change that made the visit worth it. 

The area where they hold the craft faires (and other events as well) is decorated to look like the Great Hall at Hogwarts - check out the 'floating' candles! It's a really cool effect.

There were some really great booths - there was one selling all kinds of necklaces with amazing charms - like golden snitches, Bag End doors, scissors, staplers, owls, etc; and of course one with really clever t-shirts; and another selling iPad cases. This was one of my favorite booths - Crafted Cuteness. These adorable girls were selling all kinds of amigurumis of Pokemons, My Little Ponies, and all kinds of other cute crocheted things.

I ended up buying a couple necklaces from Whimsical Forest - one had a charm of a miniature Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire book, and the other was a little bottle of blue liquid (which also glows in the dark!) labeled Expecto Patronum! She had a ton of similar charms - I was torn between this one and a bottle of Felix Felicis.








Here’s an example of part of the store, to show how it’s segmented into smaller stores.

I found Platform 9 3/4!! I considered running at the wall to see what would happen, but then decided against it.

Their Staff Only signs were so clever! Other ones said “Potions Chamber” and “Pit of Disaster - Don’t Even Think About Entering.”

Some Links for a Monday

Little Miss/Mr. meets Game of Thrones! My favorite is the Little Miss Stubborn!


The Real Actors Read series of YouTube videos is just THE BEST. This one in particular is one of my faves - “You owe us 25 minutes of vodka.” Seriously, they’re all great.

A rare look inside the Lisa Frank Headquarters. I would have killed to take a tour here when I was a kid. Heck, I’d still love to!!!

MP3 Cleaning

I have to confess I'm a bit of a digital hoarder. However, every once in a while, I get the urge to clean everything out and start fresh. About a year ago, I realized that my iTunes library was so cluttered with songs that I didn't even really like; so much so that I rarely even listened to music from it that wasn't in a playlist already. I decided to go through each and every song, keeping the ones I liked (a little over 3000), deleting the ones I didn’t (probably around 1000), rating them all (this is how I organize them; I don’t know, it works for me), fixing the title tracks so they’re all uniform (because I’m OCD like that), and adding in album covers. 

It took me seriously at least a whole year to do this, and I’m finally finally done. Of course, now everyone listens to steaming music on Spotify or Pandora or whatever. Oh well, this is how I prefer to listen to music, and it works for me.

It’s SO lovely now, when I listen to my iPod on shuffle, every song is a song that I can enjoy and I don’t have to keep forwarding to the next track in a futile effort to find a song I actually want to listen to. I had no idea I had so much junk in there!

Now maybe I should look into organizing all my pictures...

Nail Polishes Galore!

It’s not that I have TOO many nail polishes, it’s that I have too many to effectively keep in a shoebox or drawer and still be able to see what color any of them are since all you can see are the tops. That’s not very helpful, even if you have them in some kind of color order. I did some research on Amazon and found this nice clear rack that holds around 100 bottles. It’s made of a pretty thick plastic, and it ended up being a better quality than I thought it would be. It’s held to the wall with 4 nails, and I’m just really hoping that it doesn’t end up somehow falling off and breaking the wall and a bunch of bottles. It miraculously held every single one of my nail polises, though it won’t hold more than that, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with future purchases. I have a lot of smaller bottles that I tried to smush together, so overall it looks a little more cluttered than I’d prefer, but what’re you gonna do. I really really love being able to see all my nail polishes at once.

Comikaze 2013!

This was the third year for Stan Lee’s Comikaze, LA’s (pretty much) only pop culture convention. I’ve attended all three years, and it’s expanded immensely and improved upon itself every year.The first year, it was pretty small and a little esoteric - one random thing I recall is that there was a tattooing area set up, and if you got a tattoo of the Comikaze logo, you’d get free tickets for life (I wonder if anyone did, and if Comikaze honored the deal!). Last year, it was much much bigger, and as such, ran into a few problems, like huge unwieldy lines for registration, which angered a lot of attendees. They’ve really hit their stride this year, having done a remarkable job branding themselves throughout the year via their awesome social media presence.

