True North

Candy Fiesta

In some fit of insane parenting inspiration yesterday, we took out the bags of birthday party piñata candy, which have been multiplying at breakneck speed through this springtime kiddo party season, and let the kids have at it. Negotiating with them every. single. day. about whether they could have any of it, and how much, and when, and why not, and <insert monotonous whining noise here>, had become a huge pain in my ass, but throwing it all away felt too evil. So I told them they could have one day of eating whatever they wanted, and then we were going to put it away for a while. (Which nicely echoed Mama Bear's familiar plan of putting the treats in the freezer and forgetting about them in Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food, a favorite of my girls.) I've heard from other trusted, wise parents who do this with the Halloween loot that it's actually healthier and better for their teeth to get it out of the way in one day rather than dragging it out endlessly and getting the kids in the habit of having treats every day, which makes sense. It did seem absolutely crazy to let them eat as much as they wanted, but it was liberating too, just to say yes. Yes! I really mean it - have as much as you want. Stop if you start to feel yucky - really, try to see if you can stop before that happens, but don't worry too much. Just listen to your body and enjoy yourself.

Because truly, I would rather have them learn their own limits through trial and error (and they did stop before it was all gone, and even ate their dinner afterwards) than be in constant battle with me about what I think their limits should be. That's much easier said than done, but I'm working on it. Did you see that great Will Smith quote going around a couple of days ago, in which he's responding to surprise that they let their 11-year old daughter shave her head:

“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”

I LOVE that last sentence. That really is parenting in a nutshell, isn't it?

So: candy binges all the time? Hell no. And I was careful not to call it a "pig-out session" or put my own weird grown-up-woman opinions onto it. Will Smith's point about giving one's daughter command of her body seems especially crucial to me when it comes to food. But in the end, it wasn't such a big deal. They didn't act like little coked-up crazy people, as I'd been worrying they would, and bedtime was no greater or lesser a battle than usual. It seemed funny, afterwards, that I'd been fighting over and resenting these stupid bags of candy for so many weeks.

It just goes to show that in parenting, as in life - and certainly as in pursuing a creative life - the right decisions aren't always the ones that look best on paper. (If you had told me when Stella was a baby that I'd be letting her binge on candy on a regular Wednesday afternoon, I would never have believed you.) And I think the right decisions are often not the ones that other people agree with. But you have got to figure out your own limits, your own truth. Otherwise, you'll be wasting your time fighting with someone else -- an individual someone or the collective culture; real or imagined -- about what they think you should be doing, who they think you should be.

Ask yourself: Creatively, what version of a candy fiesta could I give myself? A sewing class that would mean you're out of the house one evening a week and can't do dinner with your kids? Leaving the dishes in the sink or the laundry in the hamper so you can go write, or paint, or shoot pictures for an hour instead? A whole day gorging yourself on art at your favorite museums? A night out dancing? What's something you've been saying NO to out of the fear of being irresponsible, but that would feel wild and liberating to say YES to instead?

And then try to open up the bag and dump all the candy out onto the floor, whatever that means to you. I can almost guarantee it won't turn out anything like what you're scared it will.

Clothespin Fairies

The girls and I made this adorable project last week for one of Maeve's friends, who was having a birthday. This particular little friend is so much fun to make presents for - her mom is an artist and her dad is a doctor with an expertise in environmental toxins, so I know the small, handmade, non-plastic gifts I like to make will find a good home at their house. Our little friend and her mom had made a cardboard and fabric fairy play-house in their living room recently, so when I saw these little fairies in their leaf sleeping bags from the Twig and Toadstool blog, via Pinterest, I knew they would have to be our present to her. Fairies for a fairy house!

Instead of the wooden peg dolls they used in the original project, I used wooden clothespins, because we happened to have some on hand. I did do most of this by myself, but Maeve picked out all the colors, from hair to skirts, and both girls helped me cut felt.

We cut out felt leaves, which I then embroidered leaf veins onto and sewed together (using blanket stitch) with embroidery thread.

I made little skirts by sewing hems onto the shape below and then hot glueing on once the dolls were painted.

