Happy Holidays from Siyu

Hey everyone! Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, happy holidays and all that good stuff :) May the Flying Spaghetti Monster bless you with his noodly appendage and all that good stuff.



I got into the holiday spirit, and put together a companion hat to the Elf slippers I released last year. I sent it out to Masqueraderie, so you can nab it out of the group notices for the next two weeks. I also put out a box of Christmas themed goodies I had out last year out at the store, it's not like they're perishable and I know not everyone might have gotten them last year. Enjoy :)

I hope whether you celebrate Christmas or not, that you're enjoying time with your family and friends. Of course no matter what you believe, companionship, compassion and love are things we can all agree on.

With Love Hunt

I can't believe I forgot to post this, in fact I was sure I had but it's been a little while since I just viewed the main page of my own blog. I'm in the With Love hunt, a sort of pre-holiday non-denominational tour of stores invited to put out a gift to their customers. I had had something in mind that I wanted to do just for fun, and a hunt gift was the perfect excuse to make it.


If you're already sick of the November/December grays then add a splash of color with glorious macaw wings! You can find these hidden somewhere in my store on Carnivale, the hint is "Watching people come and go, feeling like Michelangelo"

Make sure you swing by before Friday, the 17th, before they're gone!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone! It might be obvious that this is one of my favorite times of the year. I hope all of you are having a marvelous time and enjoying the season, and I hope if you go out partying or out trick or treating that you stay safe and your costumes remain pristine.

I found a seasonally appropriate little "friend" as it dropped in a "friendly" manner onto my shoulder, and I thought I might like to relocate them to perhaps another person's head. Yours in fact.

They're quite cute actually... when they're not moving or trying to bite you. I'd like to get them out of the undercroft, so they're free to a good home. Just please... take them...

You can find your new pet Spidey in the orange box at the store! It's out near the new releases.

The Burning Night (Aftermath)

Playing hosts to the hosts of hell turned out better than I could have expected... who would have thought they would be so kind, gracious, and considerate? One thing I noticed especially is that they are impeccably well dressed.


The costumes are always so stunning and creative at my parties and I end up a hopeless shutterbug, taking as many pictures as I can to take all of them in. There are a few more pictures on my photostream on Flickr. It's always almost impossible to choose who has the best costumes, however the voting cast Dyisi Oppewall and Ran Garrigus as the Burning King and Queen.


They are now the proud owners of the Burning King and Queen masks, which I will be releasing soon pending a couple of tweaks. I've been busy cleaning up all the ash from the floor and removing the tormented souls that stuck to a few demon's hooves.


Don't worry if you missed it! If you were in the group, I'll be sending the event mask (the one shown in the invitation) through a group notice. I also know that real life gets in the way sometimes, and that I do hold more masquerades >.>

Illusions @ Jewelry Fair: Semeret & Etya

Once upon a time in 2007, I made a silks set with matching jewelry in an Egyptian theme. It was made completely out of prims, (before sculpts!), but I loved it. I retired it ages ago when I realized it was horribly dated and I vowed I'd make a new version some day.

Well, Jewelry Fair gave me a great excuse to revisit the Egyptian theme, finally. And now that I'm getting more comfortable making clothing, I could do the clothing part right.

Semeret, meaning "noblewoman" in Egyptian (thanks Khamudy!), is an elegant, exotic and sexy outfit perfect for hot desert nights and for reclining while being fanned with peacock feathers. The silks set includes the belt, loin cloth and top, as well as a pair of panties to go underneath to preserve some mystery. But what about the collar and bracelets you ask?


Available separately, since I have plans to expand this set! I was working with a deadline of Jewelry Fair or I would have waited until more was done, but I wanted to get these out in time to make a splash. The Semeret collar is the result of hours of work delicately manipulating oblongs sculpts to allow you to choose your own color patterns, from a pallet of 6 metals and 12 different colors. All of the pieces are scripted to change, and in the case of the belt in the silks set you can even change the jewel. I love the look of the red, gold and white, but you could try silver, white and gray or tarnished black, green and orange if you liked. I was having fun wearing the set in washed out silver and white and it completely changed the feel of the outfit.

I'm still working on new pieces, and so the bangles are available separately as well. More is on the way and will hopefully be done to be released at the fair!

I've also put out a freebie to lure you into my stall, a simple and elegant stacked collar called Etya, inspired by tribal necklaces of Africa.

Here's a SLURL to get you there: TP to Jewelry Fair South

Enjoy, and I hope to see you over there!

The Burning Night

Things always get a little metaphysical on Carnivale around Halloween. Last year, the veil of life was thin and the dead rose to dance again in the halls. Some of those souls returned to paradise, others to eternal damnation. Well, the ones that returned to damnation apparently spoke of the marvelous time they'd had at the masquerade, and made their captors jealous. Last night I was contacted by an imp, a courier of a demon, who alerted me to the fact that certain creatures of the underworld were going to be inviting themselves to my masquerade this year. Rather than be a poor host, I decided to hold it in their honor.

