One Inch World

Finally finally finally! This is what I’ve been working on for the last month besides my 2007 photo book. And suddenly I find I have nothing to say… I think the pattern came out nicely though, this time I decided to illustrate it instead of photographing it. I like how it looks, it isn’t overloaded with pictures for each tiny step, and I think the illustrations are easier to understand. I wanted to get this done further before the holidays, but it’s pretty easy to make, so maybe I’ll get some adventurous takers.

I think finding wheels is a little intimidating, so I put some sets of those up for sale in my shop too, although I really don’t want to get into the business of selling wheels. If I was a business major I’m sure I’d think it was great and call it something like horizontal productization or leveraged diversification or something, but there’s a reason I’m not a business major, and I don’t run a store. Because I want to make things, not resell them. Except, now I have a store. Hrm.

On a separate note, Thanksgiving was really low key at our house this year. We were going to go over to a friends for a group shindig, but Rebecca got sick Tuesday night. Thursday it got to be time to cook dinner, well, 20 minutes until dinner is supposed to be ready is a little late to start, and I felt lame that we didn’t have anything Thanksgiving-ish. So in 40 minutes I managed to cook elbow noodles (Rebecca survives half on whole wheat noodles and half on milk and fruit), sour cranberry relish, biscuit wrapped chicken sausage bits, and roasted chestnuts. And the biscuits didn’t come out of a pop-tube either. We opened a bottle of wine, and had the chocolate cream pie Jesse made for the party for dessert ourselves. I was quite pleased with my adrenaline fueled speed cooking session. It brought back the days when we used to have Iron Chef cooking parties at our house.

I should probably have some kind of giveaway now, shouldn’t I? Maybe tomorrow.

This is one of those ‘duh’ things. We have these awesome natural building blocks that Rebecca’s DPa (grandfather) made by chopping up scrub he cleared for her aunt’s wedding reception… I wish I had scrub wood in my front yard I could turn into blocks! Rebecca added our rock collection (from the island that *we* got married on and visit periodically, obviously this should be re-named the wedding rocks and blocks) to them. My first reaction was, why are you getting out the bag of rocks? I thought we were going to play with blocks. My second reaction was, duh, obviously these things should be played with together. So there you go, rocks and blocks. I bet your blocks are missing their rocks. You should go fix that now.

Also, I just finally finally finally finished my 2007 photo year book. I started it a couple weeks ago, and it has been a constant push and a constant effort to not be a perfectionist, but just to get it all together, even if some of the page layouts come out half empty and I haven’t spell checked everything and the font sizes and styles might not be completely consistent. Major creative endeavor I can check off. Who wants to guess how embarrassingly many pages are in it? The answer is more than the days in a year. Ack! Because being selective takes more time, and clearly all the pictures of my daughter need to be preserved for all time. Obviously Although a big reason, and more than half the book, are two major vacations, one a two week business trip my husband took to Tokyo that I got to tag along on, and the other a family (great grandmother on down) trip to Central America. They could have had their own books, but then I wouldn’t have made it to 2008 yet. I am perpetually two years behind, and I would really like to fix that. But first I have a lot of blogs to catch up on, and a pattern I’m writing for Etsy that I would have liked to be done with by now too.

Rebecca has a swing in her (smallish) bedroom. I’m not sure what this says about me, or my husband that he agreed to hang it there. Anyway! It is a very tippy swing, and has been great for her balance. The other day I suggested we stack blocks on it, it was great! It turned an easy block stacking exorcise into quite a challenging one. So, if you just happen to have a tippy Ikea swing in your bedroom… no, I thought not.

Also, see those little people? Big hit. I got some peggish people, thinking I would paint them, but it turns out the smallest, ‘1-1/8″ Baby – Little People‘, are the perfect size to go with European blocks that have a basic measurement of 4cm, like Plan blocks and HABA blocks. So now they are all living with Rebecca’s blocks, and I’m not going to paint them. I think it might be a good idea to stain them different colors, because Rebecca kept getting mad at me when I would loose track of which one was ‘her’. And I might give them eyes, but probably not, and I’m definitely not going to paint them to be different community characters, because they are so much more flexible this way.

There are so many games you can play with maps. This is a map of the San Francisco Zoo that I found and laminated when I was cleaning out my desk. I set it out for Rebecca with a marker, and when she wanted to play with it we started by circling where different animals lived in the zoo, then traced lines on the sidewalk from one animal to another, then traced some of the different colored dotted line tours, and then I think there was a bunch of scribbling. I’m pretty sure we did some other things too, but now I can’t remember! Just pretending your marker is a person and walking them around on the paths is great fine motor pen practice though. I have a map of Gilroy Gardens around here somewhere, I’ll need to get that out too. Of course that will raise the question of when we are going back again, hmm. But it’s a very colorful map! The tradeoffs of motherhood. Maybe I should just print out a Google map of our neighborhood, then we could take it with us on walks to the park, and trace how we got there.

Last week we did a lot of sewing. Sewing on plastic canvas with our art friends, sewing with needle and thread on a marked line, sewing on paper (I’m just the mom, I’m not in charge here.) Then Monday she showed me you could sew through your clothes with pine needles.

I really need to draw her a cloth doll to sew (possibly turn) and stuff. I’m sure she could do it. I guess it would be simplest to start with felt. Felt and not turning, or cloth and turning. Hmm.

I got this idea from MaryAnn Kohl’s Math Arts, although I think the math connection is pretty weak it sounded like fun from a sensory perspective. The version in the book was more involved, but what we did was paint with glue and then sprinkle spices over the glue. Then there was a lot of spice layering, and then we were making ‘mudge’ according to Rebecca. Mudge being a paste of white glue and aromatic spices apparently. Although I was not deemed competent to make mudge, maybe someday if I practiced enough, but I was just making spudge. Which was fine with me. I don’t care what you call an art activity if it lasts for almost two hours, which this did!

So find those five year old spices in the back of your pantry, put them in jars with shaker tops if they aren’t already, and some paint brushes and watered down white glue. It may look like, uh, awful, but it smells really nice. Ours is hanging on the kitchen wall for Rebecca to sniff. I think we’ll do this with our artfriends on Friday.