True North

Monogrammed Card

Happy Monday! I'm sitting cozy on the couch with my little Maeve, listening to the rain outside. We're considering braving the raindrops to go out and pick the season's first strawberries from our garden, which we can see winking rosily at us through the window.... I'm glad to be back here on the blog after a couple of weeks off, inadvertantly, to deal with home and other personal stuff. Lots of projects to post about:

For Mother's Day last weekend, I was shopping for cards, but couldn't find anything I liked for my own mama at the local Walgreens. (The fact that I call her Mum instead of Mom takes 50% of the card choices out of the running right from the get-go.) So I decided to make her one instead, something simple and classic. Somehow I hit on the idea of embroidering a card with her initials. It was pretty easy and very fun - not every day a greeting card involves a hammer and nail AND needle and thread!

On a piece of blue cardstock, I penciled the letters in the configuration I wanted.

Then I unfolded the card and put it on a kitchen cutting board, and used a hammer and nail to punch small holes along the pencil marks. I made two holes at a time close together, then left a larger space before the next two holes. That way, the stitches of thread would be long, with just a little space in between.

I threaded a long-eyed needle with white embroidery thread, tied a knot at the end of the thread, and passed the needle through the holes. When I was done, I erased any visible pencil lines. It turned out pretty and unique. The blue and white is a very "my mom" color combination, but I think this general idea would look fabulous with other, brighter colors too, or with a drawing underneath instead of letters. For a more formal card, I would probably cover the underside with another piece of paper to hide the knots and messier underneath-stitching. But since I do actually like the handmade look of the work underneath, I left it visible on this card for my mom.

Is that thunder I hear? The strawberries might have to wait...

Nature Layette

After tea dyeing the onesie, hat and blanket for the nursery school auction, it was time to paint. I knew I wanted to do another tree, and once that idea for the onesie was set in my mind, an acorn hat and leaf blanket seemed obvious. That's how most creative ideas come to me - all at once, like they're obvious, with little thinking or explanation. Then the figuring out comes afterwards, when I have to work on manifesting what's in my head out onto the canvas or wall or fabric. But I rarely have much insight into that first thought.

For this blanket I knew I wanted to paint an assortment of leaves, and because of the acorn hat I decided to make them oak leaves. Black oak leaves, to be exact, because their shape is the right mix of complex and simple and leafy.

I drew two different sized leaves, plus one acorn shape, on cardboard and cut them out with an exacto knife to make stencils. I used a fabric marker and the stencils to get the outlines onto the blanket where I wanted them, and then painted over the marker lines with fabric paint in three different greens. I would have liked to have given them a little more detail, but the waffle texture of the blanket was hard to get good paint coverage with - I had suspected it would be, but had so much trouble finding an plain blanket without any cuteness already on it that I just decided to go with the waffle and a more outline-y design. I chose to paint leaves on three corners of the blanket, one corner with the majority of leaves and two more corners with just one leaf. The fabric paint changes the softness and flexibility of fabric a little bit, so I didn't want to cover the whole blanket, but instead leave most of it natural and soft to wrap up a baby in. Here's one corner (the dark dot is a shadow, was taking these photos super quick before getting them over to the auction committee!):

And here's another corner:

And another:

The onesie is definitely my favorite piece from this little collection. I love how it turned out:

And here is the cute little acorn hat. I had originally wanted to leave more of the hat's cotton fabric showing through the design (especially after I had taken the trouble to dye it!) but it just didn't look right that way, so I ended up really saturating it with green. Have to roll with your projects, right? Here's the side view:

And the top:

The actual auction was a blast, and one of my favorite teachers from the school ended up winning the layette set for her niece who is having a baby. Love when something I've made goes off to a good home...

Easter Fun, Part II

After decorating paper eggs and fingernails, we were ready to get our hands on some actual eggs!

I hardboiled two dozen white eggs (my favorite method is to place eggs in a large pot, cover with warm water, bring to a boil, turn off the heat and cover, let sit 13 minutes, then cool in cold water and dry). In past years we've dyed using the ubiquitous Paas kits you get from the supermarket, but this year I decided to branch out and make our own food coloring dyes. Next year I'd love to try making some natural vegetable dyes, but this year I just wanted to be able to decide on our own colors and determine their intensities.

