Write, Mama. Write.

Bib-bity bobbity

Aaahh... The day was saved by a sis/aunt who provided companionship/iced coffee/limitless energy for play/adoration for the boy.  Then our little family headed off to a picnic dinner in the park with a jazz concert to entertain us.  We happened to sit behind the band in the shade next to some people practicing juggling and a big, friendly golden retriever.  I think it was the ultimate toddler picnic spot.

I'm finishing up a (late) order and have had so much fun crafting some "girly" items.  I'm closing up the little shop as soon as I'm done with this set, going on summer hiatus from crafting for a "profit."  This is the Summer of Crafty Stuff for Family Life, after all, and I need to get to work start to play.

10 ways + a hint of something important

I love this handout from Wish Jar, 10 ways to infuse your work with your personality.  It's something posted in 2004 just waiting there, I do believe, for me to find it three years later.  I think Keri Smith's a bit of a genius for getting this all down, and then I worry too that I like it so much because it seems to somehow validate what I've been thinking lately.  Ah, well.  I do believe I need a similar "anti business/corporate, non-traditional, slightly controversial" bit of 10 ways for motherhood.  Something to ponder.

There are lots of things in the wings around here, cooking, stewing, brewing... whatnot.  Don't be confused and think there's any actual cooking happening in this house.  Dinners are what's absolutely easy and the boy woke up this morning pleading for muh-muh (muffins) or inka (pancakes).  You know, nurturing home-baked goodness.  Yeah, none of that to be found because there are those other cooking, stewing, brewing things.

The idea for these little laundry sets hit me when I looked through the Montessori catalog I ordered after reading this post on Angry Chicken.  I only have one up in the shop now though there are a few lying around the house and each includes many mini-clothespins (that's fun: many mini), several small towels, a clothesline, etc.  I know I'm not supposed to order catalogs, because the poor birdies of the boreal forest (scroll down to Two ways you can help birds...) are in a bad way.  My dad casually mentions these things in conversation which is one of the ways you know he's a really amazing person.  There are lots of things you can do to stop unwanted catalogs, so be sure to do some of those things, but I'm glad this one came in the mail.  It's tools for the toddler life you'd wish for in your wildest dreams, and it's a great stepping stone to ideas you can easily bring to your days.

Anyhow, everyday "doing" is the most important part of toddler life around here.  The boy loves to cook (soup takes an hour to get on the stove with my helper) and clean, water, scrub, do laundry, "organize," and any other little adult-type job there is to do.  It's almost always chaos, and I always feel like there are hazard lights flashing around him (and we should both be wearing hard hats) but even folding clothes is more fun with his help.  It's eight steps back and one step forward.  He was all over a little laundry kit of his own.

So as #5 in the 10 ways states, "Your life IS your art..." and this boy is my life.  I have fun creating for and with him, and writing is a medium of choice lately.  He had new sandals and a diaper on tonight, slapped a hat on his head and did laps through the kitchen, living room and hallway.  We tucked him in and all I wanted to do was write about it (or #1, if you're still with me here).  Somehow the fun of creating with the sewing machine, with words on the screen and through my life with this boy, somehow the work, the cooking, stewing and the infusion of it all will reflect my personality.  I'm sure of it.  Or maybe I'm sure I'm learning something through it all.  It's just a child's laundry set, and it's just my musings at the end of an exhausting "NO!"-filled day (his "no's," of course) but there's a hint of something in there that's important for me.  I can feel it.  And I so need a glass of wine.   

Things you think about at a street fair

The only really good picture I got of our actual "booth" (or, as the boy keeps repeating, Mama's "boos") focuses on my sister.  I think I'd better ask her before popping it up here so this is a little of the prep work before the big day: my little red wagon o' antiques.  Every participant has to attend a short meeting the night before the event so we learned late that the Capital City Pride Parade (part of a full weekend of celebration events for the GLBT community, drawing people from all over the state) was going to march through the street fair 'round about noon!

