Was I There?

I wish we could go to Lego Land.....

It's a beautiful dream, man.  The only kind of dream that a six-year-old boy can articulate as he works in a pottery studio trying to literally make lego bricks out of clay.  

He made the bricks.  He patterned them with real lego bricks.  And then he stuck them together to make a robot, which would have fallen apart had I not introduced the ceramic term "crosshatching."  He just looked at me with hooded eyes and gave a big sigh.

And yet....it was he, the dreamer of all things lego, who gave me the idea to not only print in the clay with the connecting side of the bricks, but to turn them the other way around so that they made hollow circle marks.  I was also thinking about my revelation when I took Denise Kester's workshop: that when you choose a medium-- say printing-- that you should explore what that medium can do and that no other medium can do.

So I was thinking about clay, how it takes the impress of the lego patterns.  How it can be carved.  How color can be forced into the indentations.  And I came up with this new magpie platter, which also has a kind of printed look, but also is very much a celebration of the stamping quality of clay.

And the title of it?  "I wish we could go to Lego Land...."

 

Bunny Quasimodo...and some links

On Saturday, we went down to see the bunnies at the Northwest Nature Shop here in Ashland.  And Josephine was, well, a bit dubious about it.  So she sat on my lap. I held the beasts and she shyly petted them.

Guinea Pigs...not so scary but still not the type of animals you want to hold yourself.

I had a great day planned: all of us meet friends Fred and Fiona and Baby Benjamin for the bunnies, have lunch, go meet some teenager dressed as the Easter Bunny at another store and decorate some cookies.  What could go wrong?  Well, me apparently, for when we started down the street, my face started swelling up with an allergic reaction. (I must have rubbed my eye with a bunny infested hand.)  I was just about on par with this.

May I add that I was brave venturing out at all given the horrific cold sore that had popped up on my lower lip the previous Friday.  My bad back which made me shuffle along the sidewalk, the cold sore, and then the allergic reaction which colored the left side of my face a terrible red and swelled my left eye completely shut-- was it any wonder (and I am NOT kidding) that people looked at me as I walked down the street, and then looked quickly away?  And that a waitress, when I dashed into a local cafe to use the restroom, actually did a sharp, horrified intake of breath as she looked into my face?

Anyhow.  I made an emergency stop at the pharmacy and went home to wash all the bunny karma off of me.  

In other news, here are some cool Easter things to check out:

• the paper German eggs I ordered and intend to paint gold and use instead of Easter baskets
• Aunt Peaches' tutorial on how to dye eggs using tissue paper 
• chocolates from Maison Bouche-- not only delicious but I love their vintage illustrations.  Last year, if you recall, I did these little dishes with chicks in red polka dotted kerchiefs.  They had been inspired by a vintage cupcake topper.  This year, I'm quite interested in the chick with the veiled hat...

 or the bunnies dueling. Hmmm....

 

 

Is that Gingerbread House Really Real?

Today I made a gingerbread house with the kids.  This is not it. Instead, this lovely one is via the super-cool foodie blog, Globetrotter Diaries.

If you want the instructions, click here.  They use a template from Martha, but make sure you cut two rectangle-shaped roof pieces if you can't find them on the downloadable template.  The recipe for both the carmel glue and the glue-like icing is fabulous. I swear I could glue a car together with that stuff.

Anyway....this is what we created:

And here's how the twee scene was: me, hunched over and uptight, snarking at both of them not to eat the frosting OR gumdrops OR peppermints.  I think I even swore like a sailor under my breath as one of the walls started to topple and Theo tried to right it by throwing his whole body weight against it while Josephine wailed that he wasn't sharing.

Which brings me to a musing:  I started this blog almost a year ago because I have enjoyed so much the blogs of other people.  I have loved these blogs because their writers inspire me with their projects, their day to day energy, their photographs, or how they parent their kids.

And yet, as we put the finishing touches on our own gingerbread house and I took a romantic, dim-lit photo of it ("for the blog!"), I realized that I was falling prey to my own desire to make things seem too successful (think: a mommy and her two adoring children create a Martha-worthy gingerbread house with ease and no squabbling!)  

I was reminded that I want this blog to be (hopefully) inspirational, but also honest about our struggles.

The desire to make things too pretty, leave out the story of struggle, is close to another assumption I have particularly around the holiday season: that everyone else is like the fun-loving people you see in the catalogues, gathered  merrily around the hearth.

