recycled solar crayons

old crayon bits in a silicon mold, inside a clear shoe box in the full sun.

two-hour time lapse.

trying it with a full set!

chalk paint

cornstarch + food coloring + water

carle museum of picture book art -- bugs in trees project

The Carle Museum of Picture Book Art hosted an open call for handmade bugs to hang from trees in the orchard. We sent these.

sun printing fabric frame & remaking artwork

The challenge of the Metamorphose art show, sponsored by MECCA and St. Vincent dePaul, is to take old, unwanted artwork and transform it. I actually liked this piece pretty well, so I left a lot of the character intact.

This piece for the Metamorphose show had a canvas-covered frame. The idea of sun-printing the fabric didn't work out perfectly, but the photos of the process look lovely.

faint texture from sun printing

"up"; envelope and thread collage with encaustic beeswax

counting on it!

Well hey there! It's been awhile, right? It was an amazing and busy summer. The kiddo and I made a lot of stuff, went on a lot of adventures, and generally kept ourselves occupied from the day preschool let out until the day preschool started. And I'm on the board this year, so things have gotten even crazier.

I'm stopping in today to share one of the big projects we finished this summer. It's a book.

About halfway through the school year, the kiddo's teacher started having the kids make one or two alphabet letters per week as part of a daily series of arts and crafts projects.

E is for Eagle

F is for Flower

X is for X-ray

If the kiddo was sick on a day a letter was introduced, we made our own version at home. Adding to the fun was putting each letter in a black portfolio book, one after another, until finally we had the whole alphabet.

P is for Pirate

Q is for Quilt

"But wait, Mama!"

There were so many blank pages left! I suggested we take on as many numbers as possible until the book was filled, and the kiddo was game. We managed to fit zero through twenty in the book before we ran out of space.

One red apple / Two pretty flowers

Six crunchy carrots

Aside from cut paper, we used a little of every material in our arsenal, from googly eyes and multi-color pipe cleaners to bingo daubers, glitter glue, and stamps.

Eight wiggly spider legs

Seven spangly fireworks

Ten flying keys

He even stitched through the buttons using a tapestry needle and yarn!

Nine colorful buttons

Towards the end, when things were getting crowded and the projects a little lengthy, we got extra inventive.

Eleven apple trees

Thirteen sugary donuts

Fourteen fuzzy bunnies

I love the sweet little faces he drew. Love them to bits.

Sixteen glittery jewels

Seventeen black zebra stripes

Eighteen wiggly hairy eyeballs

Nineteen peppermint candies

Twenty pink carnations

Whew! We made it through the whole thing. I tried to let the kiddo do most of the work on the gluing, drawing, punching, stamping and coloring (although I got a little bossy with the zebra). I stuck mainly to cutting, although he's getting so good with the scissors now that I'm going to be pawning more and more of that work off onto him, too. We're planning to tackle the lowercase letters next, unless the new preschool teacher gets to them first.

What about you? Did you tackle any arts and crafts projects this summer too?

Thanks for reading!

--a

craft fail: candy-striped leggings

Craft fails: I've had my share. This one is pretty bad, though.

These were meant to be candy-striped leggings for my Halloween costume (there's masking tape covering the parts I'd meant to keep white). How about a close-up?

Yikes. This is officially the last time I use this product. It came out faster and in a heavier spray than regular spray paint, and the "30 square feet" coverage listed on the label is just funny. Yes, these pants represent an entire can, sprayed at the recommended distance using the recommended method.

It's possible I can salvage this project somehow, but I haven't come up with a satisfactory plan B yet.

I've peeled up a bit of the masking tape and unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), there's been some edge seeping, so before I try another method, I'm going to need to reposition my tape lines to take care of that. 

The real problem (which I'd hoped to solve by using a spray that allows the fabric to remain soft, not stiff), is that I need something to cover this mess while still allowing the stretchy legging fabric to stretch naturally. Hmmm. I might have to call this one a bust, gang.

Here are a few other reviews on this product. Caveat emptor.

heirloom clothespin dolls & a love story

My paternal grandparents were married in the midwest in the early 1940s, as young college graduates. Grandma's dress was  long and made of ivory silk, and her smile glows and her eyes shine from happiness in the photos I've seen of that day. I think most days with my Grandpa, they probably shone just the same.

She was on the shorter side of our family tree, and birdlike in so many ways (I remember her laugh like birdsong, her light hands and their feathery movements). She was small enough that the seamstress overestimated the length of her gown, and several inches had to be trimmed from the hem. Several inches that she, a saver like me (only with more attic space), stashed away through fifty-six years of life after their wedding day, and which Grandpa, unawares, stashed away for an additional fourteen long years after her death.

And so the trimmings of Grandma's silk wedding gown lay undiscovered until, cleaning out some hidey space after Grandpa followed her into the unknown, my dad and his siblings found them again. The pieces must have been labeled, or they might not have recognized what they were. Or possibly Grandma stored the pieces with her dress, and my dad and aunts and uncles knew them on sight. Somehow it came from my dad to me, to split in some way between my sisters and I.

They came as two oddly shaped pieces, maybe five inches at the widest point and tapering, at the ends, to nothing. I imagine the nervous hands of the person making the alterations, wanting to get it just right in one try. This was someone's wedding dress, after all. No room for error.

Though long, the odd shape of the two pieces made it hard to decide how to use them. I sat on the project for another year, cut a piece to try to make a silk flower, and abandoned the project as too ugly to live.

Thrown off by my craft fail, I stashed the silk away for another six months before inspiration struck in the form of clothespin dolls.

