Relentless Toil

Halloween TP Roll Action Figures

I'm still making good on my promise to volunteer with the Rockets (my daughter's pre-school class) once a month. We do art/craft projects together. This month, I decided we should make toilet paper (TP) roll action figures for Halloween.

It's really a pretty elaborate project for pre-school but the little guys did GREAT. Back in September I issued a call to the class for empty toilet paper rolls and in no time we amassed more than enough. (Maybe that is TMI...)

I went through a few design drafts -- some very complex with detachable paper hats, masks, etc. -- before figuring out, after observing my own kiddo, that handing even the safest safety scissors to a dozen or so very tiny people her age would be a bad idea. So I settled on a simple 2-piece template that the kids could color and had the teachers snap and print photos of each classmate's face, in lieu of drawing heads or masks. The teachers and I did all the cutting, the kids did all the gluing.

 

We were prepared to accept, with love in our hearts, totally sloppy and lopsided action figures that may or may not stand up but no -- the kids did it like pros, every single one of them. Here are my kid's examples:

I love how she colored the witch's kitty cat -- her strokes set off that self-satisfied expression so well. There are few things that make me happier than art by very tiny young people.

Our Chessie makes such a good zombie.

Would you like to make your own Halloween TP Roll Action Figures? You can! You can download them for FREE right here (under Creative Commons non-commercial license which means you can do ANYTHING you want with these except sell them):

witchandzombie.pdf
wizardandmummy.pdf

TIP: If you don't have TP rolls available you can print these on lightweight card stock and use tape. It also might be fun to cut photos of people out of magazines or newspapers to use for the heads. If you do make any, please please please share them with me. Here's my flickr group all lonely and waiting for you.

In other news: two very special, one-of-a-kind art/craft items of mine -- along with several other really wonderful things from other artists/crafters -- will be going up for auction starting TOMORROW, 10/28, my birthday, all for the benefit of the very young children of recently deceased knitter, spinner, and blogger Colleen Kueter who was my sister's friend and by all accounts a fabulous lady who will be dearly missed. I will post a link here when we're ready for bidding to begin.

This is what happens when "we do the hump / we do the humpty hump" gets stuck in my head

It gets mashed up with thoughts of robin's eggs and old flamboyantly-mustachioed cowboys who swagger in orange pants. My brain is a pretty weird place (I like it this way).

I think that if I was responsible for dressing a tiny little boy person I would have a tiny white t-shirt printed with this, and I would stuff that little boy into it for as long as it was clean and he was relatively willing. Bribes could be offered.

I yearn a little bitty bit for the baby days, when almost all the clothing decisions were mine (sometimes my baby would find a way to reject shoes and socks, and mittens were the enemy, but she was pretty happy with hats). At age 3 my little one wants to vet and approve, and of course she should, given loose guidelines. I miss being able to put her outfits together myself, and I missed the decorate-a-nursery boat altogether -- I just never ever did it, had other priorities, and now it would be unfair to impose decor on a kid who has her own decent and doable ideas. But age 3 is turning out to be so much fun, the most fun ever. I need a Pause button so I can enjoy it longer.

Indian Summer

Here is another of the pieces I made with my "treadmill" (normal people would call it a Babylock Embellisher):

This one is really quite thick and is the main way I learned that it's a bad idea to feed too many thick-ish layers of anything into a needle felting machine. I bent and broke some needles. The background is green wool felt with a synthetic dark brown damask needle-felted into it. The little gnome-baby is dryer-sheet-appliqued and embroidered cotton. The flower petals are deep red wool felt with many layers of lighter red, magenta, and pink roving needle-felted onto/into it, and the flower center is that damask again, needle-felted in over the felt and the roving (this is the part you really should not do -- if I had to do it again I'd felt the pieces separately, then applique them together), and then some pink French knots, and then the leaves are just plain old simple shapes of plain old wool felt appliqued into place.

