I *heart* Willy

My son, Jonathan will be playing the title character in his school play, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Opening night is two weeks away which means it's crunch time for us and everyone here at Chez Darby has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to make the boy look good.

Which is how I found myself in the humiliating and embarrassing position of being flat on my face on a hard asphalt driveway turning colored squares into Chocolate Factory Walls. (I know. Shut up.)

Step by step:

1) Prime the canvas.
2) Pencil in design.
3) Paint in the large blocks of color (actually our crack team of volunteer moms did this part - Thank you, ladies!)
4) I went in (as humiliatingly illustrated above) with pastel chalks and added highlights and shadows.
5) Eric helped blur the edges and darken the shadows to make the stones look like, well, stones.
6) We sprayed fixative over our creation.

Oh! Look at those factory walls! (We sooo ROCK, don't we? =D)

Jonathan is working hard rehearsing his lines and his songs.

We're still adding finishing touches to the inside of the factory (you know I'll be sharing more about all this later) but right now there are props to finish and of course, Willy's beautiful purple suede coat (think Gene Wilder...)

...which I'm sewing even as we speak.

So it's All-Willy-All-the-Time around here lately. 

In fact, I even have Willy playing on my iPod as I sew.  ;-)

Yes, Willy on my iPod!  But probably not the one you're thinking of right now.... 

(This Willy features Arturo Sandoval on trumpet, but that's not important right now.)   ;-)