Merry Christmas

This will be short but I just wanted to post a quick wish for a very happy Christmas to everyone. I love you all and I hope your holiday is full of love, warmth, loved ones, and joy. I'm thinking of all of you tonight.

Merry Christmas!
Love, Brandee

Christmas Goodies

My favorite thing about Christmas is all the traditions and the smells and sounds of the the season. One of the things I remember about Christmases as a kid are all the fun treats my mom would make, cheese balls, and candies, and peanut brittle. I don't remember lots of cookies at Christmas, my sisters might have different memories but I'm a little younger so mom might have cut some of those things from her very long to do list by the time that I was old enough to remember. But one cookie that I do remember, and it's one of my favorite Christmas treats, are Russian teacakes. Now that my finals are over I finally had time to do some baking. So I made these Russian teacakes for the party I had the other night. They are simple to make and I think they are a little fancier than a regular cookie. It was fun to spend a little time in the kitchen.


These cookies are nice because they aren't too sweet. You roll them in confectioners sugar after they are baked so they are frosty, wintry, white. I think they look pretty on a Christmas table.

Christmas Party

One of the things I love the most about my new(ish) apartment is that with the extra room I now have I can finally invite people over and entertain friends. On Wednesday evening I had a Christmas/ end of semester party at my place. Since I was in High School I always thought it would be so sophisticated to have a formal Christmas party where everyone dressed up I mentioned that to my friend Annie and she totally got behind it. It was allot of fun and I'm hoping to have another party soon. Some of these pictures are blurry because the lighting was soft.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

My goodness, it has been a long time since I was able to blog about what I've been up to mostly because I've been very busy! One of the classes that I've been taking this semester is a Millinery class. Millinery is the art of hat making here are pictures of the hats that I've made this semester.

Some of the class wearing their Regency bonnets



This is my bonnet It was made from an old straw hat that I wirerd and cut into the brim shape and then added a fabric crown.



This is a Cavalier hat made of felt, made by taking a felt hood (kind of a "blank hat with no shaping or sizing) then I wet it with water and blocked it into the shape, wired the brim then we stiffened it with sizing.



This is my Buckram Cavalier hat. it is made from a stiff material called buckram. I patterned the shape then cut out the individual pieces, wired them then covered them with fabric then stitched the pieces together.


This is my Medieval Hennin. It is made in the same process as the Buckram cavalier hat. I did make the large braided trim that goes around the top of it. I made a long velvet"snake" then braided it with several pieces of contrasting trim to give it the right scale and interest.

Showing off our Hennins on the day of the final.

One of my other classes is Scene painting This is my final project for that class, It is a translucent drop, which means you paint it in a certain way so that it can be lit from behind so it can change looks. Some will change from day to night mine just glows. I chose a vintage corset ad for my project. These pictures show the work in progress.





This is the finished project lit from the front (it's a little shinny because it was still wet when I took this picture.


And this is what it looks like lit from behind it doesn't show up so well in a photo but the stars glow and the the highlight on the lady glows. I get to take this one home and I'm planning on hanging her in my bedroom.

So there is a sample of what I've been working on this semester. Now I have to get back to cleaning my house.

Happy October

Well, at the end of the summer I said that I was going to try and keep up with blogging one a week like I did while in Maine. It's been about a month and I've failed miserably but I'm going to try to do better. So what's been keeping me so busy that I couldn't take a minute to write on my blog, you ask? Well a couple of things. First of all the whole pesky school thing with it's homework and time consuming projects has been a big part of it. The weekend after I got back to Utah I then jaunted off to California to visit my sister and her family, to meet my new nephew. (he is so cute I can hardly stand it!) My best friend got a great job and moved away so I was spending time with him before he left. My best girl friend got married so that was a trip home for that. And then there's been the fact that I've been trying to get unpacked with all of these other things going on. But I can finally say that after a weekend of concerted effort I have finally unpacked the last box and cleaned the place, so I'm officially moved in. I've even done a little decorating mostly concentrated in the living room for now. So That's my update and I'll try to be good and write again next weekend.
The trip to CA

At lunch with my beautiful niece Ari


My nieces and my new nephew


Celebrating mom and dad's birthdays and anniversary.


I made Sunday dinner for my friend Nate before he moved I bought some inexpensive flowers and arranged them and I also made this no-bake Oreo pie. it was so yummy.

This my lamp project. I took some lamps that I already had, spray painted them black, found white shades, then bought some black trim for the shades. What do you think?
Before...

And after

I bought an inexpensive love seat and chair and I was able to buy a slipcover I liked for the sofa but my mom and I found this cute stripped fabric so I'm making a slip cover for my chair. It's still not finished but I just have to take some darts at the corners and add ties.

This is what my living room looks like I'm not done with the placement of things on the walls, I feel like I need something else but I'm not sure what yet. and I'd really like a small coffee table but I haven't found something suitable. and I'm going to add an accent color, I'm thinking pear green. But it is starting to feel decorated and livable.