The super simple recipe is: 1 cup warm water + 1 tsp white vinegar + about 20 drops food coloring. You can easily do more or less food coloring, depending on how pale or strong you want your colors to be.

For our egg dyeing party, the girls and I had red, pink, orangey-gold, pale yellow, deep green, blue and purple. I covered our kitchen table with old towels (I've learned from previous frosting-making experience that food coloring just loves to stain our wooden table), and put out the fancy sparkling lemonade that I wouldn't let the girls drink until egg dyeing time, because I am weirdly mean. Ha! Really because I like making these little holiday events seem more special and ceremonial. And because I am maybe a little bit weird.

Newly this year, I learned this great DIY egg-drying trick from Martha Stewart online. I bought a piece of foam board, drew a grid on it with lines about an inch apart, and stuck a straight sewing pin into each intersection. It really works to keep the dyed eggs upright and not touching anything while they dry.

With 24 eggs, the girls and I were each able to decorate eight - I did end up giving one of mine to Maeve, who raced through hers and then was sad that she didn't have any more. But I really like this project myself, and wanted it to be something the girls and I did together, as opposed to it being a just-for-children craft. My decorating ideas inspired the girls to try some things they wouldn't have thought of otherwise, and hopefully I modeled for them that this kind of creative fun doesn't have to have an age limit.

Some of the different decorating techniques we used:

Ombre eggs~ Dye the whole egg yellow. Holding the top half, dip the bottom in green and hold there for a few seconds. Then raise egg a little bit out of the green and hold again. Keep raising it out and holding until egg is totally out of the dye and the bottom is a deep green. Dry, then turn over to hold bottom and repeat the whole process, dipping the top in orange. Make sure you leave a section of yellow in the middle. Obviously, could be done with any other colors you want.

Mottled egg~ Stella did this pretty one by dipping different parts of the egg in blue, then pink, then yellow. Then she went back and spooned other colors of dye over the egg and let them drip down.

Crayon resist drawing~ We used white crayons to draw on some eggs before we dyed them. The areas where you draw resist the dye and stay white. There's a really fun, secret-messages-in-invisible-ink feeling to these.

Glitter eggs~ We dipped already-dyed eggs in slightly watered-down Elmer's glue, let it drip a bit, then sprinkled with glitter and let dry. For this color blocked, red and purple egg, I used a mix of red and purple glitter. I love how it turned out.

Glitter writing~ I also used glue squeezed straight from the bottle to write the letters of my niece's name, then sprinkled with glitter and gently tapped off the excess. It was hard for the girls to manage controlling the speed of the glue enough to do this successfully, but they could do the glitter part. The trick to this technique was doing only half the name and letting it dry before doing the other half. Otherwise there was no way to set down the egg to dry without smudging some of the letters, even on the pin board.

Marker drawing~ So simple. We had a bunch of different colored sharpies, and used them just to draw right on to the eggs once they were dyed. The trick to these is definitely using permanent markers, since typical, washable kids' markers would blur right away and get all over everything.

Tattoo eggs~ Learned this one from Pinterest :) Turns out you can use temporary tattoos on eggs, exactly the same way you'd put them on skin. We just used tattoos we had left over from goody bags, but I'd love in the future to buy some really detailed flower and butterfly tattoos especially for this purpose, think it'd look gorgeous.

I had also wanted to do rubber band resists and marbleizing with oiled dye, but we didn't get to those. Sometimes it's good to do ENOUGH, and then stop, especially when crafting with kiddos. There's always next year. And in the meantime, I'm looking forward to nestling these little guys in my in-laws' garden and letting the girls and their cousin loose on an egg hunt today!

Happy spring holidays to all, whatever you celebrate... <3

Paint-it-Yourself Scarf

For a while I've had this idea that I wanted to find or make a scarf that felt like a favorite t-shirt. Recently, on a Valentines supplies aquisition mission at JoAnn's, I took a detour into the fabric section and searched for a pattern and material that I could just cut and wear, but didn't find anything I loved. So I ended up settling on about 3/4 yard of super-soft, white stretch jersey that I could paint my own pattern onto, and yesterday I finally did it.

