I think at some point or another everyone wants to be part of a parade. As kids, we often make our own marching down the street with an empty can drum, a wagon and some improvised flags. This tradition of proudly displaying our colors for the masses speaks to us on a deep level. It's not just the excitement of showing off, it's also that we all love the color, crowds and excitement.

This year, my family got a chance to live that dream for a wonderful cause. The local Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association asked my boss Dana to escort them in the parade on his Remember Pearl Harbor Tribute motorcycle and find people to carry the banners and flags. The youngest Survivor is 88. They just can't walk the parade route anymore, let alone carry those heavy banners and flags. When I told my daughter about it, I think she deafened me with the loud screeching "YES!!!!" So of course, because I always "volunteer" additional family members as needed, I got my mom, my sister, Holly's best friend Madison and her Grandfather to join us in making this parade a "go" for them.



My sister Norah is a dog trainer and has two very well trained dogs that entertained the crowd with tricks as we marched. Dana's bike is hand engraved with over 100 images relating to the attack on Pearl Harbor.



Here is most of the small but proud group before we set out. Back row: Ike (89), Ginnie, her husband Clif (88), Tiny and her husband Jack (94).
Leaning on the truck: Grandpa Ken and Grandma Mauri
Front Row; Dana, Holly and Madison.

Norah and the dogs are hanging out on the side and I was taking the picture.



I got this picture from the tail end of the group. Just two cars, but so much cheering for these heroes!



My mom and Madi's Grandpa Ken carried the flags for the Survivors. They don't look that heavy until you carry them for a mile or more. So glad they had the harnesses and the pole for the banner.



The parade got a little strung out at the end here on Fremont Street. I snapped this picture of Holly with Dana out in front on the bike. She was so proud to be part of the parade and you can see how thick the crowd was.



Right before we set out. There was a lot of waiting as more parade marchers poured in from the side streets.



It was a group effort to assist Pearl Harbor Survivor Jack Gold onto Metal of Honor. At 94, he is the oldest one in Las Vegas. He and the other Survivors love the Harley. Clif said he felt it was going to outlast them and carry their memory on.

Lots more pics on Dana's flickr stream.

Really nice article in this week's Citylife on my friend Gina's new gallery in downtown Las Vegas. Gina is one of the hardest working people I know. She seemed so happy with her new digs when I saw her on Friday night. Here's to her success!

This Wednesday, take a minute to reflect on those who protect your freedoms. You know ... the freedom to say whatever we want about our government or our neighbors and not be dragged off and shot. The freedom to speak out against abuse of other humans without fear of being arrested in the night and vanishing. How about the freedom to send our children to public school and not have them indoctrinated with the beliefs of a tyrant or the freedom to worship in any fashion you want? Perhaps you're planning to travel this holiday season. Have you considered what the freedom to travel across state lines and out of this country really means for you? You know, those freedoms ... the ones that we so easily take for granted.

A solider secured them for you at high personal cost and they protect them every day. Say thank you. It's not too much to ask.

My Queen Candy Cane costume is part of Craftster Challenge #44. If you are a member of Craftster, please consider voting for her majesty. I am sure she can slip you a few candy canes.

Train's golden-voiced singer, Pat Monahan and guitarist Jimmy Stafford (who lives part-time here in Las Vegas) do an incredible acoustic version of their latest single Hey Soul Sister with just a ukulele. I've loved them for years and of course, when I heard this song .... well they spelled my "sol" wrong ... but otherwise this so screams me with its infectious, cheerful vibe.

A few more pics of Queen Candy Cane

Do you have a small item in your shop you can afford giveaway? If you have a decent size twitter following - say 300+, a tweetaway is a superior means to drive traffic to your shop and your blog or facebook fan page. This is a very inexpensive way to introduce new folks to your store, just in time for holiday shopping season.

To conduct a tweetaway:
Decide which item you want to give away and copy it's URL. You will need to cover shipping costs, so don't pick something heavy or awkward.

Have 30 minutes or so available.

Select a question that readers can answer quickly from your blog or facebook fan page and note it's URL.

Alternatively, you can do a random winner from among the first 10 people to become fans of your facebook page or follow your blog.

Start tweeting and watch your Direct Messages and replies for the answer.

Here's how I use this:
My sister's website http://www.overallbeauty.com sells an up and coming brand of nail polish at $9 a bottle. She has a dedicated twitter following of 700+ that are into beauty and nail care/polish. We have her twitter auto-post to her facebook page. To start the Tweetaway, we do a series of three tweets...

"win a bottle of (Color Name) nail polish (short URL)"
"answer (trivia question pulled from blog/fanpage post). answer here (blog/fanpage URL)"
"first correct DM reply wins a bottle of (item URL)"

We kept re-tweeting them until we got a correct answer, which takes about about 10-20 minutes.

Kim was watching the site traffic live. Within 10 seconds of the first tweet she had 50 people on the nail polish color page. During that 10 minutes, she had over 100+ visitors to her site and blog.

I think that exposure is worth the hard cost to her of $8 for the item and shipping.

What do you think? Any suggestions you care to share on using Twitter for business?

Strangely, it's actually just about Halloween, but that hasn't stopped Her Majesty, Queen Candy Cane of Christmas Isle, from dropping by to help with the gardening. I believe we'll be planting peppermint .... by royal decree, of course!

This started with a white lace dress my mom made for Holly's 5th grade graduation earlier this year. Now where else is an 11-year old going to wear a plain white lace dress? The teacher insisted the dress be PLAIN white and of course, we couldn't find anything at the store.