Speaking of flowers I am really enjoying our Indian Summer here. I prefer warm weather and would be quite happy to live somewhere that is, oh, 70-85 degrees F every day. Also, this thing where it gets dark at 7pm, that's for the birds.

Where my witches at?

As of this very moment there are five, just five, and only five, little wooden witchy dolls in ye olde etsy shoppe. Here are some of them having a soiree:

Although there are other bright and colorful dolls coming soon, I cannot make additional witches this season. I think I have hit the wall on making their hats: they were hard. Also, I cannot sell you the teensy tiny furniture or the eensy beensy accessories as some of them are heirlooms from my grandmother. The pumpkin up front is a real pumpkin! It came to us courtesy my mother-in-law. There are also two polymer clay pumpkins on the table, in the back, no bigger than nickels: they were made by my nimble-fingered sister-in-law.
If you enjoy making and painting wooden dolls too, I encourage you to share them, and I think I will offer up a free pattern for their hats later this month.
Happy Halloween!

Van Hairdo

It was just about five years ago that I found and purchased, completely on impulse, an antique commemorative plate featuring the spectacularly coiffured head of the eighth President of the United States, Martin Van Buren. It is my favorite, favorite, favorite plate and has served me many a tasty dessert.
Anyway -- today I heard about Of Great and Mortal Men, a collaboration of musicians and artists interpreting the lives and careers of the Presidents of the United States, by way of Keri Smith. Right away I thought that if I had been asked to contribute a presidential portrait, this is what I would have drawn. I mean, I would have clambered to do it, really.

Look at his adorable hair.
I can't wait to get this album and see how they interpreted him!
Van Buren has not really been favored by history. I was reading a bit more about him tonight: failed banks, inflation, credit crisis, an incumbent President that hands the successive President a great big hot mess -- it all sounds pretty familiar. What I really appreciate: he thought it important to keep the US out of war. I'll vote for that.

Getting Ready for Chefs for Healthy Babies

My family is very committed to supporting the March of Dimes (I became very ill with pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome and delivered my daughter via emergency Caesarian 12 weeks early -- though we are doing beautifully now, our experiences really should not be wished on any other family -- so that is why we show up and work). Each year my friend Ali helps coordinate the silent auction for the Worcester, Massachusetts March of Dimes chapter's Chefs for Healthy Babies event. These wooden dollies, and some framed prints of mine, are on their way to the auction!

Here are the same wooden dollies plus an extra friend (the shadowy pink one) getting together for Knitting Club. I don't knit, but it seems like half the women I love do, so, here you go, y'all.

I did not mean for that lovely green bottle of miniature Blue Nun (yes, the label really says Blue Nun, it is too hilarious) to appear to sprout out of Pinky's head there but what are you gonna do. My stylist consultant didn't notice it until it was too late, either. Below is a picture of said stylist trying to convince me that the couch really belonged in the shoot.

I should mention that the wallpaper is actually Martha Stewart scrapbooking paper. Some of these miniatures are my daughter's (Calico Critters furniture and the lovely plastic satyr which came from her Mythical Creatures action play set)... some are mine... some were my grandmother's. It is kind-of a beautiful thing, really, the multi-generational fascination with super-duper-tiny things. I bet my grandmom would have loved to play along with us!
Thanks as always to our superstar photographer and his collection of fancy lights and gels and foam core. xoxo

My "Treadmill"

I made this with my "treadmill". See?