If I didn't already know that I love the combination of yellow and grey, Pinterest has now made it abundantly clear. Like half my pins are of yellow and grey quilts or sweaters or pillows or entire rooms. So it was an easy choice of colors for the scarf. Not sure why I came up with the diamond pattern, except that I wanted it to be something pretty simple that I could easily repeat over and over.

I got a cardboard cereal box out of the recycling bin and cut out a stencil from it. Two stencils, really: a little square cut out of a bigger square. Then I painted around the stencils' edges, feathering the brushstrokes out, to create a pattern of alternating big, grey double diamonds with small, yellow single diamonds.

I concentrated the shapes into a repeating pattern on each end of the scarf and let the pattern "fade" or separate out as it made its way up to the middle of the scarf.

This design, of interlocking pieces that dissipate, is similar to the mural I painted at The Purple Crayon Center last year, which I am standing in front of in the photos above and below. (More on that mural, including lots of photos, in these posts from a year ago: Mural Preparation, Mural Process, Ready to Launch, and Mosaic Mural Wrap-up.) I wasn't thinking of the mural when I did the scarf, but then when I was at the Center last night for a concert (Ruth Moody, so good), I realized the connection and and had to take pictures in front of it.

The scarf is so soft and comfortable. I'm definitely going to be wearing it a lot. But the best was what Stella said when she walked in as I was painting it yesterday. She watched me for a little while and then said, "Mommy, I like that you can just make yourself the things you want." I like it too, Stella. I really do.

Butterflies and Rainbows

This week, one of Maeve's little school buddies was having a birthday party and we needed a present for her. Hopefully a present that was low on the expensiveness scale but high on the specialness scale. So I resorted to my old standby - the painted t-shirt. 

The twist this time was that I made two matching shirts - one girl-sized and one doll-sized. (Two certain people in my house are big into all things American Girl, a company which very much promotes the idea of dressing alike with your doll. Evidently I am easily influenced...)

I bought the doll shirt at Jo-Ann's - it's part of the knock-off American Girl doll line they sell there (and other places too, I think), Springfield Collection. They're a decent, affordable alternative to AG, and good for basics like plain white shirts. The kid-sized shirt is a Hanes child's undershirt, which I buy packages of to have on hand for just this purpose.

I asked Maeve what she thought her friend would like, and she went into an enraptured monologue about butterflies and flowers and hearts and clouds and sparkling rainbows. I worked with her to rein it in a little, and we settled on a rainbow butterfly surrounded by hearts.

(For both my girls, 4 years old seems to be the peak of an obsession with this kind of "girly" aesthetic. If Stella's trajectory is anything to go on, Maeve's likes and dislikes will get a little more complex in the next few years. For now, I try just to go with it, and only offer my opinion when what she Likes becomes fodder for how she thinks Things Should Be, eg. "I don't like that game because it's for boys" or "That's not a boy, Mommy, it's a girl because see her long hair, only girls have long hair." Sometimes it feels like I'm raising a couple of 1950s squares, but I have to remember it's just a phase of trying to organize and understand the world, and in the end our influence as parents and the things/people we expose them to will win out. Anyway. Moving on.)

So a rainbow butterfly and hearts it was. Here is my little model and her own dolly modeling the results for me.

(doll accessories styled by Maeve)

Mostly the designs are free-handed, though to get the big butterfly just right, I did do a search and found this nice black-and-white printable for children to color (from a butterfly teaching unit on "The Homeschool Club" on Squidoo, tons of stuff there). I printed out the butterfly and cut it out to make a template, like so: (I decided to forgo trying to cut out the teeny tiny antennae)

Then I traced around the butterfly with pencil onto the kiddo t-shirt. The rest, and all of the dolly design, I just did by eye. There are definitely some mistakes but my motto is always that mistakes add to the charm of something handmade/handpainted. If I had wanted a little more help from my paper butterfly, I could have cut out all the white spaces with an exacto knife and traced the entire pattern onto the fabric. Or even traced the pattern onto freezer paper and cut that out, then ironed the freezer paper onto the fabric which would have given me a budge-proof stencil to work with. But all that would have taken a lot longer.

