penny carnival

Forever in peace may she wave

I only had a chance to photograph one of my Farm Chicks treasures today, so the others will have to trickle onto the blog as the week progresses. But to start things off ...

Farm Chicks Find No. 1: A 48-star American flag for $40.

The stars and stripes are sewn on, by the way, not printed. 

Pardon the exposed hardware in the middle there. For now, I just draped the flag on nails already in the wall. And if you live in either Alaska or Hawaii, sorry. Forty-eight stars just looks so much cooler than 50.

I once saw an apartment in Elle Decor or some similar magazine that was completely bedecked in vintage American flags. It was one of the most unique and striking homes I'd ever seen featured in a magazine. The article popped into my head Saturday as I dug through a couple dozen old flags for sale by a vendor at the show.

So, sure, this is supposed to be an "art" statement, I guess. Or a decor statement, anyway. But people are often surprised to find out how patriotic I am. That's right. I usually cry during the National Anthem. 

I think most folks assume all journalists are shady, cynical creatures always on the prowl to uncover some government scandal. I would never define myself as cynical, though. Skeptical, yes. Not cynical. And most journalists I know are in the field because they're dedicated to things like honesty, keeping an accurate record of history, and exposing what's wrong in the world so that ignorance is diminished and solutions might be found. No one I know has ever shouted "gotchya!" after uncovering something damaging about another human being.

I believe that journalism is one of the most patriotic professions one can enter, actually. Without the "fourth estate"--the watchdog that sometimes has to play an unpopular role to expose truths that might make us squirm--there can't be democracy.

Maybe Thomas Jefferson said it best:

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Ironically, that quote is carved into a wall at the Seattle Post Intelligencer offices--a newspaper that ceased its print publication a few months ago due to financial problems. Journalism jobs are fading and morphing at an alarming rate. In fact, it's probably more accurate to call myself a writer these days than a reporter since most of my work isn't for the editorial pages of the paper lately.

But I love journalism and I love this country, and I don't for a second think that is a contradiction. 

OK. Pardon me as I step off my soapbox. 

In more crafty news ... I'm still on an apron kick, sewing some up for friends and preschool teachers as time allows. I also have an idea for a new apron design brewing after being inspired by something I saw at the Farm Chicks show. Stay tuned.

Otherwise, please enjoy the brilliance that abounds elsewhere on the Web:

-Amy Karol's greeting cards made from the funny things her kids say. We keep a running list of the goofy observations our girls make, too, so I can't wait to put the hilarity to use like Amy has. For example, Bo said this one day:

"When I was a little girl, my heart got broken. But it got better when sissy hugged me and we got married."

Bo, 3 1/2

-Have I mentioned this little shop yet? I think so, but it's worth repeating for your baking pleasure. Every person must have a stash of red-and-white baker's twine and some brown boxes on hand for packing up treats for friends and neighbors, don't you think?

 

-The illustrations and captions in the vintage health book that Denise Sharp bought for $1 recently. I want to embroider every page! 

-All the great kid-crafty ideas on this Web site I stumbled upon recently, including making ginormous pencils. A lot of the activities will have to wait until they get older, but the girls would get a kick out of making mondo pencils. We did something similar in art class when I was in middle school, but you could pick the object you enlarged. I chose a record album. The Queen is Dead by The Smiths. I was sooo tragic.

-The Parents Journal podcast by Bobbi Conner. You have to get past the cheesy theme music, but the messages are usually very interesting and practical. One topic she likes to address is the benefits of no or very little TV. It's always good to play her program when I'm tempted to drag out the Dora DVDs.

-Photojojo's links to photos you can use for free, as well as ideas on what to do with them.

This image reminds me of my original idea for a theme for Bo's nursery before she was born: "vintage swim."

I'd still love to do that one day, but I doubt the girls would be on board with it yet. And soon enough they'll have their own ideas, anyway. How cool would it be to paint the walls aqua, frame some vintage swimsuits in shadow boxes, and display funky old swim caps, though?

-The Crafty Crow's roundup of ideas for making seed markers with kids, found via Kids Craft Weekly. Monkey Lobster's project is my favorite:

 

-And this poster about how to build community, brought to my attention by my friend Nis.

As I said on my other blog:

I’m pretty good at a lot of those tips, but there are many ideas there that I should be using as guide to life. Some of my favorite suggestions from the list are “fix it even if you didn’t break it,” “bake extra and share,” “sit on your stoop” (my family has been doing this a lot more lately), “know your neighbors,” and “start a tradition.” “Turn off your TV” is easy for me, but if I buy the poster I might have to scratch out the word “TV” and replace it with “Internet” just to really challenge myself.

You can learn where to buy your own copy of the poster here.