I should be wiser.  Those people are drinking egg nog.  Eating truffles, cookies, gingerbread.  And they are thin.

Paper Snowflakes

There is a ground-level window in the new bathroom.  And although no one (except maybe the stray neighbor of visiting mother-in-law) ventures back there, I decided it needed a privacy curtain.  Hence, how inspirational the idea from one of my favorite design blogs, Poppytalk, who gave me a link to Laura's DIY snowflake curtain at Bugs and Fishes.

 

Theo and I also watched a great tutorial on how to cut paper snowflakes by Chris.  People, it's all the fold not the cutting!

Then we went wild on the copy paper, glued our masterpieces together and viola!

Visiting inlaw diginataries even got into the spirit.  (This is my father-in-law's nightmare: tiny pieces of paper on the floor, too miniscule to be swept up easily...and yet, he couldn't help himself, and cut out mighty fine snowflakes himself.)

Later in the day, I bought origami paper which made lovely snowflakes, but they didn't iron flat.  Still, we hung them up on our ceiling, right where the Halloween bats had been, and it was sweet: our own  bright snowfall, to cheer us through the coming winter days.

Drawing With Children

On summer or weekend days, right after breakfast, we have "art time."  Nothing elaborate, just an immense box of markers and artist-quality sketchbooks.  Sometimes we glue.  Sometimes we paint.  But mostly we keep it pretty simple.

This was Josephine's favorite style of art this summer-- fill the whole page with color. She now has whole sketchbooks of these strange quilts of color, although now she is moving on to more representational drawing.  Eyeballs are predominant in her art; with Theo, it was twig-like hands with thousands of fingers.

I think there is something to just letting them be, putting the materials before them without any timidity or judgement.  

(My own art teacher mom banned coloring books for me-- something about not having to deal with someone else's notion of what things looked like.  Plus, we played that Harry Chapin song over and over again about some little boy who was punished for not coloring the flowers properly like the teacher wanted.)

And yet....I came across the greatest book in a used bookstore last spring-- Drawing With Children by Mona Brookes.  It reminded me of one of Mom's favorites-- Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain-- that she used with her students.

Drawing With Children is wonderful in that it breaks down seeing and drawing into small exercises that come off more as play than instruction.  Theo and I are already cobbling together these lessons and my goal is to somehow, even with Josephine, balance the freedom with the practice of art.  

In the end, for all of us, I think it is about seeing, noticing what is around you in the world.  And in that my children are often better than I am, fascinated by the most ordinary of things.

Dragons Redux: Kids Crafty Project

 

Mention must be made of where Diane, Theo's preschool teacher, went with the Chinese dragon project.  First of all, this saint of a woman has five four-year old boys in her charge, boys who are painting boldly, with bright colors and big gestures.  These boys also love to paint with things they can get physical with-- tennis balls, toy truck wheels, marbles.

So it was a stroke of brilliance when Diane found an electric back scrubber her mom was throwing away and decided to let the boys use it as a paint brush.  They painted, too, on this strange roll of sticky paper that had been lying about the schoolroom for years.  Then they cut out simple shapes (as you can see) and--- viola! Dragons!

I think this is a fine riff on the Chinese dragon idea, and yet these dragons are ready to march into any day of the year!  We also agreed they were a nice homage to Eric Carle.  You remember "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," don't you?

 

Anyway. I also love how each dragon has a such a unique personality.  

Theo then got kind of crazy and made one dragon eating its tail, and a flying one.  Which he says is his favorite.

 

She Blinded Me With Science!

What to do on a dreary day in Oregon?  

• Think about Vance Kirkland's paintings from the fabulous NASA-inspired art exhibit we saw in January at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. 
• Haul ourselves off to Ashland's Scienceworks Museum (where we run into my pal Skoshi, who is the museum's "lab" director.) 
• Be grateful that Skoshi lets us play with colored water, paint palettes, and an eye dropper.  (More about this later...)
• Listen in awe to the lesson on Oobleck that Skoshi is going to present to the visiting schoolgroups that day.
• Go home and try making Oobleck ourselves.

 Oobleck is a mixture of two parts corn starch to one part water.  (Green food coloring optional.)

You could tell your kids that making this demonstrates "the dilatant property of Non-Newtonian fluids" and the "process of polymerization."  Because, when you tap your fingers swiftly into a bowl of Oobleck, the polymeyers tangle and the Oobleck feels surprisingly hard, but when you lower your fingers gently, the polymers have a chance to move.  Then, the Oobleck feels like liquid.

