Meeting Celeste and Our Best EVER 3 Fine Grains Giveaway!

What a busy few weeks I have had traveling around the US!! I just returned back from a wonderful visit to Palo Alto, California to visit my sister! I was also able to stop by and finally meet designer, Celeste Randolph of Ambiance Interiors. Here we are enjoying the spectacular California sunshine on her back patio!

I am sure you all remember Celeste’s gorgeous kitchen that was featured on WD last year! You can read more about it HERE! And if you missed it make sure you do take a peek – It is just awesome!! Celeste was such a wonderful host and we had a great time getting better acquainted! Thanks Celeste it was such a treat!!

I wish I could have traveled down to Southern California and had a visit with my dear friend, Kymberley Fraser, creator of the 3 Fine Grains textile line and the owner of the fabulous store, A Beautiful Mess.

Once again Kym has “wowed” us with her phenomenal designs made from authentic, original antique German grainsacks. Each year, like an angel from above, Kym gives WD readers a chance to own one of her gorgeous creations!

You might remember the wonderful Grainsack Christmas Tree we gave away last year; above is one of the trees available this year. Let’s have a look at the rest of Kym’s new Holiday Line:

She creates the most amazing ornaments, like these antique linen hearts with crowns. Perfect for the queen of the house!!!

And these fabulous monogram ornaments made from grainsack remnants!

Another new item are the grainsack covered photo albums - Love these!!

Kym has such incredible talent – here are her signature grainsack stockings! Aren’t they beautiful?!

And above is the GIVEWAY – I am so giddy just announcing it! Kym has given us a gorgeous Christmas Tree Skirt. It is handmade from authentic, original, antique German grainsacks. It is lined on the back side with burlap and has a burlap rope trim going all around it. It measures 60" and it retails for $725!!! Awesome, right?!!

To enter to win just leave a comment below. For an extra chance to win begin following A Beautiful Mess on Facebook click HERE. For a third chance to win begin following Willow Décor on my Facebook page HERE. Finally re-tweet this post on Twitter and have another chance!

If you are interested in purchasing any of these items, you can contact Kym at (805) 630-3727 and she will ship them out right away! A huge “Thank You” to Kym and best of luck to everyone! I will announce a winner next Saturday! Good Luck!!

(Photo credits: Lu Tapp Photography, French Kissed)

New Film: Hugo (2011)

Martin Scorsese's Hugo, from a John Logan adaptation of Brian Selznick's 2007 novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, represents both a categorical improvement in contemporary stereoscopic aesthetics, and also the director's most conspicuously personal, and indeed successful (fictional) filmmaking in well over a decade. Hugo opens with a fluid forward travelling shot that proceeds, at break-neck pace, from the interwar Parisian streets to the interior of a steel-and-glass, art nouveau train station that will provide the film's primary setting - and a clandestine place-of-residence for the preteen Cabret (Asa Butterfield). Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson's bravura camera figure ultimately comes to rest on the young Hugo as he glances out from behind an overhead clock-face, onto the teaming masses and arriving and departing locomotives below. Spatially speaking, Scorsese builds his film around the angled paths of the latter, which is to the say the same diagonal planes that provided the cinema's first projected work, Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895), with its exceptional depth. In his own first exploration of nascent stereoscopic technologies, Scorsese finds visual and motival inspiration in cinema's historic point-of-origin, in trains arriving in a station.

Yet, Scorsese treats three-dimensional photography as a wholly new art, as a medium with its own aesthetic laws, rather than as an overlay for traditional two-dimensional film practice (as it is frequently conceived in the blockbuster mode, and as it is literally applied to a number of older features). Scorsese works in all three dimensions, utilizing a modified classical style to discover representational strategies appropriate to his new medium; he advances the technology by making 3-D feel far more like classical narrative storytelling, with shallow (and distinctively frontal) shot/reverse-shot chains alternating with the film's more kinetic chase sequences in which the viewer is propelled through the damp, under-lit back corridors of the liminal structure. The filmmaker manages his competing planes with aplomb, racking focus regularly to subtly lead his spectator from one plane to another and back through his cavernous interiors. Indeed, it is a testament to the filmmaker's facility with the new technology that he does not constantly overwhelm his viewers with aggressive depth cues, but instead allows for subtle modulations that make the experience of Hugo much less taxing than other experiments within the same form.

Scorsese does however re-imagine existing footage in three-dimensions, with the narratively central work of Georges Méliès not only projected within the diegesis of the film, but also produced in the cinematic pioneer's glass studio. Among the more magical images in Scorsese's fictionalized semi-biography of Méliès occurs when Scorsese's stereoscopic camera shoots through a transparent, foregrounded fish-tank, which  demystifies Méliès's special-effect work; in so doing, Scorsese completes his narrative conjugation of the real and the fantastic, Lumière and Méliès, digital's photographic and animated modes. Hugo indeed represents a consummate, if at times overtly didactic overview of proto, early and silent film history, with the director's avocational interest in preservation providing the film with its take-home lesson. Following a decade-and-a-half of increasing work within the mode of film-historical, non-fiction pedagogy, Scorsese has married this interest with the loosely biographic idiom that had seen a qualitative decline in the director's since his major, hyper-Fordian Kundun (1997). Again, Hugo represents a much richer Scorsese, which it remains to be said often emerges in those less expected narrative corners and generic detours in his corpus, from The King of Comedy (1983) to The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun.