Grandma was crafty like me, too. Really, a number of us (aunts, sisters, cousins) share the affliction. For Grandma, it was mostly knit and crochet. An afghan for each grandchild was our birthright, and I remember very clearly a baby blue sweater she once made for me when I was a kindergartner. It was knit in a checkerboard weave pattern. I loved it. I have exactly one photograph of it. This one. (We were camping with some cousins, one of whom is, in this photo, regretting her offer to share her chair with her stocky five-year-old cousin with the bloody knee.)

I have more photos of my Grandma and Grandpa than I have of this sweater, but not many. After marrying, my grandparents moved to Southern California where my Grandpa made a name for himself as an aerospace electrical engineer. Grandma raised five kids and managed a house using her degree in home economics, and she did a good job on every one. One of them (my dad) married and moved north to pursue a career as a a civil engineer. After that,  they saw him (and later, us) only once a year or so. I don't have as many photos or memories of them as my SoCal cousins do, and I didn't get as much time with them while I was growing up, but oh, there was so much love. We felt it from a distance of hundreds of miles. 

I made the dolls first, carrying their bouquets of buttons from Grandma's button box. It came time to cut the silk for their dresses, and my hands weren't sure I meant them to do it. Seventy years that silk sat untouched. Seventy years since it had been cut from the hem of her wedding dress. Back then, the act of cutting this fabric had kept my grandma from tripping on her hem. Now? I was cutting into her dress again. Her wedding dress. There was no room for error.

I kept my cuts as few as possible, sewing six little wedding dresses (two-layer tubes, really, cinched at the waist) from the remnants. I had painted the dolls' hair and eyes to match Grandma's on her wedding day: dark hair, blue eyes; and now, I dressed them one by one. 

One of my step-sisters got married a month ago, and my younger sister will be getting hitched in a couple of weeks. It's all a cycle, you know. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Seventy years from now, some grandchild will be chopping up some memento of one or the other of them to make into something new. Just in time. 

Thanks for reading.

(p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them.)

Linking up to:

I'm Crafty!

post christmas craft-a-thon, part 1

After Christmas, when everyone's holding their big post-Christmas clearance sales, I like to spend a little gift card cash on some marked-down craft kits for a change-up to the daily finger-painting and coloring we do.

This little spin art kit in a very nicely designed box came from Bed, Bath, & Beyond and cost under $3.

It came with twenty-five circular sheets of paper, three little bottles of paint, and a "spinner", which is essentially a top.

Of course, if you're working with a not-quite-three-year-old, you're gonna burn through the supplied paint in just five art pieces, but I'm okay with that. The kiddo stayed interested for a half hour (shockingly long these days), and thinned-down tempera paint can substitute for the other stuff. Overall, a nice way to spend a bit of our afternoon.

If you pick up (or build) a similar kit, work inside the box as recommended to avoid spattering walls etc. And experiment with different speeds of spin and different amounts of paint; the results can vary wildly.

What post-Christmas craftiness have you and yours been up to? I've got a couple of competition projects and some birthday stuff in the works, which is good; the holiday projects didn't all come together in time, but I'm finishing stuff and feeling good about my progress.

Thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger just by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that.

leftovers

Whenever I finish a project, there are usually leftovers of one kind or another. In the past, I have just boxed things up and stashed them away, but the recent clean-out of the spare room may just have cured me from that habit. New habit I'm trying to form: using the leftovers to make another fun project right away.

Saving things for later seems like the right thing to do, but when you have as many different kinds of hobbies as I have, and when you tend to forget down the road where the leftovers are or whether you have them at all, you end up buying new stuff each time anyway. Wasteful. Makes storage areas messy, too, and then when you're pulling stuff out to donate, you start adding up in your head the money you spent . . .

The Halloween costume project this year meant leftovers of several kinds: felt and fake fur, most obviously. With Christmas coming up, I thought I'd take some of the stuff and make something cute with it for my kiddo.




Voila! Monster pillows!

To start, I cut the largest rectangle I could from the leftovers of a remnant of faux fur used for the tail of my son's Halloween costume. The pillow pictured is made with a piece that measured about 13 x 25 inches. (Folded in half and stitched, it made a nearly-square pillow approximately 12 x 12 inches.)

Next, I planned the face, and cut face parts out of leftover red, orange, ivory, and charcoal gray felt. I stitched the layers together, then planned where they should go on the pillow (not too close to the edges, and not to close to where the fold would go at the top of the pillow). You can pin your pieces in place; I just free-handed, because I wasn't too picky about having the face end up perfectly placed. I think it looks a little sillier slightly off-kilter.

Using my machine, I stitched around the face pieces close to the edges, attaching them to the fur.

Then, I clipped my threads, made my fold so that the furry sides were together, and stitched around all of the open edges, leaving a space open to turn the pillow right-side out and stuff it. I stuffed it full of fluff, then hand-stitched the opening closed.




I may have a hard time keeping this guy (and his soon-to-be siblings!) out of sight until Christmas. He already looks quite at home in the nursery chair.




(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)


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Wonderland, part 1

Wonderland is coming this summer, and I've got the bebe to think about, but I'm still doing the production design for this one. And I have a budget of $300. That's community theater, folks!

Anyone have any spare:

*fabric (felt, fleece, fake fur, calico, muslin) in 1/4 yard or larger pieces (fake fur can be smaller)

*clothing (black shoes, suit jackets, ties, vests, shirts, long skirts, anything that can look or be altered to look turn-of-the-century)

*large pieces of masonite, cardboard, or foam core board (3x3 up to 4x8) for set pieces and props

*time to spare crafting all of this stuff between now and August?

I can even get you a tax receipt. That's how I roll.