Chalking up one year

Today is Magpie's real deal. Her official birthday. Her bash isn't until Sunday and she doesn't know better anyway, but this is the day I get to remember her coming into the world and into our lives.

Magpie was induced, like her sister, and like her sister it took a couple days for the pitocin to work. We thought she'd be born on October 19, but I think my body knew that 10-19-07 doesn't have the same ring to it as 10-20. Bo's birthday is 7-7. We like to keep the numbers simple, I guess.

There were lots of starts and stops to the labor, but when she finally was ready it didn't take long to push her out and at 12:34 p.m. (1,2,3,4) she was in my arms. A much different experience than with Bo, who was rushed to the NICU without a pause to meet her mama. (That explains why later that day when I went to visit Bo there I gazed longingly at the wrong baby for several minutes. Oops. She has been making up for our lost first moments together ever since.)

Magpie is much more independent than her sis, scooting her way around the house as she pleases with her octopus-like crawl. She usually plays sweetly at my feet while I sew, only once throwing me for a loop after sitting on the sewing machine's pedal.

Most people who approach us in the store call her a zen baby or comment on what a calm demeanor she has. She does have a sort of chilly-chill persona, and I can't wait to watch it evolve over the years.

Happy birthday, my sweets.  

I stayed up late last night painting a wall in the kitchen with chalkboard paint, a project I started about a month ago. The green I chose was supposed to look more vintage schoolhouse than the result, which I would call Fenway Park Green Monster green. But hopefully it will look more chalkboardy as we fill it up with scribbles and such. Here's a start to a woodland scene I hope to fill in by Sunday's party. I used an overhead projector and some coloring book images for help.

 

Cover your cans

Let me admit something right off the bat: I'm a part-time nurser. I stopped at 8 months with Bo and 9 months with Magpie. 

That can only mean two things: dirty looks from female strangers (not all, but plenty) when I shake up a bottle of milk in public and lots and lots and lots of empty formula cans.

I can't bear to toss those cans. Formula costs so dang much--It's like I owe it to myself to get a second use out of them. 

So let me introduce you to the latest thing taking over our home: covered cans. 

The idea came from the fabulous blog Elsie Marley, written by Meg, who got it from a Japanese magazine. Meg's cans are much more subdued and charming than mine, but I needed some punches of color in my otherwise white-brown-and-black kitchen.

I'll post a more detailed tutorial here later, or you can follow Meg's. Basically, it's a slipcover for a can, and you can modify it to fit any size can you have. I like to make them nice and snug, so much so that you kind of have to work to get it over the can. But they come off, so you can wash them easily.

Speaking of nursing, check out Bo's fixation this weekend at the county fair as a calf was drinking its mama's milk. I could hardly tear her away. When she grows up, looks like she's either going to be a plumber (plumber's crack in training there) or a lactation consultant. 

My version of a hummer

Remember the fabric wall silhouette tutorial I wrote during the tryouts for the Ohdeedoh blogger job? Well, I finally got around to giving the rooster a friend--Mr. Hummingbird. (Unfortunately they live in different rooms in my house and they are stuck to the walls so they will never meet.)

This idea was brewing for a while. If nothing else, it gives us something new to look at in our oh-so-blank Navajo White-walled house. We painted the whole interior BM Navajo White when we moved in, with the intent that our house would be like an art gallery--full of colorful paintings. One year later, the walls are still pretty bare.

It was looking great for a while when we were renting art through the museum here. Probably like a lot of museums, they have a three-month art rental program. Their prices were extremely reasonable (I believe prices range from $50-$150 or so per piece for three-month periods), but with the baby coming last fall it was one thing we cut from our budget.

We do have a drawing by J's grandfather up on one wall right now and a few alternatives to art--the vintage phonetics cards I've posted before are near the girls' rooms and a poster from the movie "Life is Beautiful" is in our foyer. Some people think it's weird that we have a movie poster in our foyer. That movie blew us both away. We put it somewhere so prominent as a reminder that no matter what our daily troubles might be, life truly is beautiful.
Next to the poster is a little tag with the number 5 on it--to represent the five of us (me, j, bo, magpie and Cronkite the dog) and a rubberband in a frame. The rubberband was originally a bracelet with the word "luminous" stamped on it. It was a gift from my dear from Gil--one of the nicest compliments anyone ever gave me--and again, it's just a reminder to aim for luminosity as opposed to grim and grime.

And now, the hummingbird in the living room. We call our house Hummingbird Ranch because it's a ranch-style house and because we get a TON of hummingbirds in the backyard during the summer. Happy humming, little bird.

(Movie poster image courtesy of moviegoods.com. Call it censorship if you want, but the foyer is a disaster right now so I'm not going to take a picture.)

Jiggity jig

Home again.