The street fair sign coordinated with the pride flags!  I'm not very familiar with the GLBT community, just as I'm unfamiliar with selling my stuff at a street fair.  The whole day was out of the norm, fascinating, exhausting, fun and, I do believe, a success.  I had lots of time to people watch and think, and here are some of the things I thought:

• People love a good calla lily.  We could have easily sold triple our number of calla lilies (around 150?) but didn't want to deplete the "field" too much before the big 60th wedding anniversary celebration in two weeks.  It was so fun watching the flowers spread out to the town.
• Why in the world do people run around on city streets without shoes?  Yuck, ick, gross, disgusto. 
• I'm not good at sitting around.  Britta's so patient and happy to people-watch, and I'd stand there for about fifteen minutes and say something like, "So, you need anything from the truck?" or "Should I maybe take a load of this over there?" or "I think I'll head over to Starbuck's (again) to use the bathroom" or "I'm just going to walk over there for a minute and I'll be right back."  I'm not good at sitting around.
• Stories are important to people.  People like to know the history of something, how it's made and why or how a certain piece came to live with you and what it was used for and when.  They instantly make an emotional connection with the item and want to buy it.  Fascinating.
• Similarly, I was struck by how nice it was to know who was going to be wearing or enjoying something I had created.  The little girl with a new smocket?  The darling toddler with the hat (yeah, the boy definitively hated it)?  The woman with a new bird?  It was so great to see and each was a perfect fit for the creation.  It's a completely different feeling to have that personal connection between what you make to sell and where it goes. 
• I am so, so proud of my sister.  Lately I've been noticing how I'll glance over at her and I get shocked just a little bit about the fact that she's this beautiful woman and not a cute little kid.  I try to boss her around too much still, I'm sure, because she's all grown up somehow now and she's this gifted artist.  People asked her what her next step will be... Big gallery shows?  Mass production of her incredible cards?  I can't wait to find out.
• Street fairs can be a little sad in the desperation.  There were a few people who looked like they needed to sell something to make rent or buy groceries, but the fund raisers for special needs medical equipment really made me want to buy something when there was nothing I wanted to buy.  Similarly the elderly woman who knit absolutely incredible sweaters and seemed to sell very little made me very, very sad.  Who knew there would be so much anguish involved in such an event? 
• People sell crappy stuff and people buy crappy stuff, and some people charge a lot for really crappy stuff.
• When you sell very little and buy a new push lawnmower you go deeply in the hole quite quickly.
• I'm not a street fair kinda gal.  I'd love to do it again with Brit, mind you, but I don't like the push, push, push to make stuff to try to sell at such a place.  It's great to have the push if you need it (and I needed it) but I don't like making stuff to sell.  I like making things I love and if there are extras, it's fun to try to sell them.  Does that make any sense?

There you have it.  A street fair like no other.  Last night as I was falling asleep T said he was proud of me for trying something new.  I mumbled, "I'm just trying to find my niche."   Always, always trying to find my niche...

Random ranting with summery craft thrown in too

Well first off, I think summer is starting to poke through in my crafty creations.  We've got another hat to work with though I'm decidedly unhappy with it.  I used fabric from an old tablecloth (that my sister couldn't sell on eBay... Imagine that?!) and it's just too floppy even with the interfacing.  It wasn't what I was going for.  It is bigger though, so #3 might be the charm.  Someone asked and I'm still about 150 emails deep in indebtedness so I'll just add in here that I started using last summer's perfectly-suited Gap hat for dimensions, then bought See & Sew pattern B4764 for a dollar thinking it would be easier.  The pattern says, "YES!  It's easy...") but I'd have to argue that, "NO!  It's not!"  The pattern was horribly complicated and though I looked at their sizing I never did understand any of their instructions.  You're probably much more pattern literate than I, so it might be worth it for you to try.  I just ended up playing around and making something that looked hat-like.

Onto the random ranting.  I have lots of generous family members and friends who share subscriptions of all sorts of magazines with me.  I love it.  I've always, always had a thing for magazines and never feel good spending money on the subscriptions (well, especially now).  Money-wise it just never seems to total out right for me because I zip through them so quickly (enjoying the zipping, of course).  The New Yorker is the one exception because I could never, ever keep up with reading them all (it can be a little stressful as they pile up actually).  Anyhow, when I was little I used to devour the magazines at my grandma's house every time we visited and so I have a long history of being completely freaked out by some of the articles they put in those things.  I mean, who knew there were so many things to worry about?  When the boy was born I bought those silly clips for under the mattress to hold the sheets on tight because when I was seven or eight I read about a baby... Well, it wasn't good and I held on to that fear somewhere in the back of my mind for over twenty years and then it popped out again.  Anyhow, I'm better at self-policing my media content now than I was but, jeesh, it's so pervasive and insidious.

When I was an undergraduate I did all sorts of research for a communications minor about women in media.  One study I had to do involved looking through hundreds of women's magazines and documenting each image of women to see how they were portrayed.  Among other things I looked for canting which, for my study, meant how the woman was physically positioned.  Was she off-balance?  There are often underlying messages about people in how they are presented visually and so, so many of the women were shown to be off balance in the pictures.  It comes across as playful at first glance but when you look at how men are portrayed so often they are "sturdy" and balanced, leaning towards the camera with their elbows squarely on their knees (or some such pose).  After awhile the contrast starts to bug you.  Women start to look "silly" in the pictures all the time, like one little push of the finger would flatten them.