For the flower hats, I just cut out a bunch of white petals and different colored circles for the middles, then hot glued them on. Had to work fast before the glue dried, so I had Stella assisting me on this part - not touching the burning glue, but handing me petals.

For wings, I cut out felt hearts and glued them on. And that's it! Cute, right?

This is why I love Pinterest - I really do get some good ideas from being on it... If you're on, follow me using the button in the right column!

Spring Break

My girls are off from school this week, and we've been chilling. Climbing on the playground. Baking muffins and cookies. Admiring (actually, dancing for joy is more like it) the first dishwasher we've had in six years AND our brand new refrigerator--both long-promised gifts from generous family members that we couldn't have until we upgraded our house's electrical service, which was finally finished last month. Making forts out of the giant boxes those appliances came in. Cooking big dinners. Reading Little House in the Big Woods. Eating ice cream. Sleeping in.

Tomorrow we head to the American Girl store in NYC with my mother-in-law, an outing so thrill-inducing that Stella and Maeve might pass out from excitement before we even get there. We also have big plans to finish out the week with a movie night with Daddy to see Mirror Mirror, and brunch this weekend with my closest cousin, who lives in England and so has never met the kids.

I remember reading a blog a few years ago where the writer was describing summer vacation with her two kids, how relaxing and fun it was to be together in the house with everyone drifting around, doing their own thing for a while, then coming together for an activity... At the time, I was in the midst of a summer with one preschooler and one infant, and the days dragged on in this monotonous kind of hell. I read that post and felt like it was written in another language. I couldn't imagine a time when I'd be happy for day after day of unstructured time with the kiddos. And yet now here I am writing this post. It's good to be reminded that however difficult or repetitive parenting can feel, it's actually changing, changing, changing all the time.

Hope those of you also on spring break are having a lovely time. What are you up to this week?

xoxo, Alison

A year ago we were at the beach in South Carolina with my family. So lucky. That post, with lots of pictures plus more ruminating about the importance of doing nothing much, here.

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

Easter Fun, Part I

We've been doing lots of colorful, springtime- and bunnies-inspired crafting this week.

PAPER EASTER EGGS

trace:

color:

inspiration:

cut out, then hide, play or display:

 

EASTER EGG NAILS

choose colors: 

make dotting tool (straight sewing pin stuck into pencil eraser):

go crazy!

So much fun.

New Piece

Remember this old canvas from high school that I painted over with white, so I could turn it into something new?

I turned it on its side and started a new painting of my girls. These days it's looking more like this:

It's based on this photo I took of them last summer in Montauk:

Not quite done, but I'm happy with it so far, and happy to share it here.

Living Room Art Class

[Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]

Last week I had the chance to go see a preview of the new exhibit, "The Steins Collect," at The Metropolitan Museum with my mom, and it was fantastic. If you can get to it, and if you have any interest in Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Paris in the early 20th century, the birth of bohemian counterculture, the origins of modern art collecting, the importance of supporting and encouraging artists... just go. The sheer quantity of amazing art on the walls is pretty mind-blowing.

Afterwards, at the museum store, I scooped up this book, The Usborne Book of Art Ideas:

It's not a new book - I think it was published in 2000 - but it doesn't feel remotely out of date. And it's packed with great technical how-tos and project ideas. It's my perfect type of mix between being good for both kids and adults: whimsical and fun (check out those pink bugs on the cover!) but also meaty. It doesn't talk down to its reader.

Stella just lost art class in her school week schedule (oh, urban public school, how I love/hate you) and has been asking me to give her art classes at home. Before getting the book, we had done one class, on drawing what you see: strengthening the connection between your eyes and your hands. My kids get frustrated that they can't "draw like Mommy," so I look for opportunities to assure them that their style is valid no matter what their age, AND that their abilities will change with time and that they can't compare themselves to me, who has been doing it quite a bit longer than them. It's a balance. I want them to feel the joy of creating without rules, but I also want to give them access to techniques that it took me so much trial and error to figure out on my own. And mostly I try to emphasize for them that drawing and painting is like anything else - it requires practice! It's not something you're just "good" or "not good" at. I truly believe that.