Or you could just get excited and say to your kids, "Doesn't this feel sooooo weird?"

All in all, a satisfying afternoon.

I also love the fact that Oobleck comes from Dr. Seuss' Bartholomew and the Oobleck, which was about a king who was tired of the weather in his kingdom and orders something new--- so a green goop falls from the sky and messes up the whole kingdom.

So appropriate for a rainy day.  We also ended up putting a bowl on an exercise trampoline and jumping awkwardly on it to see how the oobleck reacted to vibrations.  Very cool, although we must of looked like the Witches from MacBeth.

 And now...Listen up, mommies.  Here is another dinky thing I would recommend that has now provided hours of entertainment-- We have several times hauled the food coloring, ice cube trays, and (because we don't have eye droppers) old syringes that were once used the shoot water down the dog's throat to get him to swallow his pills.  (Charming.) 

Then we sit at the dining room table and mix colored water, kind of using the ice cube trays like a color palette.

 

Although Theo is learning more about color theory than Josephine.

We then, of course, have to freeze these strange colors so that they become strangely colored ice cubes.

Which, as I've discovered, makes a martini turn a strange brownish-green.

But what can you do?

Fifi's Cookies

 One of the several nicknames we use for Josephine-- "Fifi."  I don't know what people in other countries imagine when they hear that name, but here one usually thinks of a fluffy poodle.  

 
 So how appropriate was it that a lot of our valentines cookies were pink and white Fifi?  With sprinkles. 

  

You can check out the great recipe here.

Cardboard Fetish

Theo's 2009 Halloween costume.  100% cardboard, except for the leg and arm bands, the old TV antenna, canning lids, glitter paper, and the "knobs" which I literally found in the gutter and decided to use.  Also (and you can't see it) I have velcroed (is that a word?) two egg cartons to the back, which Theo can whip off in a moment's notice like a Las Vegas stripper (my image) and hold up in front of him to collect solar rays and recharge (like WallE, his image.)

Why am I showing you a Halloween costume in February?

Because I am thinking of my love for cardboard.

My eyes go shifty when I shop at our local co-op and there are the cardboard boxes for the poor souls who have (those bastards-- more on this later...) FORGOT THEIR HEMP/CANVAS/SAVING THE EARTH bags.

Even if I don't need it, I lust after those cardboard boxes. And I usually stuff, oh, say, twenty, into the back of the car.  The texture, the history, the potential!

 

It would be like going to the moon.  And, speaking of the moon, here is what Theo's preschool teacher Diane had the kids do recently while they were "exploring outer space."  You know what this is, girlfriends: cardboard, a lovely layer, and strange objects, covered in tinfoil, all highlighted with some type of black glue.

Splendid.

This was another one of my favorite books as a kid.  Now, I read it to my own children and feel a sinking feeling when I see the 1970s mom in an apron getting excited about her new refrigerator.

 

But never mind that.  Once, when a former student came to live with us, and we had shopped at the co-op, and I had stuffed cardboard boxes in the back of the car as usual, we were driving home when I saw another WONDERFUL piece of cardboard in someone's trash (I swear, it was like a 3 ft X by 3 ft piece!). Of course, I had to screech to a halt and kidnap it.  But when I got back in the car, Eric (the student) turned to me as if a policeman might turn to an addict.  

"Do you know you have a cardboard fetish? "he asked.

"Yes," I said then.  And I still have to admit it now.  Yes, I do.

Feeling Reptilian

 

This is just a spiral cut out of a huge piece of green paper and decorated by Theo.  We hung it from our porch as a twisty snake to greet this afternoon's sunshine.

We have snakes on our minds these days.  

This is probably why...

 

last week's visit to the snake man of Colorado Springs.  His name is Richard "Doc" Holiday and, along with being my best friend from highschool's dad, Richard is an expert in all things snaky.  He travels around to the local schools and parks programs, mostly lecturing about rattlesnakes, but also about other snakes as well.

In his garage, Richard has over ten snakes, which the children adored.  

 What freaked me out, though, was the constant rattle of a huge rattlesnake and Josephine pressing her face against the glass cage, saying, "He's snaking, he's snake!"

 
 Theo bonded with "Candy Cane," a corn snake.  At one point, Theo started shouting "Wooooo wooooo" and we couldn't figure out what was wrong with him until we realized that the snake's tail had wrapped around his side and was sneaking up the back of his shirt.

Josephine just thought the snakes were cute, like kittens.