Trophy Cloth finished (plus piecepack goodies)!

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

Greetings all--

The piecepack contest Trophy Cloth is finally finished, packed up, and
ready to be shipped to Mike Schoessow on Monday.  Mike will sign it,
with an annotation that he was the second contest winner, then send it
on to the third contest winner after he announces the results of the
contest on Monday.  I hope Mike takes the opportunity to play on it
once or twice before he sends it to the third winner; it's not really
fair to him that we took so long to get the cloth together that he has
hardly any time with it.

For those of you who don't know, the Trophy Cloth is a
card-table-sized tablecloth embroidered with all four standard
piecepack suit symbols, meant to be autographed by each game design
contest winner and passed on to the next one.  I took a few photos of
it before I wrapped it up for mailing today.  Here's a shot of it
spread out on a card table:

  http://www.ludism.org/piecepack/trophy-cloth/01_overview.jpg

Here's a shot as it would be seen during a hypothetical piecepack game
that requires placing the pieces of each suit next to their respective
embroidered suit icons:

  http://www.ludism.org/piecepack/trophy-cloth/02_pp_spread.jpg

Here's a close-up of some of the very nice embroidery on the cloth:

  http://www.ludism.org/piecepack/trophy-cloth/03_embroidery.jpg

Here's a side view of the tablecloth, so you can see where we signed
it:

  http://www.ludism.org/piecepack/trophy-cloth/04_side_view.jpg

And this one is mostly for me and Marty, rather than you folks -- a
closeup of where we signed the cloth as the first winners:

  http://www.ludism.org/piecepack/trophy-cloth/05_kidsprout.jpg

It may look as though we pulled a John Hancock with our autograph, but
it is very hard to write small with the fabric paint markers we were
using, and there really is plenty of room on the cloth.  It will be
years (at the current rate of contests) before we run out of room for
signatures on the cloth.

Technically, the embroidery was not that expensive, but the
"digitisation", the conversion from a computer graphic of the logo
into a set of stitches that the embroidery machine could use, was
costly.  (The whole piecepack community will reap a benefit from this
investment, however.  See my next message.)  While Marty and I both
have small businesses at the moment ("small" is the keyword here), we
are technically unemployed, and we could not have gotten the Trophy
Cloth out the door without the generous financial assistance of
piecepack players like you: Mike Schoessow, David Hassell, and Tim
Schutz.  Thanks a lot, guys!  (The irony that Mike contributed a fair
chunk of change to what was supposed to be his award does not escape
me.  Thank you for being patient, Mike.)

That's about it.  The package will go out to Mike via Priority Mail as
early as possible on Monday.  Mike, you are still at the same address
in Belmont as when you won the Ludic Synergy Contest, correct?

Goodbye, little Trophy Cloth!  Come back to us soon! :-)

Ron and Marty

-- 
       Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... & rwhe@...
	 Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game & Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/
Home page & Hexagram-8 I Ching Mailing List: http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/
Seattle-area computer training & more: http://www.powerkeyconsulting.com/