For our second class, with the book on hand, we decided to do a painting class. Specifically, a color-mixing class, inspired by the page above. I wanted the girls to do a little experimenting with color on its own, without starting to paint a scene right away. We decided to learn about purple and pink, especially how working with different reds will get you very different results.

We mixed one blue with a couple of different reds and talked about which resulting purple we liked best and why. I pointed out that a more orangey-red is going to give you a muddier purple when mixed with blue than a purer red will, because an orangey-red has yellow in it, and red+yellow+blue makes brown. Some of it was over their heads, but I wanted to start them thinking about colors as recipes, as mixes of other colors - a little bit of this and an little bit of that. What does the purple look like with more blue in it than red? With more red in it than blue? 

For the pinks, we mixed white with five different pinks and reds. It was cool to see how just adding the white could really make a whole new color, and how the red that the girls thought would make the best pink actually didn't. And how we disagreed about which was our favorite pink! Variation is good.

I'm excited to be thinking about other art class subjects for the future, and wondering if eventually this might be a fun idea to take out of our house and do for other kids, too...

Happy weekend, all! I hope it is lovely.

Little Girl, Big Feelings

It was over a year ago now that our dear doggie, Vega, passed away. Surprisingly and fascinatingly, it is the littlest one of us, Maeve, who is still processing it most actively. She's four years old, which means Vega's death occurred one-quarter of her lifetime ago. And yet the event seems to be on her mind more often than it does for the rest of us. Or maybe it's just that, as such a young person, her emotions are closer to the surface so we see them more clearly.

As a mother, I find that, both in our culture in general and certainly in myself at times too, there's a jittery discomfort with children's sadness: an anxious need to fix it as quickly as possible, distract the child out of it, and assume it means something must be wrong with your caretaking. To sit and just BE with a little one's sadness - or rage, or anxiety, or fear - is a tall order. But I think that's often exactly what they need. Just to have a grown-up face them, take it all in, and not freak out. Not try to fix it. Let it be theirs.

So I fight my occasional urge to talk Maeve out of her sadness. She brings up Vega's name in conversation and gets our family to talk about her. She likes to decorate, shrine-like, the framed photo of Vega we keep on a side table. She will crawl up into my lap and announce, "I'm sad about Vega," get a cuddle and some comforting words, and then happily go back to playing. None of this happens terribly often, so I'm not worried she's obsessing. I'm happy that Maeve can work through the big sadness she experienced in such an open way and on her own time frame. It seems thoroughly healthy to me. And making space for it seems valuable not just to her own emotional health, but to all of ours. It's a little thread that this big-hearted girl weaves through our days, reminding the rest of us to be more present to our feelings.

All of which is to say that I wasn't particularly surprised when Maeve recently announced to me that she wanted to make a book about Vega, though I wondered what she had in mind. An imaginary story? A letter to Vega? A description of what Maeve remembers from the day Vega died?

I dutifully got out supplies: plain white paper, old magazines and tape, colored pencils, and a photo of Vega that I didn't mind if Maeve cut up. Maeve said she wanted to look for pictures of dogs in the magazines, so we searched. Luckily I had some O magazines in the pile because, let me tell you, there aren't a whole lot of dogs on the pages of Elle and Vogue! We collected six doggie pictures, and Maeve cut them out with her safety scissors.

With just two pieces of paper, we were able to make a book with a front and back cover, plus three double-page layouts inside, for six pages total (one for each dog). I just put one piece of paper on top of the other, folded them width-wise down the center, and stapled along the fold. I don't have a long-arm stapler, but Amy Karol's easy eraser trick (see it in this video) is awesome for when you want to fasten somewhere too far away from the edge of the paper to reach with a regular stapler.

Maeve did the cover first - taped the photo on and asked me how to write "Vega Died," the title she wanted. That just about broke my heart, but I managed to keep it together. Then she wrote proudly, "By Maeve."

