Empire Building

JEDI READY: Today was all about getting ready for tomorrow, tomorrow being the fourth international Star Wars Reads Day.

On Saturday, Oct. 10, bookstores, libraries, and retailers will host readings, signings, parties, and more. 

Here in Seattle, the biggest Star Wars Reads event is at The Museum of Flight. There, they're hosting Death Star Ground School (of course we're signed up!), Wookiee's Workshop activities, Storytime with Ewoks, a Star Wars trivia contest, and an Empire Writes Back fan fiction contest for elementary through middle school aged students. 

CJ and Annabelle each entered a story, and earlier this week we found out that they each won their age category. Cool! So they'll be reading their stories in costume in the museum's theater Saturday afternoon. 

They had already planned on being Star Wars characters for Halloween, but this event meant expediting the costumes' readiness.

Fortunately, we already had Annabelle's old school Princess Leia (with the cinnamon roll hair, ha ha) dialed in.

CJ is going to be the old school Luke. When we found out he was a contest winner, we started scrambling to get his costume together. We scored great boots and pants and a belt at thrift stores earlier this week, and we had a light saber in stock. The only piece left to get was his tunic. It occurred to me that Luke's shirt looked a *whole* lot like a karate uniform top, so we ordered one off Amazon. However, Luke lives on dusty Tatooine, and his shirt isn't pure white, for sure.

Like true Seattlites, we decided to antique the fabric using a couple of strong pots of coffee!

We pre-washed the garment, and then submerged it in a pot of coffee (plus a little hot water).

 We weren't quite happy with its color after one bath, so we gave it a second go, with a little stronger brew.

That did the trick! The garment looks Tatooine authentic!

We also printed out copies of the kids' stories on card stock, and pulled out an old comb-binding machine from the basement. They had fun punching holes in their books' pages ...

 and then binding them with the big plastic combs. 

Tomorrow should be big fun! 

STILL PRODUCE-ING: Our garden continues to provide. 

There are peppers aplenty. Today, we harvested our first Carolina Reapers, a mash up of a ghost pepper and a red habanero. The peppers average 1,569,300 on the Scoville scale, which is frightening. They are the second hottest peppers in the world (topped only by HP56, 'Death Strain'). Oh my. 

Beautiful little cherry tomatoes continue to ripen. I made some amazing spaghetti sauce a couple of days ago, slow cooking it for 10 hours just so we could enjoy that aroma all darn day.