Lately I've been looking at some parenting magazines and I started to feel all stressed out.  Then I realized how messages about fear and danger were so prevalent.  The same magazine articles that stressed me out as a seven year old were really getting to me as a parent.  In one parenting magazine "The New Rabies Risk" was followed by an emergency guide to "Germ-Proof Your Home" and then, in the same issue, there was an article about "Law School for Mommies."  This was not about going to law school as a mother but about whether parents of a child who falls while playing with your child could sue you.  It talked about what happens if your child needs a visit to the ER while with a babysitter and the doctor refuses to treat him without parental consent.  Feeling stressed yet?  These are just a few things in one issue of one magazine.

What's this all about?  Why does fear sell?  Why do we buy into it all?  I know childhood and parenthood can be super-scary (hey, we just had our five and a half foot fall to the sidewalk and before that we took an ambulance ride to the ER-- in just 19 months) but do we need to pay for people to tell us how super-scary it can possibly, maybe, sometimes be?  Does reading that sort of crap make me a better, more-prepared parent?  What important thoughts are we replacing when we waste our time worrying about these sorts of things?   There's always something that can happen, and it's probably happened to someone.  Does the fear make us smarter about danger?  How does it limit us as parents and how does it limit our children?  Magazines aren't the beginning or the end of this, by the way.  What do news outlets get out of pushing fear?  How does media hook us and how can we be smarter about it as parents?

Embrace the banana bread

Thanks, everybody... I feel better about humanity now!  And while I'm at it I'll offer up a blanket apology for the email you get from me about an average of three weeks after you've commented.  It's about two weeks and six and a half days past you caring about my response (probably) but I'm slow.  My "Happy Spring" cards with a cute picture of the boy bundled in a warm coat and hat are officially one season late now, sitting next to me here at the computer.  At least I'm consistent. 

The boy is just fine.  After I wrote about our BAM yesterday he woke up and started yelling, "Mama! Mama!" from his crib.  I opened his door and he yelled, "NIUak, NIUak!!" (yesterday's version of "picnic") while pumping his arms in the air.  It was time for our first picnic of the day and time for me to stop worrying about his head.  He's fine.

So, the other day in our little parenting class the topic was nutrition again.  The teacher mentioned something about how you can really put any veggie in a banana bread recipe and someone turned to me and asked if I made banana bread.  It was one of those moments where I thought the person sort-of meant, "Get a load of this... She thinks we have time to sit around baking banana bread."  I think the woman who asked me is really cool and down-to-earth and has a great take on lots of things so a part of me wanted to be able to respond in what I thought she would think was a cool way.  You know, "Oh, yeah... Really...  Like there's time for that."  I wanted to connect with her as a busy, cool mama.  Only T knows how utterly hilarious it is that she asked me if I make banana bread because there is almost always a loaf or two on our kitchen counter.  It's a good way to use up dying veggies and the boy's still on his banana strike but he loves the bread.  I keep buying the darn things and they keep turning brown/black.  I won't touch them if they have a single spot of brown so the banana burden's all T's unless I bake. 

I really do like baking too.  It's calming, nurturing, satisfying (keep in mind my hard and fast distinction between baking and cooking).  I offered up platitudes: "Well, I'm home you know, and we're always trying to save money... And..."  Let's face it though, I bake banana bread all the time.  Through the discussion I thought a lot about how much people go out to eat and how, even when they're home, a lot of food people "make" is processed meals heated in the microwave.  We're just all so busy and everything seems to take so long.  When things can be easy we like to accept the easiness.  I've thought about that banana bread moment several times throughout the week and decided it's just one more step in my never-ending effort to grow up and accept my totally uncool nature.  I'm outside the norm.  I can list out just about every single ingredient we eat each day because I combine them all.  I cook and bake for my family every meal, every day.  I sorta, kind-of like doing it.

I guess these days I'm all about passing on my lack of hipness to the next generation.  Some new, small aprons debuted during nap time today and I like the stripes.  A little one could wear this and bake banana bread to his heart's content.  Cool. 

May craftiness

I had visions of May Day bouquets on front door handles but somehow the first of May has come and gone!  There are lots of big and little things happening in May around here.  We're knee-high in our own print shop-like pile of invites, envelopes and direction cards for the big 60th Wedding Anniversary and 80th Birthdays Bash (those special words require caps, don't you know?).

