The New Duplex album is here!

At last, the new record from the laziest band in show business. More rock songs for small people and their minders! Topics covered: noble gases, sandwich making, photosynthesis, same-sex divorce, dogs in sweaters.

Its taken us 4 years but we've finally managed to get it together to put out our second album, Worser. I'm pretty darn happy with it, and not only because I got to do the silkscreened art. Great song contributions by everyone in the band, too. Here's a song - Orange Popsicle, by Duplex!:

[audio:http://www.anniewilkinson.com/audio/duplex-popsicle.mp3]

(I'm going to post my little demo version of it later, so keep an eye out for it!)

One really, really great thing about playing music for kids is you get to do early shows, at say, noon. This works perfectly with my schedule. Oh, and if you're trawling around on myspace or reverbnation, add us as your friend!

buy the album

Recently one of my workmates was unloading some things her children had outgrown, and I picked up the book The Biggest Best Snowman by illustrator Will Hillenbrand. I was pretty intrigued by his style and the textures he was getting, and (like most picture books) there was a bit of info regarding the media he was using - the one I was most curious about was his paper, which was vellum.

Always eager to hand over more dollars to my local art store, I went to buy some but was rather discouraged to find that the heaviest they carried was something like 29lb and that that was as heavy as it got. How did he use watercolour and acrylic on it? My own experiments were horrible, wrinkled messes.

Luckily for me, googling the illustrator turned up his website and a whole section on his process! Isn't the internet fabulous for sorting out your problems for you? :) It turns out the trick is he's dry mounting the vellum. Not having a dry mount press, I've resorted to vellum spray glue, but after playing around with the mixed media bit I'm back to oil pastels. The spray glue stinks and is probably not the most environmental solution - I'm either just going to tape the vellum to bristol to keep it flat, try dry mounting with an iron (apparently some mixed results with this) or try out some Letratac adhesive sheets.

In the meantime, here's a picture I made for my new book, done with oil pastel on vellum:



I have to say I love it - I finally feel like after 2 years of experimenting I've found my materials - no small thing, I assure you! It works beautifully with oil pastel, its so easy manipulate the pastel with a paper stump.

Gratefulness You!

I haven't written in a month, and the first thing I did was wade through my comment spam and came across this:

I was just reading a point on how to place your down comforter all puffy again and on the brink of all the answers said that you can save some tennis balls in the dryer to amount to that happen. how to build tabular tennis tables So how does that chef-d’oeuvre exactly? Why does this happen? Can you throw away something else rather than tennis balls? Gratefulness you!

Why does this happen indeed!

So I will try and encapsulate what I've been up to for the past month:

a) my daughter was frightened by my hairy armpits recently (they're not grotesquely hairy!) and tried to put my arms down so that she would no longer have to look at them (I was lying on the couch at the time). When I told her that she would have hairy armpits too when she got older she wailed, no, I want to look like Barbie!! This is a sign that I am failing horribly as a parent.

b) I love my new house. Although we have been here for two weeks today is the first day of officially being moved out of the old. I'm writing this from my kitchen window where I am overlooking the courtyard and the crowd of children playing outside, including my own. I cannot stress enough the joy I feel at booting my children into the great outdoors after dinner.

c) Here is a little picture of my new deck. I have been foregoing my studio of late just for the sheer pleasure of sitting outside with its gorgeous view of the mountains. What is missing in the photo is the smudge left on the glass door by my forehead when I ran into it. As I later remarked to a friend, I'm not used to things being so clean.



d) some gigs again finally, and practicing once a week is starting to pay off. I was horrified lately when I came to the realization that I have been playing guitar for 16 years. 16 years!! Ok, not religiously or anything, and there was quite a long bout of only being the rhythm guitarist, and yes, sometimes my fingers still behave like they're clinging to a bass guitar, but shouldn't I be better by now? The tradeoff though, is that I am not so professional that I find it a chore to practice every week. In fact, I love it.

e) Mood lately: I'm a happy happy camper. Grateful Me!

The Big Move

We take possession of our new place today, but we haven't even begun to pack - luckily we have the whole month. We have been spending most of April weeding out all the things we've accumulated over the last 6 years, and once again I despair over my giant footprint. I'm trying to gather up all the toys that my children don't play with, and the awful thing is this: one tiny piece is missing from this toy/game, rendering it useless if I don't find it, but surely it has to be in the house somewhere! And what if I get rid of this now and it turns up when I start moving out the furniture? I already had one instance when a boot of my daughters went to Big Brothers and the other one was mysteriously left behind. That nagged at me forever.