Big butterfly:

Unfortunately our iron is broken right now, can you tell? ;)

Little butterfly:

Then both butterflies got a sprinkling of tiny hearts and dots, for pizzazz:

I hope the little recipient likes it. If she doesn't, she can always give it back to Maeve, who really wished I had made two... I mean, four!

If you're like this, check out some other painted clothing gifts I've made for our small friends over the years: some tree-inspired baby pajamas, a pink retriever t-shirt, a firefighter t-shirt, and a do-it-yourself t-shirt painting kit.

A New Year

Happy 2012!

I didn't manage to get here to post one single time in December, which seems completely in keeping with how crazy the month felt. Good crazy, mama-crazy, with present shopping to do and cards to write, class parties to organize and teacher gifts to plan, and last-minute volunteered-for projects to complete. (Because somehow, the longer the to-do list gets, the more I want to say yes to everything. Why is that??)

I didn't do as much handmade Christmas gifting as I've done in past years, but it was a pretty creatively productive month anyway. One cute project was preparing for Stella's Girl Scout troop's holiday performance at a local nursing home/adult care community, The Wartburg. The girls did a variety show to entertain the seniors, with talent acts, a mini play, and caroling, all against the backdrop of a gingerbread village that the troop families had made to recreate the buildings of the community's campus. Our family's contribution was the President's house, in the foreground below. Not our finest creative moment, but gingerbread is a new medium for us. ;)  And no one seemed to mind our wonky windows: on a whim, our troop leader entered the village in This Old House online's annual gingerbread competition, and we took the Grand Prize!

When we weren't obsessing about gingerbread baking times and royal icing composition that week, I was busy making the sign you see in the background above, and collaborating with Chris on a prop tree for the girls' play... thank goodness for handy husbands!

I sketched a big tree silhouette (about 6 ft tall) onto two pieces of plywood, which Chris cut out with the jigsaw and assembled by screwing them into a support base he built, and then I painted the whole thing with a mix of house paint and acrylics. It was one of those projects I didn't have a ton of time to work on, which can sometimes - as in this case - be a blessing, since then I can't afford to become too much of a control freak-perfectionist. There's a time and place for slapping something together. And then, you know, being done...

My favorite part of all this was definitely the sign. After mapping out some ideas on paper first, I penciled the layout of Christmas lights onto a big piece of foam board. To keep the lights a consistent size, I made an easy little stencil out of a post-it. And to make absolutely sure I didn't mess up the Girl Scout insignia at the top, I printed out a copy of the emblem in the size I wanted and used graphite transfer paper to trace it onto the foam board. The transfer paper is a relatively new discovery for me and it is AWESOME. I've even been using it in my personal painting when I want to get something just right or use a piece of a previous design. It's so easy use, and when you paint over it, it doesn't muddy the color of the paint. I generally like to freehand everything, but have been learning lately to allow myself the occasional shortcut in the name of moving forward and accompishing more. Feels creatively healthy.

Once the layout was set, I painted in the lights and the blue background. I knew I wanted to do some faded snowflakes behind the lettering, and figured keeping the whole background light (instead of doing it in red or green) would allow for that busyness without taking too much attention away from the words. Then I painted in the snowflakes, and liked them so much I almost didn't want to put any lettering on top of them!

When it came time for the lettering, I went for a 'more is more' approach, with a bunch of different fonts and colors, vintage circus poster-style. I actually wish I had bumped up the size of the words so that the whole thing was even crazier, but overall I like how cheerful and celebratory it turned out. The candy cane 2011 numbers were fun, and I also loved the red and white mirrored design of GIRL SCOUT. Will  definitely be bringing that idea back into another project in the future.

Off now to enjoy the last little bit of family hang-out time before the realities of work and school start up again tomorrow. But I'm looking forward to a new year and new possibilities to come - one of my new year's resolutions is to be better about sharing those possibilities here!

Unbalanced

Was looking through some of my photos from last month, and realized I never posted these outfit pictures I had taken one day after a meeting of my mothers' group. Although this October has been beautiful and mild, still the idea of wearing shorts already feels crazy and far away... I remember feeling good on this day - a little rocker, a little glam, a lot comfy, just how I like it.

Moms' group is such a nurturing and accepting crowd, it's the perfect venue to debut your braver/stranger sartorial choices like, say, wearing just one long earring, 80's-style.