What I did this summer - or - Things I learned in Maine

So this is it my last blog post from Maine. I thought that I would start off by posting a link to Maine State Music Theatre's website, where you can see videos of most of the shows that we did this summer. If you watch the video for Spamalot keep in mind that in the last song of "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life" I'm onstage behind the castle, it's my secret cameo. This week I've still been dressing Spamalot and that's going more smoothly now, and I've also been working on the Co-design of Alice in Wonderland. Some of the pictures I am posting are shots of the Girl playing Alice in her costume for so publicty shot (but I took these of course)I'm also posting pictures of various items that we were considering as options for the show, however, not all of them made it to the show. It's been a fun crazy sometimes awefull sometimes wonderful summer and I thought I'd make a list of what I learned in Maine.

1. I don't realy like lobster I tried it and I don't hate the flavor but I can't do the texture.
2.I think I could learn to like fish if it's really fresh.
3.I hate humidity!
4.The Big Top deli makes a delishious turkey club...yum!
5.Being nice doesn't always make people respect you.
6.I don't care about that last one I'm not going to stop being nice.
7.I'm physicaly capable of things I didn't think I would be capable of i.e. running up and down stairs more than 10 times a show.
8. I should never work at a job where I'm have to work alone in a room with no one to talk to...it makes me a little crazy.
9.Even when it's hard and I'm exhausted I still love theatre.
10.Roomates can be fun and they can keep you sane.
11. I love my family and I can always count on them to see me through hard times(althought I knew that before I came to Maine)
12.I miss really good squeezy hugs from my friends.
13.A somewhat narrow galley-style kitchen is actualy quite a luxury.
14.It is possible to make good food even when you only shop for two or three days at a time.
15.I love my car and miss it a lot!
16 Hannaford is a lovely grocery store and I wish they were located in the west.
17. The Altantic ocean is cold!
18.I am weaker than I thought I was but more resilient then I thought I was.
19.I'm a western girl, even though New England is lovely and I do think I could live here I will always be a western girl. I like mountains, wide open vistas, and the warm and friendly people.
20. There are many wonderfull and talented people here who have made my time away from my home bearable/wonderful and I hope that I will be able to keep in touch with many of them.


Well it's been a great summer and I have about two and a half days left but I'm very excited to come home but I will miss the new friends I have made here.

12 down One to go!

It's been an extreemly busy week. I've been working on the wardrobe crew for Spamalot, which opened Thursday. If you've never seen or heard of it, Spamalot is a musical based off of Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail. It is very funny and has a lot of gags, tricks and spectacle. It is also a very hard show to run. There are 8 dressers and we all pretty much run from one change to the next. We have been open for several days now and I'm finaly getting to a point where it's going more smoothly. I'm also Co-designign the intern show of Alice in Wonderland. We had most of the cast in for fittings on Saturday and they went really well, which is good because we load that into the theatre on Saturday, and with our show scdule we have the morning today and Friday to get the show done.


Wardrobe Crew playing frisby after we had pre-sets done.

Carrie wearing a hat that we may put in the show.

The prop girls wearing a matching color scheme.

The Final Strech?

This one is going to be short and boring. I'm going to be dressing Spamalot and co-designing Alice In Wonderland right up until I come home. I will probably be pretty busy from now on. I took a few photos of the storage area of the fort to give an idea of what I've been working with. My parents have been helping me look for an apartment back home so we'll see how that goes. I finished my initial scene breakdown for Three Musketeers, the show I'm designing next year, so at least I'm making progress on some stuff. That's about all for this week.

Change of Pace and a day off!

This week has been alternately a hard week and a fun week. I think it's been difficult because I'm getting closer to the end and yet it's still a substantial amount of time left, roughly a third of my total time here was left to go at the beginning of the week. However, I got to go work at the costume shop on Saturday which I was nervous about (new situation) but it turned out to be allot of fun and one of their stichers had been hurt earlier in the week so they were very grateful for my help, it was nice to be appreciated. In fact, they asked me if I would be willing to come in on my Sunday day off to help more and I agreed to because it was really enjoyable to get to work with people for a change. Then on our Monday day off my roommates invited me to go to Freeport with them then we went to a company picnic at a board members house. It was a perfect day, warm but not too hot, and the house and the water was beautiful.

My roommates and I had a feast of zucini, squash, potatoes, and chicken it was delicious. the above video is me trying to be clever and document cooking in the tiny kitchen we share but I probably sound like an idiot. Oh well I was having fun. This is me working all alone at the fort in fact I took this picture with the timer on my camera thus the poor photographic quality. On Saturday when I worked in the shop I went to the mall to get a hot dog from a stand in the park and there was a band playing in the gazebo and two of my roommates where there and one of the electrics interns showed up it was nice to have lunch in the park and poke a little fun at the quality of the band (clearly High School aged boys) Perfect Saturday in the Summer atmosphere. These are photos of the lovely location of our company picnic I believe this is the home of one of the board members of the Theatre. There was good food and it was so beautiful and I got to go on a boat ride in the bay but I forgot to take my camera on the boat. Well that's one more week down and now I'm at about three and a half weeks to go I think I'm going to be very busy for the rest of my time here but I think that will be good so I don't have time to feel homesick. Until next week....