Toddler Art :: Painting Canvases & Playing Poker

Its been a little quiet on the blog front here, but we've been busy in our every days.   Doing the every day and dealing with Handsome's odd hours job, making merry, the usual.  Ever since I realized that my baby was now a toddler, and that she might like to make things, we've been adding some creative doings to our shedules (fancy English accent required).

We *try* to only use the paintbrush, but sometimes...
The hands get what the hands want.

I love to get in on the painting, too!
The best part, is that if I don't like it, I can paint over it again with a different color.
The Nester taught me that.
The blue one, I want to put words on, but I don't know precisely how...

 Riley has loved doing the painting, and so long as I pick out colors that won't poorly mix (like green and purple and brown), the end result is generally aesthetically pleasing.  I'm planning on hanging a handful of the canvases together, all of our paintings, to showcase them.  A few 3M Velcro Strips* (They are THE BOMB!) and voila! We'll have another blank wall in our rental covered up with something beautiful! [This whole "no hole making" rule is chaffing, but we're working around it.]

Painting could definitely be done without purchasing canvases.  I was considering painting some pieces of cardboard white and letting them dry, then having RG paint on them.  But the canvases at Hobby Lobby are $6 for 2, sized 11x14.  That just seemed too good to pass up, especially when these might be turning into Christmas presents.  Another thought - I'd like to get them printed as postcards.  C'mon, who doesn't want a postcard that looks like this!?

On an unrelated-to-painting note, I made a toy for Riley.  It is nowhere near as pretty as her paintings, but it has brought a lot of enjoyment to my girl, and a lot of picking up of poker chips for me.  But whatevs.  

 Old oatmeal container, a moment with a knife, and a handful of poker chips: Boom.  New sorter toy.  When she's using it as Mom intended, its awesome.  I like to think that the different orientations of the slits in the top help her understand spacial reasoning, and the hole in the side allows her to follow cause-and-effect with chips in the top = chips out the bottom.  I may be reaching.  Regardless, she likes it.  When she uses it as a shaker toy, that results in chips flying all over the living room, she still loves it, although I love it less.

Although I came up with the idea on my own (mostly born out of desperation and cheapness), I was inspired by this gal here.  She & her son are constantly making cool things out of whats around them!  I love following along with her on Instagram and seeing all of her creations!

<3 M.

New Favorite Hobby :: 2014

I went to write a post about how I have a new favorite hobby.  And then I paused.  Because it seemed like I've done this before...

Apparently I have a new favorite hobby every year.  Last year, extruding pasta.  This year, re-purposing wine bottles into drinking glasses.  Next year, the world.

A week before Christmas, Handsome finally noticed that I've been hoarding empty wine bottles in the cupboard.  I'd like to point out that we throw the word "hoarding" around like its a hot potato.  You have 2 pairs of boots?  Are you hoarding?  Keeping those Christmas ornaments for next year, I see... *coughHOARDERcough*.  So when I say I was hoarding empty wine bottles, I mean I had 5.  So yeah.

Anyhow, I had big plans of maybe someday getting a bottle cutter and making my own sleek line of drinkware.  I love glasses more than I ought, and why not make some more!  Plus, I have this ... this... thing. Where I have a hard time throwing away something that still has so much use left in it.  Its like I can feel its potential energy, and I just can't toss it in the trash.  So I "hoard".  Same goes for pasta sauce jars, maple syrup containers... Its fortunate that we've bought most of our babyfood in little squeezable pouches, else I can't imagine the tiny glass pyramid I could have built by now.  Okay, maybe "hoarding" is an acurate term, if you're categorizing all of my glass collection.

I never bought a glass bottle cutter, though, because, although it's on my wishlist, it never seemed to make its way to the top.  Instead, I'd spend my "personal cash" budget on things like fancy unsweetened cocoa powder and a partial cow hide.

That's how I roll.

Aaaand... now this story is getting much longer than I meant for it to.  So let's actually make a long story short.  Handsome got me a glass bottle cutter.  It's called the Kinkajou.  I love it.  I now need a dremel so that I can make the tops nice and smooth and then I'll be in business.  My favorite part is the details about the cups that remind you they were once wine bottles.  Things like "1.2 L" on the bottom and the punt, which is the dimple on the bottom that makes you pay more for less wine.

I love my new toy.  I'm out of wine bottles.  I could remedy this situation on my own, but... well, then I'd be drunk.  And I'd probably still try to cut the wine bottles, and then handsome would have to respond to a rescue call at his own house and I've vowed to never make him do that sooooo... send me your bottles.

Do you have a new hobby of the new year?  Do tell!  I'll probably be looking for something new to do next week ;)

<3 M.

A Space for my Place

I don't know what it is about 2014, but I have been on my game this entire year.  No lie.  All 2 days of it.  Yesterday, there was much scrubbing and wiping and putting away.  There was also exercise and dinner made.  While I'm toot-toot-tooting my own horn, I'd also like to mention that not once so far have I forgotten to feed my dog.  Considered re-homing him, definitely.  But he's been fed consistently and so we're still winning.

Today, there was dishes doing and laundry switching and vacuuming of carpet and car seats.  And then, I got down to the fun part - my new space!  A place of my own, a space to create - a haven.  A not-chaotic, made just for me, haven.  Bear in mind that all things are relative, but to me, this little corner of the spare bedroom is sitting at the end of the rainbow, shooting wishing stars and french-braiding unicorn manes, awesome.  I have been doing all of my work off of either a $10 yardsale table that is octagonal shaped, or the coffee table downstairs, so pretty much anything would be a bump up. 