There's also a ton of fun happening with Skirt Month.  You did know it was Skirt Month, didn't you?  Megan has led the way with the sew-along, my pattern review is in the works and there are lots of fun features and tutorials planned.  This little number (below) was created by someone, and luckily they had my measurements, style and budget in mind (a $2 thrifting maybe-it'll-fit buy).  This one has little blue diagonal lines (hard to see in my washed-out pic) that meet exactly everywhere on the skirt.  How do you do that?  It's pretty great, but I'm still holding out for the Barcelona (now in my hot little hands) as a perfect skirt replacement.  My sister's getting the layered look and I'm getting the A-line.  Woo-hoo!  Of course, that means I have to sew a piece of clothing that someone else'll actually wear, so we'll see about that.

Mom called the smocket an apron and I suppose that's what it really is...  An overlay?  A dress?  A smock?  An apron?  I like it even more now.  I headed out at 10ish last night for some emergency bias tape and found some darling fabric screaming, "Smocket!  We want to be smockets!"  So, no little girls in sight and you're probably right to be a little concerned about my mental state, but we have more smockets in the works around here (piled on and under the invites).  I impulsively submitted the smocket to Tie One On (it's what gave me the idea to use rick-rack on the pocket in the first place) and got a little thrill to see it in the Rick-Rack gallery.  I already know what I'm doing for the May/June Tie One On.  Lately T keeps saying that I'm getting so domestic.  We just bust up laughing every time.   I need to work on the cooking and cleaning part of that!

I have a dozen or so of the (above) covers in the works for a special event, and I wasn't totally happy with this little prototype.  They're covering books with blank pages for notes, journaling or whatever, and I think there will be some checkbook covers to go along with them.  Anyhow, lots of ideas for improvements along the way.  I decided I'm a big fan of bias tape.

Most of the sewing around here lately is of the splat mat variety.  I get a lot of satisfaction out of sending splat mats around the country but they aren't the most thrilling daily post: "Look, I made another splat mat.  Ta da!"  I've been going back and forth in my mind about how and what I want to post.  T says I just need to sit down and write.  That's the part that really does it for me (hence, Write Mama Write, I suppose).  I do like the extra little push this space gives me to infuse our lives with a bit more creativity, and I never want it to be a site that only pumps out stuff for the shop.  Trying to run a business (even if it's small, like teeny-tiny small), especially when you're a mama at home with little ones, can easily become everything extra.  I just don't want splat mats to be my everything extra.

If they were, how could I contemplate joining my sis in Illustration Friday? 

Somehow we're in charge of things now

Very odd, but somehow T & I became the ones who help the Easter Bunny rather than the ones who hunt for eggs.  I had the same feeling this past Christmas; suddenly the boy can do things like open presents and dye Easter eggs and somebody (or two somebodies) needs to make it all happen.  I had a mini- (internal) meltdown when trying to find some clothes for the boy for our informal family gathering yesterday.  Somehow the historical record of me + motherhood seemed to rest on what the boy would be wearing in the pictures yesterday, and I certainly hadn't made any seersucker pants for the occasion.  I hadn't even, really, done laundry. 

So the boy was asleep, T was helping the Easter Bunny outside and I was drying my hair when our first grandparent guests arrived, and it was a beautiful, happy day.  The boy has never had such sustained happiness, and I really think it trumped other special days like his birthday and Christmas for him.  He was surrounded by three sets of grandparents who love him and think he's brilliant and funny (he is, of course).  When he woke up from his nap he looked out our sliding glass door to the backyard and kept saying, "Uh-oh!  Uh-oh!"  Someone dropped a whole bunch of eggs out there!  When I look at the pictures I'll think about how happy we all were, and the boy looked pretty cute in his shortalls and T-shirt.  Those bits of sustained joy are really what I want the historical record of me + motherhood to show.

Egg pictures after the holiday are a bit odd (so yesterday!) but it's in keeping with the pace around here lately. 

I made lots of baby gifts this weekend (overdue presents + showers + things to go in the shop soon) and I love this new mat style (I made a few).  The boy and I also have more bibs, undoubtedly inspired by bibs like this or this, or even patchwork like this or this.  I'm still unhappy with this particular one because I continue to develop a relationship with my new machine (read: try to make it like me) and I'm still not used to how it switches back to the default setting when you change where you want the needle.  I meant for it to have long stitches around the edge and ended up with a continuous line! 

I love these (and I kind-of get a kick out of the boy eating peas + carrots while wearing a bib made of Peas + Carrots, but that's just me and I think it solidifies my standing as a complete nerd).