Here, I'll explain: last October I was jonesing really hard for a real, honest-to-goodness treadmill, the kind you walk or run (or hang laundry for weeks on end) on. It was to be an especially extravagant birthday present. My plan was to park it in front of the TV, which we keep down in the basement, and walk or jog while watching what I used to watch then: Battlestar Galactica, Gilmore Girls, Heroes, Lost, The Daily Show, and plenty of Noggin or Charlie and Lola for the kid. I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to manage treadmill safety issues with said kid -- she was 2 at the time -- but like most things I figured we would just manage somehow. So Sam (my husband) read some reviews, and I read some reviews, and eventually I dragged him and my brother- and sister-in-law to our local Sears and proceeded to have a spectacularly bamboozled and protracted treadmill purchase and delivery process. And then once the thing got here, we discovered that a) a critical part was missing such that the treadmill couldn't be turned on and b) the treadmill itself was too long and too wide, even when folded, and even when everything that wasn't welded into place was carefully removed, to descend the stairs leading to the basement. We would have had to remove a window to get it in, and we aren't very handy in the carpentry sense, so... so... so... So I returned the treadmill (this was an even more spectacularly bamboozled and protracted process) and replaced it with Exercise TV on-demand, and a Babylock Embellisher, which I still refer to as my "treadmill".
The Embellisher is a needle felting machine. I was introduced to it by the incredible textile artist Sara Lechner.
The Embellisher fits in the basement just fine, its needles can be locked safely away from teensy toddler fingers, and it isn't doing anything for my muscle tone or heart rate but it is a lot of fun.
I want to warn you, if you use a needle felting machine, that you probably shouldn't do too much felting of really thick materials, such as 2-3 layers of wool felt or even 2-3 layers of quilter's cotton: I have bent and broken a few needles this way and those needle fragments go flying. I had to wave a magnet over the tabletop and floor to retrieve the fragments.
I have had much better success with a thinner sandwich of cheesecloth, wool felt or cotton or polyester fabric, and tiny tufts of wool roving. Then I add applique and embroidery details.

I get my cheesecloth from the grocery store and dye it (shout-out to Dharma Trading here!). Weir Dolls and Crafts has always made me happy with their service and their selection of wool felt and roving.
Incidentally, I am a proud Bernina devotee and Bernina does offer a needle felting attachment for their "sewing computers" -- but needle felting wool is a fairly messy process. You end up with miniscule wool fibers everywhere (also a concern if you have a wool sensitivity or allergy, no matter what your needle felting tools are). I didn't want the risk of fiber dust gunking up the innards of my precious Bernina -- so, my treadmill/Embellisher it is.

Making Art with the Roaring Rockets

A few weeks ago I played hooky from my day job to go and do an art project with the Roaring Rockets pre-school class. My daughter is their tiniest classmate, though definitely not their youngest. What can I say? I make 'em Fun Sized.

The Roaring Rockets' theme that week was "All About My Body", so I brought in some make-a-person collage kits for them: construction paper backgrounds and heads, and tiny shirts and pants made of the spare scrapbook paper and origami paper I was looking to offload. The pre-school contributed their own glue and magic markers. I also provided a model for them to work by (shown in the lower left, below).

And here is what my kid created:

Being in pre-school with a cohesive group of 14 itsy bitsy people was the most joyful, wondrous, surprising, FUN experience. Nobody roared and there were no actual rockets. I think their collages are really fabulous, too! Each kid did his or her collage in the most orderly, peaceful, jolly, cooperative way that I believe can only happen through the magic of pre-school peer pressure. I mean, my kid is a really good kid and she likes this kind of activity but I'm telling you, if I led this same project with her one-on-one I'm not 100% positive we'd actually complete it together in one sitting. It is also particularly hard for her to put away her toys without 13 other tiny people also putting away toys at the same time; she will agitate for the more fun alternative she cooks up. I think the next time I want the house tidied up I'm gonna have to find a small army of three-year-olds, I tell you what.

In all seriousness, though, our time here is so limited. Our time with our children is even more limited. I don't want to blink and have it all be over and find myself regretting that I didn't spend my daughter's childhood being the mom I wanted to be. As a grownup, I've always worked like a dog and I really like working, but I am determined to find some way, even if it means going out on unpaid leave for a little bit, even if it means being looked at funny by other professionals, to volunteer at the pre-school once a month for as long as my kid is there. It's gonna be a blast.