Our marathon vacation has come to a close. After three weeks in Rhode Island, we came home Wednesday evening to a full garden, a happy dog and an empty fridge (the freezer filled quickly, though! We recently bought 1/4 of a grass-fed Oregon cow. More on that another day). It's always hard to say goodbye to my family back east, but it's also good to get settled at home again.

I apologize for neglecting the blog as much as I have. I have a flood of work deadlines to slog through but promise to be back in regular crafty action after that.

It's amazing how much a garden can grow in three weeks, by the way. There's so much that needs to either be eaten or frozen, and there's no shortage of weeds that need pulling. The photos below include a shot of a young sunflower and a hollyhock making its way through our fence from our neighbor's yard (don't you love when that happens?).

We also came home to a huge stack of mail, of course, including the book "How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way," by Tim Selden, which I won from Amber over at Kids Craft Weekly. She holds a monthly contest for anyone who submits photos of their kids creating one of her crafts. I'm not sure if it's a random drawing or if she just chooses a photo she likes, but I was excited to hear that my shot of Bo doing pantry art won. Thanks, Amber!

I haven't had a chance to dig in, but the book looks great so far. I've read a more detailed book about raising your kids in the Montessori way. This seems to be a good refresher/quick reference/easy-to-find activities sort of thing.

So tonight was a little rough. Bo has been begging to take a ballet class ever since she saw her cousin MH dancing last spring. I finally signed her up, we read a book today about ballerinas, she put on her tu-tu, and we drove to the 6:30 p.m. class only to learn that it'd been changed to 3 p.m. Um, how am I supposed to explain that to my 3 year old? Crocodile tears ensued. I attempted to dry them with a trip to the ice cream shop--is that horrible? Am I teaching her to numb her emotions with food already?
My heart really broke for her, which worries me because this is only ballet class. What happens when life gets more complicated?

Back to books, though. I need to come up with a better system for displaying the girls' books. For a long time I thought the more books the better, but Bo seems really overwhelmed when she goes to her bookshelf to pick out something for us to read. Plus she has a hard time recognizing books when she just sees the spine.
Some of the books I have are crap-o-la, too, since a lot of them came from a book sale in which you could stuff a big box full of books for just $5. I hardly looked at the titles, let alone the plots. Sometimes she'll pick out a book and as I'm reading it all I can think about is how in the world it ever got published and how can I make up a new ending so she isn't emotionally scarred forever.

Anyhow, I ordered a few books online last night--The Seashore Book, by Charlotte Zolotow, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, The Carrot Seed by Ruth Kraus, and Feelings by Aliki. Those suggestions came from Sew Liberated (previously Montessori by Hand). I'd also love to start chipping away at Amanda Soule's picks.

Now I just need to come up with a better display system. Pasted below are some ideas: Martha Stewart, All Sorts and this way-too-expensive spinny number, respectively.

Anyone have an idea for displaying and storing books they'd care to share?

Ohdeedoh yodelayheehoo 2

Aaargh! Ohdeedoh just posted the tour of my girls' bedrooms for the blogger search I'm in the thick of. If you're just tuning in, I'm one of four finalists to be a regular blogger on Ohdeedoh, the parenting/baby/child branch of the Apartment Therapy family. They asked us to write sample posts for their site, which they've been posting over the last few weeks.

I'd love to get the gig. Ohdeedoh is a great place for parents to go to get ideas for well designed toys, kids furniture, etc., but what I love most about it is its emphasis on living small and simply. That's me, in a nutshell. That's who I try to be, in a nutshell.

The other finalists are extremely talented writers and have great eyes for design, though, so I've got ants in my pants right now. It doesn't help that I shot the photos on a gray day, making everything look a bit too soft. I also didn't realize they were going to run all the photos, which explains why there are three shots of Magpie in there (none of Bo, by the way. She was in quarantine with Dora because she was a total tornado that morning). And despite a modern emphasis in the rest of the house, the girls' rooms lean on the folksy side.

OK. I'll shut my trap now and just see what happens.

A month without deadlines

I love my job (freelance journalist). Truly. Wouldn't trade it for anything, except maybe being a professional cheese sampler or a wave counter at the beach or a freelance journalist who is paid really, really well.

But the deadlines are piling up this month, so I'm finding myself daydreaming about being crafty instead of actually being crafty.

There are a few projects I will have to tackle no matter what--Fourth of July dresses for the girls, a gift for a new baby, a HomeMaker column that's due in a couple of weeks, and things related to Bo's birthday (a present for her, party favors for the buddies). And there are always the silly kids crafts we do to make ourselves forget about all the soggy rain (is there any other kind? I guess "soggy" is my placeholder for a superbad word I'd like to use instead) that's been coming down lately. Grrrrrr ...