Enter: The consignment store sewing table!  (It's worth it to note that I have 0 amount of prejudice as to the origins of these tables.  If I had grabbed this table off of a garbage barge on a hot summer's day, I'd still love it just as much.  After a thorough bleaching, of course.)

See that??  That sweet little made-for-my-new-machine table?  Let's have a closer look-see, shall we?

Now my quilts can just skim across that table top, moving like the music of my soul.  Or at least NOT like a blanket that is draped over a pile of books and getting pushed and pulled back and forth and sometimes catching but maybe not quite.  In a word, the fact that the table is level with the sewing... place... (?) is bliss.

But wait!  There's more!  You saw those swanky drawers on the left-hand-side, right?  Or you thought you did...

Ta-daa!  Not drawers at all, but rather the perfect place I've been wanting for keeping thread all not jumbled up.  Storing things inside of pickle jars is fine for stuff that is compact, like nails or crayons or pickles.  But storing thread... well, its a mess.  There's a reason they're not called "thread" jars, and it has nothing to do with the fact that pickles come in them.

Anyhow, one thing I love about this little table is that, thanks to its previous owner, it has already been outfitted for all of the things a sewist such as myself would want.  All those small pieces to my sewing machine, like the screwdriver and the feet and the piece that I'm not sure what it is?  That little bin right on the door keeps them handy and out of the way.  And the most perfect thing I ever did see?

Like. A. Glove.

I've decided to keep my old Brother (hehe... my brothers...) because of those fancy stitches it can do.  Mostly for the zig-zag and the button holes, really.  My mew Juki, she's the star of the show up top.  But you can't just get rid of your Brother!  That's illegal! (Unless he's younger than 6 months old, in which case it is perfectly legal to leave your brother at a fire department.  This has been a PSA.)

The rest of the room is in flux still, because there's a few things that need to be moved that can't be moved without another set of hands, and RileyGirl wasn't feeling particularly helpful today.  Girl has got to start pulling her weight at some point.  Sheesh!  But handsome will be home soon enough, and then things will be moved and the other side of the room won't look like this anymore:

#fulldisclosure

So now that things are coming together, I've got the itch to get to making again.  The nightmare that was Bono & The Christmas Sweatshop (name of a terrible 80's exercise video???) has been all but forgotten, and I'm feeling the creative juices flowing!  Which is good, since I still have about 4 Christmas presents left to make, and I've got to order my cow hide this week.

Have you been doing any extra cleaning this year?  Have you been making anything?  Have you fed your dog?  Do you want my dog?  So many questions!

<3 M.

What To Do With Pictures

So you take a bajillion pictures, just like I told ya.  You find some good ones.  The not-quite-good ones, you edit in picmonkey.  And then what?  You can print some for your Gramma.  She'll like them.  But then what?  Remember scrapbooking?  Remember the craze, where people were buying ribbons and saving stubs and it was all "how embellished can you make your pages" craziness?

Yeah, I did that.  For about a year.  And then I got engaged, and I quit.  Cold turkey.  It was hard, you know, having free time again?  And not having my house littered with paper scraps and hole punches and stickers, stickers everywhere.  

But at the same time, as I relished my freedom from double-sided tape, I missed the awesome memory books.  So I tried just taping the pictures in a book but, uhm... yeah, not so fancy.  And then I quit taping them now I have a book with 4-7 pictures shoved in between each set of pages.  So that's not helping anybody, and that's not providing me with memorable moments.

Enter - shutterfly.  Now, shutterfly has no idea who I am.  But I used them to create a book for the "I'm pregnant and here's the photographic proof" book, and I loved it.  So of course when I realized that I wanted to make a book for RG's first year, they were the natural choice.

On Creating

I wanted to start this post by saying, "Now, I'm no artist, but..."  But I've been reading over at Chatting At The Sky for a while.  Am I really not an artist?  Is "an artist" such a big and far away thing, that I couldn't be one, just because I've never hung my work in a gallery?  I mean, I create things.  Make cool things, even if they're not beautiful things, out of parts and pieces.  So am I an artist?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Do I create things?  Yeah, yeah, I do.  Do you make things?  Do you make art out of life?  Maybe you can schedule so many things into a day, and carry them off with such flair, that that's your art.  Maybe you're an artist.

And I have something to say about that.  Something to say to you, and something to say to the naysayer inside of me that thinks, "You're probably all out of ideas by now."  No I'm not.  I also read ... somewhere (sorry blog person who wrote this!) that creating is a discipline, it is not luck or happenstance.  You have to work at creating.  Which sounds funny, until you ask that sculptor how many hours they spent in the studio, or the singer how many years of voice lessons they took, or how many takes they made.

Yes, luck does find us once in a while.  As I am fond of saying, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. But one nut will not feed a squirrel for long, and you cannot rely solely on luck to gift wrap and deliver your next great creation to you all of the time.

For those of you who think you are not an artist, for those of you who finally gathered all of your courage together to try and make something, only to have it fail, fall apart and burn to embers, I want you to know that it happens.  (I'm chuckling at myself right now, thinking that I sound all grandfatherly and experienced, when I feel pretty much the opposite of both of those terms.)  I have for you an example of how a first try often fails, but a second can get you back in the game.  Maybe you planned out and cooked a big ole dinner to impress someone, only to have it taste... well, gross.  Maybe you took some pictures you thought were great, and upon closer inspection, the focus was off, or they felt... flat.

Or maybe, you saw a cute checkbook cover, and thought, hey, maybe I could make that!  (please excuse the bad lighting from here to eternity.  Thank you.)

The one on the left is the first try, the right is the second try.