So you know those guys that Shakespeare wrote about?

So we had to give this group presentation about a historical figure featured in Julius Caesar. My group was researching Caius Cassius, who led Caesar’s assassination. 

The idea of this presentation was that we had to cut a silhouette out of paper and glue pictures or write words on it to represent the person we were researching.

 

Caius Cassius Silhouette

  
 
So, basically, Caius Cassius was a Roman politician. He was married, and had a child, although he was quite grumpy with his friends so his family life may not have been all that happy. He betrayed Julius Caesar and led his assassination, then left the country six months later. He committed suicide after being defeated in a battle years later. 

A long time ago, in a high school far, far away…

So a while back, our teachers gave us a project. Well, they sort of gave us a project. I believe the criteria was something like: 

– you have to answer a question

– you have to be learning 

– you have to be able to set up your project in an open-house style, so people can understand it without you there to present it

–it has to be related to Star Wars

This all seemed like reasonable criteria, but it was a very open-ended project, and we had to come up with a lot of it ourselves. Because of this, there was quite a variety of ideas and subjects within the class. 

The question I decided to answer (or try to answer) for my project was “what influence did Japanese culture have on the costumes of Star Wars”. I had originally planned to look into the influences of the time period Star Wars was created and the time period it was set, but I wasn’t able to find specific enough information, and I changed my question, while keeping the same theme.

I learned a lot of interesting facts about Star Wars, and about Japanese culture, and I discovered that there are more connections between the two than you might think at first glance. If you’re interested in my project, you can look here

The link above was for a Prezi slideshow I created for my presentation, but as I mentioned previously, we had to present our project in a way that didn’t require us to be there talking about it. Now, my project was a difficult one to display without an explanation, and that’s information I’ll take with me for future projects. However, I eventually decided to draw a couple of the outfits from Star Wars and label the things that were influenced by Japanese culture. 

First draft of one of my drawings

Now, the reason all our projects had to be displayed without a presentation was because we set them up for our parents (and anyone else who was interested) to look at as an open house. In order to make it more enjoyable for the people looking at our projects, we were divided into groups based on the subject of our project, and assigned a planet from Star Wars and an area of the school to decorate like that planet.

Now, my group was doing projects mostly about the design for the costumes and sets of Star Wars, although it varied a bit. However, that was not important to which space and planet we were assigned. As it happened, we were responsible for turning the back of our school library into Dagobah (the planet where Luke meets Yoda). 

Besides decorating the library and setting up our projects, we also had to find food and an engagement piece for the people looking at our projects. A girl in my group made cookies that looked like Yoda and we served green Gatorade, which did a good job of keeping any children there happy. As for the engagement, we borrowed a drone, made to look like one of the droids from Star Wars, from our teachers, and gave people a chance to try controlling it through an app downloaded on my phone.

 

The library as Dagobah

  
 
I had a lot of fun working on this project, although I wish we had had more time to plan and find materials for creating Dagobah. If I were going to do this project again, I think I would have used the time I did have more wisely, and I would have liked to have found more information, because I found what I did learn quite interesting.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ve got to go save the galaxy…

Toodles.

La: a Note to Follow ‘Sew’

So, if you read the first part of this blog post (Sew, a Needle Pulling Thread), then you’re up to date with our quilting project. For those of you who aren’t, here’s the link: https://www.blog44.ca/willab/2015/12/16/sew-a-needle-pulling-thread/.

So, my quilt square is part of the “Legend of the Polygonians” quilt, and it represents the part of the story where Cordelia (the main character) has started a new life for herself in the Bermuda Triangle. She’s living there happily with Kai the Guy (an explorer who was stranded in a plane crash) and their children. They’ve both adapted to their surroundings. They pass on their virtues and their story to their children, and that story becomes the foundation legend for their society, the Polygonians. The society also worships Poseidon as he caused the events that helped the society to form. My quilt square shows the final scene in the story and not a lot happens, but it symbolizes the beginning for a new, and hopefully better, life for Cordelia and Kai. 

  
As for how my quilt represents this; I took the translation between the story and my quilt square quite literally, so most of it is fairly easy to understand. Cordelia and Kai are pictured in the foreground, Cordelia with a crown, to represent that they rule their society. There is a triangular island in the background, because they are living on an island in the Bermuda Triangle. Poseidon is shown in the air above the society, because he is watching over them. Other Polygonians, drawn in a simpler format than Cordelia and Kai because they play less important roles in the story, are shown speaking about a trident to represent Poseidon (Poseidon carries a trident), with a heart to symbolize that they love and worship him. The heart is blue because Poseidon is the god of the sea.

First Draft of my Quilt Square

  

  

  

  

   

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