But other than that, I'm pretty much glued to the laptop until our big, fat Italian vacation in July. Have I mentioned the vacation? Not in Italy. That was probably deceiving. We'll be in Rhode Island with the Italian side of the fam. For three whole weeks. That's right. Weeks. Not days. How I convinced J to do this, I'm still not sure, but we're all super excited to just park our rears on a beach for a while and spend time with the cousins and aunts.

Until then, if I weren't so booked, this is what I'd be doing ...

Making one of these for every baby on the planet.
Buying a better color printer so I can spend the rest of my life here.
Wasting countless hours here.
Reading this book.
Finding a clever way to celebrate the beautiful words to this song in our garden.
Finally, finally, finally remembering to watch my boyfriend's show on Saturday morning.
Doing more of this (that's not me, by the way).
And sleeping.

Good night.

(Photo below is from ohdeedoh.com)

One of my Farm Chicks finds

I forgot to mention what I bought at the Farm Chicks sale yesterday: some clothespin dolls we'll give Bo for her birthday and these vintage phonetics cards I just hung outside her bedroom. There were several to choose from but these words caught my eye--wee, ting-a-ling, Bo-peep, and asleep.

Ohdeedoh yodelayheehoo

Ohdeedoh posted my how-to project this afternoon. It's currently at the top of their home page. Can't miss it--there's a big rooster involved (my obsession continues).

Ug. The photos didn't come out great. It was a gray day here, and I refuse to use a flash until I make one of these things. Oh, man. Just realized I don't have Photojojo on my blogroll. That's criminal.

P.S. Moms aren't supposed to get sick. I never remember my mom being sick. So what is wrong with me? I happen to have the major cruddies on probably J's longest day at work ever (5:30 a.m.-10 p.m. It's graduation night). He was able to break free for an hour so I could nap, but I'm literally moaning in bed right now. It doesn't help that I was popping pain killers that expired in 2004 all day. I just went to the medicine box and the freshest pills I had expired last summer.

And right on cue, Magpie just started to cry.

Update: The direct link to my Ohdeedoh post (now that it got bumped down a few spots) is here. I'm also going to paste the directions here, in case they ever remove the post from their archives.

Remember the one who got away? The love who wanted more, but you just weren't ready to commit?
If you still have commitment issues, you might fall for this temporary way to decorate walls that requires neither paint nor wallpaper nor heartache. All it takes are fabric and liquid starch to create a bold scene in your child's room.
We first took note of the magic of liquid starch last September, when Kayte, of Love Forever , adorned her walls with fabric flowers. This version lets you dictate the shape of your art, rather than following the fabric's pattern.
First, decide on an image you want to create. Look to coloring books or cookie cutters, like these, for inspiration.
Pin fabric of your choice to a wall, wrong side facing out. Our rooster friend here is made with Chocolate Lollipop, by FreeSpirit.
Now, draw the image on the back of the fabric, either by enlarging a picture on a photocopy machine to make a template; drawing it freehand; or, if you have access to an overhead projector, tracing the picture onto a transparency sheet, projecting it onto the fabric and following the lines with chalk.
Cut out the shape, flip the fabric over and begin "gluing" the fabric to the wall by applying the starch with a sponge brush. Apply it to the wall and the right side of the fabric as you go, smoothing out any ripples that form.
Once dry, your silhouette should stick to the wall until you're ready to remove it. Leave it up for years or change it to reflect the seasons or holidays.
When the time finally comes to say goodbye, peel the fabric off, wash the walls with a wet rag, and, like any good breakup, it should disappear without leaving behind a mess.

Help wanted: fix my bathroom

So our home's main bathroom isn't so bad it'd earn me a spot on a house makeover show, but it still needs some help.

We just celebrated our 1-year anniversary here, and as I've mentioned before, there's still a lot left to do. Bathrooms obviously are more expensive to fix than, say, closets, so totally revamping this one won't happen for a long time.

But what can I do in the short term to make it better? I'm looking for some instant gratification. Maybe not instant. Some soon gratification. How's that?

There are actually people who like this bathroom. They come to my house, go tinkle, and come out and say "nice bathroom." To me, though, it looks like the previous owners went to Home Depot one weekend and bought whatever was on sale. Brown marble tile. Country-ish wainscoting. Circa 1994 lighting fixtures. And a huge vessel sink that juts out into the middle of the room. Vessel sinks, by the way, are horrible, especially when you're dealing with a shorter-than-average preschooler who is potty training. I admit that occasionally, when she forgets to wash her hands, I conveniently forget to remind her.

One day, I'd like to move the plumbing to the corner and replace the sink with a concrete trough sink. The wainscoting and the fixtures have got to go. But beyond that, I'm stuck. Any ideas to make it look more modern without spending mucho dinero?

(I don't mean to gripe about a perfectly fine bathroom, but I've been spending a lot of time in there lately (see potty training above) so it's starting to consume my thoughts.)