You are invited, if you dare to come, to dance away the night with imps, devils, demons and seductive succubi. I will be host to the hosts of hell, and open my halls to those that you hopefully will never meet elsewhere. Come, all those that are tired of the same old circles and tortures and have some fun.

As usual I have to ask that when planning your costumes, you adhere to the following guidelines. They've been a policy since 2007 and have allowed my masquerades to be relatively lag free and very enjoyable for even those on older systems. If we all pitch in, we can all enjoy the costumes without gray people.

Please keep your prim attachments in total to 200 or less.
You can double check how close you are to the limit by using build, and holding down shift to click each item you're wearing. The build window will display the collected total of those prims.


Streamline your AO, or leave it at home
Nobody likes looking like a noob while being a wallflower. However, if you don't plan to dance, fill a veritably lag free, low prim ZHAOII with your two or three favorite stands. Otherwise, just go without.


No particles, and no listening scripts
Turn that bling off, and make sure you don't have any items on you that respond to chat commands. Make copies of items that have resize scripts in them and use the remove feature that many have included.

As usual, there will be a costume contest, determined by vote, to vie for the titles of the Burning King and Queen. Two previously unreleased, themed masks will be awarded as the prizes, along with an Angel Card good for 1500L worth of Illusions goodies.

If you are planning on coming, please be sure to join the "Illusions Burning Night Masquerade" group. There is a small fee of 150L as a token of commitment, to make sure that the people who are members seriously intend on coming. Make sure you join the group early, do not put it off because you don't have a group slot. Spots will go surprisingly fast, and I will refuse to add a single soul more than 50. I will, however, have a waiting list just in case anyone leaves the group, which has happened before. There will still be hope to get in even if you hear about it too late.

Masks are required, but a complimentary mask will be offered at the hall, which is the mask shown in the invite. I know the costume rules are tough to follow, especially when it's so tempting to go for excess, but I have the utmost faith in your creativity to be able to work around the limitations, and flourish. I can't wait to see you there.

Illusions Burning Night Masquerade
Saturday, October 23rd, 4PM SLT
Illusions Event Hall, Carnivale
(Join the "Illusions Burning Night Masquerade" Group)
Themed attire and mask required

Marketplace

Linden Lab is migrating the web-based SL commerce over to a new site, and I have to say it's a relief and a pleasure to see it. For years the majority of users who wanted to shop without going in-world used Second Life Exchange, then XstreetSL, which was eventually bought out by Linden. They also bought out the smaller, yet substantially more pleasant to use Onrez (formerly SLBoutique) and since Xstreet was more popular they kept that one active, and us merchants lost the online service we preferred to use. For a year and a half we've had to live with the ugly, inconvenient to use, cluttered but very popular Xstreet, but now that's finally changing.

LL is finally unveiling their new cohesive marketplace which is a beautiful merging of the two sites. The technology Onrez used to make it more pleasant to merchants and the incredible volume of products and vendors of Xstreet are being merged after all this time to create the new SL Marketplace. It's not perfect, and it's still in beta, but considering Xstreet is closing October 19th if you don't like it, you don't have much of a choice (except maybe go to Apez...?)

I for one welcome our new online commerce overlords. I'm actually really excited about this change and for once I didn't mind going through my listings and making changes using such handy tools as bulk edit and quick fill. The new marketplace has advanced technology like... listing keywords, and choosing related items. Can you believe Xstreet didn't have that? And there are a lot more advances and features on the way.

I've set up my storefront, and I'm actually looking forward to putting more of my store online than has been before. I've had a tendency to get impatient in the past and only put my biggest sellers or whatever I get around to. But they've made it so quick and easy I don't really have an excuse not to.

Quick tip for my fellow merchants, if your Magic Boxes end up getting full and hard to keep track of, rez another! Sort your products and put each group into a different box. And for people with multiple colors, keep in mind that soon colors will be able to be grouped under a single listing for an item, and really focus on updating and polishing up one copy of each item. The other colors can come later.

Hope you're as excited as I am, I have to say this is one of the nicest developments for content creators LL has unveiled since sculpts.

Runes, Chains and Dreamcatchers

My constant companion, life partner and always encouraging man has had one thing on top of his "things to make Siyu do" list for a while. There are things that he has on there which involve rescuing old projects that are sitting, waiting for attention, and things that he'd personally like to see me do, but there's one he's always bugging me about. "Decorate your horns! People will seriously love them, I'll love them! Make them!". So after Corvus & Columba, he hijacked me and would not let me create anything else at all until I'd worked on embellishing my horns, and had finished them. Since I'd already put it off before, I had no choice!