One thing that differentiates them, not necessarily positively or negatively, from San Diego Comic Con, the granddaddy of all Cons, is their panel line-ups. SDCC attracts major studios and celebrities, eager to show you their upcoming films and TV shows, and this has become the calling card for the show (to the media, at least; plenty of other things do go on at SDCC). The panels at Comikaze seemed to mainly consist of fans/bloggers/commentators talking about stuff, which, don’t get me wrong, can be cool and super interesting. But it's not quite as attention grabbing or compelling.

A really cool aspect of Comikaze's panels, however, is that every year, they have these reunion panels, featuring casts of shows that were popular when I was kid. In the past, they've had the casts of All That, Wild & Crazy Kids, and Salute Your Shorts. This year featured the guys who played Pete and Pete in the Adventures of Pete & Pete, as well as the voice talents from Powerpuff Girls.

Further to that, they also tend more to the nostalgia factor. For example, they had a video game museum, showcasing vintage video games like this awesome Atari, and this original Nintendo system.

The exhibit floor was, to me, where Comikaze really shined. There were TONS of really unique vendors this year. When you attend as many conventions as I do, you tend to see a lot of the same booths over and over again (which is totally great for them, if they’re doing so well at each one that they can afford to keep doing this). I would say that a significant portion of the booths I saw were ones I’d never seen before. One in particular was selling wooden swords that they had handmade, some of which were from various movies and video games. I hope they sold a ton because they were super cool!

Another favorite was the booth with jewelry and other fun things in the shapes of assorted foods. I really thought it was called Pretty Pretty Jewelry, but now I can’t find anything by that name, so I guess I was wrong. I bought a really cute purple M&M ring from the very lovely girl who made all the things, and I’m sad that I can’t remember what it was called because I bet she has a great Etsy store or something.

Another thing I picked up was a Unicorn horn!! I’ve seen Unicorntopia at the last few conventions I’ve been to, but this is the first time I actually got one, and I proudly wore it for the rest of the day.

One of my goals was to get some of those sweet Pacific Rim figures. My mistake was in trying to , by the time we got to the end of the exhibit floor and went back to the beginning, the toy vendors had raised all their prices! I ended up having to pay more than I thought I would, but I guess at least I got to support small business instead of just buying them from Amazon. Gipsy Danger is now hanging out with Katniss Everdeen and Catwoman on my bookshelf.

I also wanted to pick up some more Funko Pops, but ended up getting a little overwhelmed and then just forgetting the whole thing. I came in with a couple I knew I wanted to get (namely, Glinda the Good Witch, the Sunflower from Plants vs. Zombies), but then I saw some that I didn’t even realize they made (Wicket the Ewok, Leia - both slave girl and princess editions, Maleficent, Wicked Witch) and then I just didn’t know what to do with myself. Oh well.

Oh, and did I mention I met Grover? Well, I did:

November Goals!

#1: Lose 5 pounds - This may be a bit ambitious since I’m not quite into the habit of working out with a regular frequency, and also because of Thanksgiving. But I'm going to try anyway!

#2: Blog at least 3x a week - I’m trying to get into the habit of blogging regularly. It’s worked here and there, but I need to make it stick. I want to develop some new features to write about as well.

#3: Finish 2 books - I don’t think this will be much of a problem since I’ll be traveling to Houston for Thanksgiving, which always gives me a lot of free time to get some reading done.

#4: Do something creative - Lately I’ve been trying to do one creative thing a month. Last month was the refrigerator magnets. This month, I want to try to make these supercute headbands with decorations on them, like ears and flowers and sequins.

Orange is the New Black

I recently finished reading Orange is the New Black (the book), as well as watching Orange is the New Black (the TV show). I really liked both, but they were surprisingly very different. The show definitely got some inspiration from the book, like a couple characters and some situations, but it’s not at all a direct adaptation.