So, making the best of money already spent, I added the sheer glittery candy cane underskirt right to the original lining in the dress. We had originally planned to be Snow princess but didn;t find sheer snow fabric ... so switched gears.

We made the scepter out of a cardboard tube and part of the reel some of the garland came wound on. It was covered in tin foil, tape, and the attacked with hot glue and a huge number of pipe cleaners, glittery snowflakes, Christmas garland, plastic peppermints, two holiday peppermint sprigs and silver bells, plus pipe cleaner candy canes on top.

The crown is a base of red and white craft foam that suffered a similar treatment with glitter glue and stick-on foam candy canes, 3D pipe cleaner candy canes, star garland and more plastic peppermints. I even used some odd white eyelash yarn around the base for a little snowy feel.

The treat bag was in my christmas box from last year. A few stick-on foam candy canes and some glitter glue to write with finished that up.

Her stole and cape is just more translucent fabric with glittery green, red, and silver dots. The big candy cane on the front was a foam kit that took about 5 minutes to glue and attach to the dress with a few stitches.

Thermal red shirt and gloves plus white long johns, awesome candy cane knee socks and silver shoes were purchased from Target or Walmart. All can be worn again after Halloween.

Minus the articles that can be worn again, this cost about $80 plus time. Had I shopped at the dollar store for the Christmas decorations instead of Hancock's and Michael's it would have come in even cheaper. The most expensive thing was those lengths of sheer fabric.

Photoshop Tutorial: Dull Color Fix: Duck girl
Level: Beginner
Demo in Photoshop CS4

Click on images to enlarge.


This picture of my daughter was taken by a professional photographer - my cousin Brian Pedersen. We went to a local park in Las Vegas. It was late in the day and the light was going, but it is otherwise a great picture — if we can fix the dull color. Although this seems challenging, it's actually a pretty fast fix.

The first step is a little clone on the face to even out the skin tones on the right cheek. This is done on a new layer and merged down once you are happy with it. To clone on a new layer, create a new layer using the sticky note icon at the bottom of the layers palette, select the clone tool and make sure Current & Below is selected in the options bar. Alt/Option+click on a clean area very near the area to be repaired in order to match the color and lighting.

Next you'll need to use a threshold adjustment layer to find the lightest and darkest points in the image. To do that, select threshold from the adjustments panel and follow the steps on my digital teeth whitening tutorial. You should end up with two of these small target markers.

Create a new curves adjustment layer and click the white eyedropper. Click in the center of target #1 in the duck's hair. Then click the black eyedropper and click target 2. Now comes the "eyeball" part. This image doesn't have an easy to spot neutral gray such as concrete paving or a metal object. I clicked around a bit and settled on a spot in the upper left by the very fuzzy car bumper. When you do this, watch the skin tones and anything that should be white. It's easy to introduce a color cast if you are not careful. It is also easy to turn skin too magenta or too blue.

You may need to reduce the fill or opacity of these adjustment layers to reduce the strength of the effect and create a more natural change.

Now this looks pretty good for 3 minutes of effort, huh? But we can do more. How about we pump up the yellow in the duck and her shirt?

I created a new curve and on the BLUE channel dragged the mid-point down. This brings in more yellow. On the red curve, I dragged very slightly up to warm it up even more. To have this only effect the shirt and the duck, fill the layer mask with all black then using a soft edge brush, paint over the shirt and duck with white.

Next, let's darken and enhance the green in the background to make the child pop out. Create another curves adjustment layer. On the green channel pull up slightly. On the composite channel, pull down slightly on the bottom of the curve, and up even less on the top half of the curve. Fill the layer mask with white and paint over the girl with black. To soften the mask, you can run a gaussian blur on it.


Next, create a new regular layer. Sample a dark green from the grass. Fill the layer with the dark green, Set the blend mode to multiply. Select the eraser tool and use a huge fuzzy brush to erase all the green except the corners. This darkens the edges and makes the kid pop to the front. Lastly, create one more curves adjustment layer and don't make any changes to the curve. Change the blend mode on the layer to screen and lower the opacity. Fill the mask with black and paint over her face with white. This creates areas of target lightening that preserve skin tones very well. See my Painting with Light tutorial for additional explanation.

Here's the final image.


Here are a few other before and afters using these techniques or slight variations on them.


This one had a trip through LAB to pull the colors out of the canyon and a sky replacement in addition to curves.

Questions? Post below.

I'm down in San Diego this week. One of our stops was Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery to visit the grave the Pearl Harbor Survivor who inspired Dana's book. Ben F. Boosinger was quite a guy and the cemetery is quite a place. The almost perfectly placed lines of identical stones stretching off into the distance surrounded by the huge sheltering trees wrapped in marine fog pierced by the late afternoon sun made for a somber, but beautiful setting. We saw graves of Generals and Commanders as well as veterans from every war back to the Spanish American War in 1898.

There are also monuments to notable events in San Diego's long military history. The obelisk commemorating the USS Bennington was especially striking. In 1905, an explosion aboard the ship while in harbor killed most of the crew.

The cemetery now has so many graves that they have begun to build long walls called columbariums that have spaces with elegant plaques to hold the urns. It is in one of these, overlooking the gorgeous San Diego Bay, that Ben and his wife Edith are laid to rest.

Of course, my handmade jewels come with me wherever I go. These lovely blue freshwater pearl drop earrings came from Jen at The Blue Dress. She included them with the Wild Vines Earrings I ordered as a bonus because there was a small snafu with my order. So elegant and beautifully made. The gorgeous multicolored gray freshwater pearls came from Cary's Boutique. I am also wearing my sister's handmade mineral make up in Chocolate and Summer Wheat.