Actually, the earring I made myself. Came across some cheap old earrings I never wear anymore, hacked off the main dangly part from the hook and little pearl bead, leaving a tiny metal circle at the bottom, and then attached pieces of old chain to the circle - just threaded, clipped, or looped on the chain until I liked how it looked. And voila: new earring.

I'm wearing~ black silk tank: vintage inherited from my grandma, black jacket: Jones of NY acquired free at a clothing swap, shorts: Old Navy, black flats: Payless, silver cuff: thrifted back in college, other bracelets: gifted, thrifted, and DIY, earring: DIY, sunglasses: Topshop

Previous outfit post, where I talk about why on earth I'm doing outfit posts, here.

xoxo, A

Back on the Playground

Yesterday, Stella and I took a rainy day field trip to the kindergarten playground. She had never seen it in person, and it was so cute and unexpectedly moving to see her jumping around on the games I had designed back when she was in kindergarten herself. She was my muse - we even used her outgrown 5 year-old sneakers as the template for the footprint path.

Plus, I got to show her the murals I've been working on this summer...

The playground project was always a two-parter: first, last November, games painted on the big, empty blacktop, to inspire and expand the kindergarteners' play. You can read more about that and see pictures in this post. The second part, the murals, had to wait until the seasons changed and gave me more consistently good weather, which didn't end up happening until this summer. For the past few weeks, I've been running over the school every possible morning while the girls are at camp - which for Maeve is only from 9-11:30am. Subtract time for the long good-byes each morning, driving over to the school, setting up, and then cleaning up at the end, and that looks like about 1 - 1.5 hours of possible work time per day. I am focussing on the mantra "slow and steady" so that this schedule doesn't drive me completely insane!

And it is - sloowwwly, steadily - coming along, from the original bare brick columns:

to getting them cleaned up and primed:

to the basic design sketched on and the background colors almost finished:

The two columns are cubes with little storage sheds inside them - the doors to the sheds take up the fourth sides you can't see here - they face in towards the school. I am painting the other three sides with springtime nature scenes.

On the lefthand column: a garden scene, with daffodils and tulips and their roots, bugs flying around, worms and ants and rocks and bones underground...

On the righthand column: a pond, with a duck couple and their nest, a goose, fish and frogs, cattails and underwater weeds...

This coming week I'll be finishing up the brown background sections (you can see in the pic of Stella pointing to the goose, above), and starting the best part - breathing life and substance into all the details with lots and lots more COLOR.

Painting Sunshine

BEFORE: Old, slightly stained and fraying (and wrinkled), extremely comfortable white t-shirt I couldn't bear to part with. Did I mention comfortable?

AFTER: Newly painted shirt that makes me totally happy. Are the shapes petals? Scales? Not sure. I was thinking about one of the flower pots I painted last year (the fourth one down) and this Anthro top. It turned out so bright and sunshiney. And since I painted over the stains, I can actually wear it out in public again, hooray.

Fabric paint is the best.

Loving

Just dropping in with some little inspirations of late...

Dutch designer Ilse Acke's blog is great in general, but in particular she posted recently about an installation of painted wooden floor tiles (see it here) called Wall-to-Wall by Raw Edges Studio that is so gorgeous, I think I drooled a little.

Married creative people William and Susan Brinson's site is very nice to look at. What I am really smitten with, however, is their loft, which you can tour here. Fantastic style.

Bri Emery's blog, DESIGNLOVEFEST, is one of my quick daily stops for visual inspiration. She is the Art Director at Rue Magazine, which I also love.

Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs was something of a star on campus when I graduated from college with her, and now she's becoming a bona-fide star with rave reviews of tUnE-yArDs' second album showing up in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, on NPR... I'm so happy for her but, more to the point, I genuinely really love the music she is making. It's wild and rule-breaking and raw and cool. (There are audio links on most of the sites I link to here, but you can also check out videos on youtube for Bizness, Real Live Flesh, and another, live performance of Bizness at SXSW as well as tons more.)

It's been so warm and lovely here lately. Each morning on the drive to nursery school, Maeve gets so excited pointing out the flowers on the trees, shouting "pink!" "white!" "another pink!" from the backseat. It never gets old, for either of us.

Back with more soon, Alison