Then she began taping the magazine cut-outs into the rest of the book, centering a dog on each page. Finally, she dictated the words she wanted me to write. It ended up being something of a love letter to Vega, telling her how much Maeve misses her and why, with details clearly prompted by the magazine pictures in that kind of murky-reality way that little ones are so comfortable with. This is what she said:

I miss you, Vega. I miss you, doggie. You were a good doggie. I wish you could still walk with me. I liked when you sometimes licked me. I like your footprints, Vega. I love you. Bye.

{pages 1-2}

{pages 3-4}

{pages 5-6}

 What I love most about this particular way Maeve expressed her sadness about Vega is that she made something. She wanted to and we did it, almost immediately. The whole process was like this great, easy channel through which she could metabolize whatever she was feeling. And afterwards, she proudly asked me to read it to her once, then put it away and moved on to something else.

 

Very Wholesome

Chris and I were out with some friends recently and one of them mentioned that he comes by to check out True North sometimes, which was so nice to hear. And then he said something absolutely terrible. He said, "Your blog is so wholesome." He didn't mean it disdainfully - though there was a hint of brotherly teasing, perhaps - but wholesome is only really a compliment if you are a loaf of bread. Or a preschool television show. Wholesome when applied to my own passions and challenges seems a little like code for LAME. For days it was stuck in my head.

But then I decided: you know, screw it. I know my life is pretty kid-centric and I'm ok with that. If it wasn't for my kids - for the fact that I've been a mostly-stay-at-home-mom with lots of time but little of it available to myself, for our lack of extra money necessitating me to think outside the box for birthday presents, for wanting to model for the girls that you do what you love and trust the process and don't give up on what's important to you - I don't know that I would have had the opportunity OR drive to "reclaim" my creativity. So True North is pretty wholesome. I work here on being honest and brave, and I craft a lot for and with my kids. It is a bit of a preschool television show, and that's how I like it.

All of which is a prelude to saying it's about to get a whole lot more wholesome up in here, because I have a new project that is all about the babies in my life. And wait, it gets worse: I'm making them all dolls. Yep. In the past couple years, many of my closest mama-friends have had their third children, and my high school and college friends are finally catching up and having their firsts. I have a lot of new "baby friends," as Maeve calls them. Some of those little friends live frustratingly far away, and so I hit on the idea of hand-making them something special as a way to bridge that divide and give them each a little piece of me to include in their days.

It started with newly 1 year-old Lee, who's first birthday party we were headed to last month. (You may remember the tree jammies I painted for him when he was born.) Lee is a third child with two older brothers, so this is not a household that needs more toys. But a little soft buddy that could be smooshed in the carseat and tossed in the crib, especially a doll for a little boy, well, that sounded just right.

I had wanted to try making simple dolls again ever since I made these hand-holding gals two years ago as a present for one of Maeve's friends (details in this post):

So I went back to the source: this tutorial (with video!) by Emily Martin of The Black Apple on Martha Stewart. And this time I actually printed out the pattern instead of winging it. (Older and wiser...) Though I did modify it a bit, as I explain below. This was the resulting dolly for little Lee:

The shirt is a batik print fabric I've had for a while (it has made an appearance on True North before, here). The face and arms are thin canvas appropriated from old curtains, with the features painted on with fabric paint. The legs, peace sign, and hair are all felt. The real Lee was born with a fabulous head of dark hair, so the doll had to rock some serious hair, too. My dear friend, Lee's mom, has a great sense of humor and style, and I knew she'd get a kick out of the giant peace sign, which I cut out of orange felt and appliqued onto the shirt front before sewing the body parts all together. To make Mr. Lee-doll a bit more boyish than the Emily Martin pattern, I slimmed down the shirt and kept it more of a rectangle, less of an A-line dress shape. I also purposely sewed his legs slightly farther apart to further indicate this idea of shirt and pants instead of dress and tights. I think it works.

Here he is standing up. He has quite long legs. And wonky arms that seem to reach out for a hug.

The little glint of white on the eyes helps bring life to his expression.

The real Lee is an absolute little bowl of sweetness, and I think that somehow the doll captures that. Can't wait to show you the others!

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.