Though Hugo likewise presents unfamiliar generic terra firma, the filmmaker's latest is nothing if not a work of personal expression, with Scorsese dividing between two surrogates (in addition to his own on-camera cameo as a turn-of-the-century photographer): the forgotten Méliès and the latch-key Cabret. The director is at once the aging legend, deeply concerned with his legacy and the preservation of the past, and also the young technician and aspiring magician looking toward the medium's future.

This review was co-written by Lisa K. Broad and Michael J. Anderson.

Christmas Giving

We would like to give you an update on our project as we go into the Christmas season.
We have been so blessed with people who have given their hearts in building this home for our "Angels".  Children who never imagined in their wildest dreams they would  live in one.  Their home is finished, including beds and mattresses along with the latrine just outside their door.  The main house is almost done, excluding the floors and plumbing fixtures.  The water is now in, complete with submersive pump and stabilizer and is pumping 5000 liters/hour of beautiful clear water.  We really believed we could open in February 2012, but we have decided that we are going to wait for just a while longer.  There are too many things we need to do  and we want to do as much as we can to get finished first and then bring the kids in and start with a structured routine to raise them.

We have been asked by many, especially now at Christmas time, what they can do to help us finish, so I am going to post a list of items needed for completion.  If you would like to help take on one of these projects as a family or an individual, please let us know.  We would be very grateful

Generator:  the pump for the water is run by electricity and the power in Jinja is on approximately 3-4 days out of 7.  The cost for the generator will be $800.00.
Grass Hut:  this hut will be used as a community house for the kids to eat in, for meetings and gatherings.  It will cost approximately $3,500.00.
Flooring:  to cover 9 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 4 showers, 3 kitchens, 3 sitting rooms and 6 verandas.  The floors will cost $3,800.00.
Plumbing Fixtures:  toilets, showers, sinks, including kitchen and bathroom.  $1,500.00
Oven and Refrigerator:  $1,000.00

8' Concrete Wall:  BC Holstein News has taken it upon themselves to write a story in their newspaper with the goal of providing safety at the compound by building this wall. They have encouraged the dairy community to join together with them in purchasing enough bricks to complete the wall.  You can read their story on page 56 at www.holsteinnews.com.  The total cost of this wall will be $12,000.00

We will keep everyone updated on their progress.

Thank you Karen, Gary and your team

The plaster is completed in two of the three apartments.  The verandas are also done on the both sides of each unit.  The road that leads into the project is growing so fast with all the rain and the palm trees are getting big.

The plants in the rock gardens are also starting to grow...

This is a story I must tell you about.  The submersive pump was put in and they had to do a 6 hour test on it.  Instead of letting the water go to waste, Edwin brought all the people from the area in to fill their jerry cans.  As you can see, it is mostly the children who fetch water.

Edwin helping the little ones fill their jerry cans.

Look at the faces...concentration if I ever saw it 

Yes...bulls-eye

Do you remember baby Alan?  This is the youngest child we have coming to live in our Home of Angels.
Edwin went to the village to check on him and found this precious child with his Jaaja who has been raising him since him mommy died giving birth to him.  Edwin bought him milk and cookies along with sugar and food for Jaaja to help her with the 12 other grandchildren she is raising.  All her children have died, leaving her the only one to care for all of them.  Jaaja cried tears as she told Edwin how grateful she is for us taking her grandson and raising him.  She never thought God or anyone cared but boy was she wrong.  We all care.

When a child in North America wants a doll, they go the the store and buy a soft doll....easy
In most places in Africa, if a child wants a doll, they climb a banana tree, cut down a stem, open it up and create their own doll.  No, it's not as soft, you cannot cuddle it but they have a doll that goes everywhere with them.

This is another handmade doll

Thanks once again to all of you for travelling this journey with us.  You give me the inspiration to keep baking the banana bread, to go out and do my speaking at schools and just make the people around me realize how much we are blessed living here.  Such a simple thing as a banana bread can change a life.

Then we have many of you who have joined forces with us and help financially with your donations. You have made a huge difference and what you see growing in front of your eyes here, is mainly thanks to all of you.  You created a beautiful compound with your hearts to make a difference in this world.

Thanks to the people who are offering to sponsor the kids, provide food for their families and all the volunteers from all over North America that help us in more ways than I can explain here.  You are so important to us and please remember, you are ALL welcome to come when we finish and see what you took part in.

We all can make a difference in other peoples lives....it just takes the first step