The book, and show, follow Piper, a woman who got involved in a little drug trafficking by way of a woman she was dating many years ago, and now is sentenced to a year in women’s prison. She has to navigate her way through the unfamiliar world, figuring out how to act and who she can trust. Each episode of the show also follows a backstory of one of the characters, giving insights to their personality and how they ended up in prison.

One interesting sort of difference from the show is that the book talks about how communities are an important aspect of prison life. You become part of a family unit, there’ll be a ‘mother’ who’ll have ‘children’ who will be like siblings to each other. They are much more supportive of the other women in prison, giving them supplies they might need, and emotional support. In the show, it seems a bit more tricky, like one wrong move and you might get shanked. Of course, that adds a bit more drama to the show than having everyone sitting around hugging would.

Okay, maybe I’m just crazy, but I feel like spending a year in jail wouldn’t be like totally awful? I mean, sure, you don’t have total freedom, and the food sucks, and you can’t see your loved ones. But... I should as hell would enjoy spending a year and change to just read books, listen to music, do some yoga, maybe learn to knit. I’m just saying.

Crazy Eyes is one of my favorite characters in the show. She’s so weird and off putting at first, but she has so many great moments, like when teenagers come to the prison for a Scared Straight session, and while everyone else is yelling at the kids, she starts fervently reciting Shakespeare to one. And when her elderly white parents come to visitation, she exclaims “I like my hair like this, Mommy!” See her best moments here.

Halloween Craft Faire at Whimsic Alley

On Saturday, I went to the Halloween Craft Faire at Whimsic Alley. Whimsic Alley is this amazing store that is set up to look like Diagon Alley from Harry Potter. It’s designed to look like a series of smaller stores inside, each one selling a different theme, so there’s a clothing shop, a candy shop, a wand shop, etc. They have a lot of merchandise from the movies, as well as items just inspired by the series (for example, stuffed owls, jewelry, pins, stickers). It’s incredibly well done, and it’s a must for any Harry Potter fan living in or visiting Los Angeles.

This weekend, they had a Craft Faire. In the back room where they hold events, probably 20 tables were set up where vendors could sells their crafts. There was a lot of really cool stuff for sale, pins and soaps and candles and accessories and shirts and all kinds of creative and clever things. I'm always astounded by the creativity of people in fandom.

Mickey's Halloween Party at Disneyland

Left: Tower of Tower; Right: Space Mountain

A week or so ago, my boyfriend and I went to Disneyland for Mickey's Halloween Party. Disneyland at Halloween is almost as cool as Disneyland at Christmastime, with all the pretty decorations, pumpkins and candy corn everywhere.

For this event, they shut down the park after 6pm for party-goers only, and set up trick or treat areas. All the rides were still open, so with fewer people than normal in the park, we were able to get on a ton of them.

They also had special snacks for sale! Not pictured: the mediocre candy corn gummies. I've never been so disappointed by candy corn before. Sigh.




Let's get to the important part: the trick or treating! This is something you basically never get to do anymore as an adult, so it was fun and also kind of weird to go around to all these stations and have candy tossed in your bag. There were more stations set up than I thought there would be, plus, each station ended up having like 4 or 5 different carts that you'd walk by to get candy. Some of the setups were really cool - one went through Innovations, another around Rancho Del Zocalo in Frontierland. 



We were even able to see both a parade and fireworks show. During a typical Disneyland day, it would be virtually impossible to go on all these rides, AND see fireworks AND a parade.

Look at all this candy we got! And check out my cute pumpkin Mickey trick or treat 'bag' - it even lights up!!











Oh, and here's my outfit. I got a few compliments on my cute Pooh ears.

Craftiness

Check out the craft I made on my other blog, Challenges Accepted!, where my BFF Erin and I do fun challenges designed to try new things and get out of our comfort zones!