Seriously, there has to be a better way to deal with stuff. Obviously, acquiring less of it would be the best place to start (and that should be easier considering the jump in rent that we've undertaken) and I'm really thinking that I'm going to buy only second hand toys from now on. My daughter's birthday is coming up and she's dying for one of those new disney princess dolls, and so far they have not turned up on craigslist. If I buy something on ebay is it really better considering what it takes to ship it here?

Meanwhile I have been working on my third picture-book (number one is still out in the world, and number two was ready for sketches when I was sidetracked by number three). Its amazing how difficult they can be to write - isn't there a better, simpler way that I can say this? Also compounding my difficulties was the fact that this time I created a story around what I felt like drawing. It may be to my benefit that if a line doesn't feel right I will literally have a physical feeling about it, and I have to keep writing and rewriting it until I can read it without that nagging sense that those lines are just wrong. I think I may have got it, though, and I'm keen to continue with the sketches!

all about the tourney

So you may have noticed from my twitter update that we won the international tourney out in Delta last weekend (which just goes to show you, we WILL drive an hour for 19 minutes of ice time). It's taken until today to start feeling slightly like myself again, to get over the exhaustion and the aches and pains that left me largely immobile yesterday. It was worth every minute of it.

Highlights included meeting some fine new hockey players (our team was two teams combined, as neither could get enough players out), bonding with my Kaos team-mates (have I mentioned lately how great they are?) and playing alongside one of the best defencepersons I have met in awhile. And there was a hot tub in there too - the only down-side was two days of greasy pub food.

But most of all, it was pretty satisfying to beat 3 American teams (we faced off against Canadians in the final), one of them being a university team, the USC Trojans. Are there divisions in university hockey? I was slightly confused by our beating them, although they gave us the best game. I was also surprised at how apologetic they were on the ice - not the kind of behaviour one expects from Americans, and this was true for all three teams we faced - they kept saying sorry at the slightest bump. And the more they apologized the more I was like:



So much for the unapologetic Americans and the nice but boring Canadians!

Homeless Pt. III

About one hour before the realtor called to tell us our house was sold, we were offered a 3 bedroom in a co-op one block from our house. Can you imagine any better timing? We got a bit of help from my friend Vanessa who put in a good word for us (and now tells me to bloody go to church already, because someone sure is looking out for me - I think it's just her, so I'm going to make sure I have lots of extra sugar), and the best thing (aside from living next door to our best friends) is that we won't have to leave our neighborhood. Our son gets to stay in his school AND there's a secure playground outside where he can go play with a bunch of kids AND we won't get kicked out yet again because someone wants to sell AND we get a whole month to move.......phew.

Honestly though, how wrong were we in thinking that the place wouldn't sell quickly? 589,900 for a 3 bedroom duplex (better make sure you have a cat for the small rodent problem) when there's a 9 bedroom 5 bathroom house for sale about 4 blocks away for less that. We thought that the real value is in developing the lot (its huge) and the economy is rotten and it's a bad time to develop blah blah blah....but people are buying even if they barely look at the place, and Canada's economy is hanging in there and for that reason yesterday the Globe and Mail called us a nice but boring nation.

We'll see if we're that boring. Tonight is our women's hockey tourney where we get to face off against some Americans, and trust me, we take our hockey very very seriously, over here.

Band Practice

Its odd how some nights you can go to band practice and your instrument sounds like shit, and then the next week its amazing. A week ago I could barely tolerate the tinny sound of my guitar, even rolling off all the treble didn't do anything. Last night it was fracking great and I have no idea why. It's too bad that I'm always forgetting things - I've been short one guitar cable since our last gig and the kids scattered my guitar picks all over the living room (but luckily I had the one that Christine gave me last week in my pocket) and worst of all I broke a string and forgot to put a new one on. I am seriously pushing it with how old my strings are, and how sad is it to show up to band practice with a 5-string guitar?

The thing about playing in a band with two songwriters is there's no shortage of material, and we were working on Christine's new song in which I was having a grand old time with the delay pedal, rendering my bandmates near-deaf. It took us awhile to navigate our way through 3 segues (Third Segue same as the First!) but by the end of it we'd trimmed it down to 1. I'm pretty excited about it, and I'm keen on getting myself some more fancy effects.

The time has come to try and get the band out there a little more, and I've got some BIG plans in store (she said, rubbing her hands together excitedly).