Anyhow, here are some awful pictures of Rebecca’s sewing, from two months ago. The next several posts will all be things several months old, before moving took over my life!

Rebecca has been sewing felt recently. For Christmas D-Pa got her a stack of craft felt of her very own. This is a heart that one of us cut out, can’t remember. I think she cut it out… it was for Daddy, went something like: “This heart is for Daddy.” “You’re cutting a hole in it?” “Daddy has a hole in his heart and all the blood is coming out.” “Oh?” “Now I’m taping it up.” “Mom, make a needle for me, I want to sew it to my skirt.” “Oh sure, why not.” “Now Daddy’s heart is stuck to my skirt, and I’ll show everyone at school tomorrow.” Two months and it’s still on there.

Yes, the color on this is awful. We did this at Nenny & D-Pa’s house over winter vacation. Rebecca said she wanted to make a donut, so I cut out two teal circles for her. Yes, she chose the color. First she sewed around the ring in the middle, then she said she wanted to put strawberries on it. So I cut out some strawberries, and she randomly stitched everything together. Then she wanted to stuff it. Sweetie, that’s really the wrong order to do things in, but who’s fault is that really? Sigh. Okay. So I started forcing stuffing in between the front and back between the strawberry stitching, holding the edges shut so that Rebecca could whip stitch around the edges. It ended up plumping up reasonably, luckily she wasn’t very thorough about sewing down the strawberries, because Mama’s always have to make these things work out, right?

By next week maybe I will have unpacked her felt and she can get back to work again. Actually, the biggest stumbling block to that right now: I bought a second hand wood bookcase for craft supplies, sight unseen, or in this case un-sniffed. It reeks of either perfume, incense or ill conceived fake teak scent. Any ideas how to get rid of it? I’m afraid the scent is somehow embedded in the finish and I’m very upset about the whole thing. It looks very nice, but the smell is making my throat raw.

On each piece of watercolor paper I drew a secret heart picture, nothing complicated, and Rebecca sprayed and painted watercolors over the top until she could see the whole picture. And yes, I did use a moving box as my backdrop, my house is covered in them! Should I be packing right now? Yes…

This project was inspired by Richard Shilling’s Land Art, via 5 Orange Potatoes. After looking at Richard Shilling’s inspiring gallery of work we gathered a big bag of leaves, a pile of Monterey Pine needles, some scissors and got to work.

There was some arguing about who got to use the blue scissors (vs green), and who wanted to sit in the pink chair, but there was a lot of leaf cutting and stabbing with pine needles. Dunno about the kids, but the moms had a lot of fun!

This is probably three weeks old. I am going crazy packing boxes! Monday is the move, I’m sad I’m missing all the great valentines day crafting I could be doing.

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.

And they twist up and down, and they draw, and they are so cute! So, now we have four lipstick crayons, and I’ve only found *one* in the washing machine so far…

Once we were done making them we used the wax shavings – yes yes, couldn’t just throw them away – to make sun catchers. I’m sure that’s why it’s been raining for the last two weeks…

So, I’m sure, being moms, that you have some lipstick languishing in a drawer somewhere that would be so much happier as a crayon!

Basic Instructions:
Clean out lipstick with a paper towel, and maybe a q-tip. They don’t need to be washed, just mostly clean.
Take half a fat crayon, and whittle it down until you can jam it into the lipstick holder. You shouldn’t have to hammer it in, but it should be tight.
Done!

I think these would make great little valentines day presents too!

Notice the haircut? That was a christmas morning present. She’s been wanting that consistently for quite a while, and now that it’s done I like it too, surprisingly enough! (I’m firmly in the long hair camp myself.) She slouched quite a lot when I was cutting off her ponytail, when it was off and she straightened up I was rather shocked at how short she had managed to get it without my noticing! Chin length in front, but up above her hairline in back. And so she ended up with a reverse bob, because that was what happened, and it was practically instantly exactly the haircut that she should have had, no getting used to it period, no who’s child are you? And I would have had no idea how to get there if it hadn’t happened by accident!

Salt watercolors – we painted with diluted liquid water colors using brushes, and sprinkled flake salt over them. Always pretty and fun. I was experimenting with the amazing dilut-ability of liquid watercolors – I think I diluted them about 10:1, and got colors as strong as the girls often get with dry water colors, reasonable pastels that is. Thinking about it makes me want to put out a color mixing activity for today. (^_^)

This was a variation on working with starch packing peanuts, I thought it would be fun to use tempera paint to stick them together instead of water. The girls seemed less inclined to mash the peanuts into the liquid until they were mostly dissolved lumps, I thought that was interesting. They are more used to gently dipping things into paint vs soaking them in water I think. Because of that the building went a little more predictably. Anya delicately made very long twisty walls, Rebecca randomly mushed hers into puddles, and Felicity decided to use hers as dissolving paint brushes. Same materials, vastly different outcome!

This is a carrot. Carrot leaves look nothing like that in reality, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a soft carrot with a realistic top. Only plastic ones.

This carrot is a basic cone pattern, with velcro patches holding it together. I’d really like to get some colored velcro for projects like this, and making sushi rolls, I’ve seen some really cute patterns that use colored velcro. I used random orange fabric patches to make the pieces I cut the cone sections out of, which I like. The construction is pretty messy though! I tried to get away with sewing the tiny circles on with the sewing machine. That never works…

Merry Christmas from Vermont, (vacationing with the in-laws, much more satisfying than California!)

I just got my copy of One Yard Wonders, which has my origami organizer pattern in it, and it is SO AWESOME! (The whole book!) I admit, I thought it was a little kitchy when I first heard the proposal, projects using 1 yard of fabric? My prediction was it was going to be half bags and half aprons. But they managed to keep it to 5 things I would call an apron/smock, and a similar number of bags. There is really a lot of diversity. And the really magic part is that now I know I can indulge in a yard of fabric whenever I want, and there will be some awesome pattern in this book that is just right! I hadn’t realized that the true power of this book would be to enable future fabric purchases, hahaha! I know how much fabric to buy now! One Yard!

Going in I also really wasn’t sure how they were going to make all these patterns and tutorials from different people fit together and look cohesive, but then, that’s their job, isn’t it? I should have had more faith. They did a great job! My pattern looks nothing like it did when I submitted it, it looks much better! They took my photo tutorial and turned it into an illustrated tutorial, that, except possibly for the tying step, is probably easier to understand. So now I’ll have the confidence to do this again, if I ever see another call for proposals. In the mean time I’m forging ahead with my next pattern for my Etsy store. LEDs, conductive velcro, and felt…