A couple of my friends suggested I carve runes into my horns, to give it an infernal or mystic look. I actually had a lot of fun going back into Zbrush and doodling on these, all of the little runes and designs were drawn on carefully, and I invented a couple of symbols. Each horn has a different design, symmetry in this case didn't look so good and it gave me a chance to do more doodles! These are available on all of the ram's horn styles. I considered putting them on to the Ibex horns but there wasn't enough surface area to really make them clear.

After an informal survey of customers and Masqueraderie, it seemed that most people had at least one style of my ram's horns on their favorites list. Nivicola in particular seemed to be well loved, and since its one of my favorite shapes as well I made the following specifically for Nivicola, designed and built around its eldritch curve.

I got it into my head that the curve of a ram's horn would be the perfect place to have a dream catcher. After sketches and a few failed attempts, I set about the mangling and abusing of an oblong sculpt. It drove me crazy, I spent hours and hours tweaking and pinching and straightening and then scrapping whole chunks of it, just to start over again. Lots of frustration, lots of sweat, (but that might have been because the AC was on low) and general pain. I dropped it for weeks but my man wouldn't let me forget it entirely. Finally, when all of the cords were satisfactory, textured, and fitting on the horn, I experimented with beads but scrapped them because I was so ready to be done. After a break, and feeling the finish line was finally close, I made some new beads and stones and of course they look wonderful. They're finally just right.

Do I even need to say that these are my favorite? And not just because these were the ones that came most easily once I finally got over not having a design in mind. I should have known that just lining up chains would make my mystic gypsy muse giggle.

I really love these, especially the delicately hanging crystals. The other side is asymmetrical and has its own arrangement of chains, you'll just have to see the demo to see the effect. They use the sumptuous stones that Elessia and Orinthia have, along with the same choices of metals and horns as always.

Seeing the final results, I have to thank him. There was a lot of frustration, long and arduous work and far too many times I just was simply not in the mood to work on these... Things just dragged on and took so much longer than usual. I had a lack of inspiration, a blocked muse, and the fount of my creativity was plugged. However, with the help of him, friends, and even my mother offering me suggestions, concepts, and encouragement I worked through the spoiled brat that is my self discipline to finish these. Hopefully he'll be right in the end that you guys will love them... but I'm not going to let him do it again! I like my creative suffering to be my own damn fault XD

Siyu at SLCC

If you happen to be in Boston, I will be attending SLCC on both Saturday and Sunday. I will be accompanying my awesome and dangerously punny friend, Jen Shikami of 7Seas fishing who will be showing off her RL version of the game, which allows you to fish for buttons!

Jen has generously/foolishly lent me her button making press and I've been going wild, creating a range of buttons that feature slogans I made up (such as "I think you might need to rebake") as well as others using my items as an illustration (like the Esmerelda witch hat with "Witchy" beneath it). I'll be selling and distributing them, so if you catch me and you have a buck seventy-five on you, you can nab one and show your SL pride. If I have any left over after the con, I'll even consider mailing any to you if you're willing to pay for shipping!

I'll also be selling prints of some of my favorite pictures on Flickr, in case you're interested in owning a physical copy. I got a bit full of myself and signed the backs of them. They come framed, so I think they'll make a nice memento. Again, if I have any left over I'll be happy to sell them to you guys if you're willing to pay shipping.

Wish me luck, and I hope I run into a few of you there!

Corvus & Columba Flickr Contest: Results

I apologize for the delay on the results, I was traveling and though I hoped to be able to review and write up the results of the contest while I was away, it turned out not to be the case. But I'm back! And happily able to finally see the beautiful interpretations of this set.

With each submission that came in I was excited and happy to see how people used the set in their own way and had made it theirs. I love seeing what sort of avatars are created and how people imbue my items with new personalities. And so the winners of this contest are those that I felt took the pieces I gave them, made them a part of themselves, wore them with great aplomb, and of course created a strikingly artistic and memorable image.

"In the Bleak December", submitted by CorvusPDX Noble

"The Raven", submitted by Carthalis Rossini
My two favorites, and tied as the winners of the contest, they embodied the dark fantasy and fairy tale feel I so love about this set. The images are beautifully eldritch, with tasteful post-processing and good composition. They both have a nobility, a gothic refinement, and they both wear the set beautifully. Both Carthalis and Corvus will be awarded 1000L gift cards with which to buy out whatever they haven't bought already!

In second and third place, I found these images particularly dramatic, and they stood out from the other images submitted.

"Crow Man Falling" by Achariya Maktoum

"Confusion" by Sparkles Wingtips

I really admire that both Achariya and Sparkles brought in new pieces to create an entirely new outfit and look with the crow's head, taking advantage of just how transformed an avatar can look with it. I love the contrast in each of these and I think both images are enticing and beautiful. Congratulations guys :)

To see the gallery of submissions, click here. There is an 18 picture limit, so for people with larger sets, I apologize but I had to pick just my favorites from them. There are some really beautiful uses of the outfits there, with wonderful and fantastic images, but I did have to pick just a few that stood out. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted an image, and I hope you'll try again in my next contest.