The Big Picture

Orange Wednesday is upon us and I now realize I’ve been stuck in macro mode. After creating the above mosaic this morning I drove to work and saw color themes everywhere, particularly orange. Things that normally would have looked junky had appeal. The caution tape wrapped around a tree and blowing in the wind, the sidewalk barricade surrounded by cones, the repetition of street signs and banners. It was amazing and it made me see the world in a completely different way. I’ve really enjoyed the macro challenge and want to thank Orange Flower for organizing the event, but it’s time to move on. Maybe even take a few shots from a distance.

(This isn’t a good shot, but it was orange and made me think. If only I had extra time this morning to get out of the car and properly shoot this color coordinated semi.)

Photography Addiction

Well, it’s official. I have a photography addiction. Similar to Jennifer I’m really very sad to see Orange Flower’s 30 Day Macro Challenge come to an end. I haven’t been posting daily at this site, but you can see my photo set here or those of other challenge participants here. I think I might be heading into withdrawal even before it is officially over tomorrow. How sad is that? But I do believe it really has improved my photography skills.

So what do I do? I enter another little online photo project – Curious Bird’s Color Week. Well, I missed day one so I’m posting Green Monday here with Yellow Tuesday. It’s all really silly but I enjoy these things.

Notes on green photos (clockwise from top left) – morning frost on a small rhubarb leaf; the front hose I left out all winter, will it still work?; doesn’t everyone have a green soccer ball?; a branch of new leaves on our choke cherry tree in the front yard – I worked on this one for at least 5 minutes before I realized my macro feature wasn’t selected (apparently I haven’t learned as much as I like to think). We have no shortage of green in this household between the green obsessed preschooler and the foliage unfolding outside, so this one was easy.

Yellow on the other hand….. (again clockwise from top left) – Duplos; Mozart music cube (I love this thing); extension cords; rain boots that are too big for Eleanor but too small for Seth. I could not find a single thing that wasn’t made of plastic or rubber. Apparently it is an unnatural color in my house.

Potpourri Collage

What do you do with potpourri after the smell has faded? We make collages. Here’s the low down:

Materials

• Glue – in bottle is best. Glue sticks and such won’t provide enough contact area
• Stiff paper – card stock, paper board, you could even use the inside of a flattened empty cereal box
• Old potpourri – smell gone, but not forgotten – spread out on a plate or cookie sheet (You may want to remove any larger pieces so as to avoid an upset child that doesn’t understand why his 4″ pine cone doesn’t stick on the paper.)

Let the artiest “draw” with the glue. The younger they are the better luck you’ll have with smaller, full bottles so that hand dexterity isn’t an issue. Let said artist choose and arrange pieces of the potpourri to his or her satisfaction.

The 1st time Seth worked on this project he was more enamored with squeezing the glue out. Now that we’ve done this a few times and the glue novelty is wearing off he’s getting a bit more into the placement of the objects. However, there is still plenty more glue than necessary.

I love how this project can be whipped out at a moments notices with no prep and minimal clean up. Here’s the result of doing just that during a recent play date:

The blue background was made by a friend of Seth’s. I love how she lined up the cinnamon sticks. She did leave it behind for the glue to dry so I took the opportunity to frame it in some cheap Ikea frames. Using Command picture hanging strips I was able to hang Seth’s and have a gift ready in a matter of minutes.

Keeping Centered

There are three major things keeping me centered while I attempt to come to grips with my sister’s passing:

1. My husband – he’s taken on most of the home front responsibilities thereby giving me the time to grieve.
2. My children – I just can’t go to pieces, they need me.
3. My knitting – I don’t seem to have the energy or desire to do a lot right now. But I can knit. It’s tremendously therapeutic. I go into a zone – it’s relaxing and safe there.

So, much of my weekend was spent knitting. I started on a potential swap item using yummy Malabrigo yarn and my first pair of Addi Turbo circular needles. I may never be able to go back to regular knitting again. The needles work so smoothly and the yarn is so soft and luscious. I think I’ve been spoiled forever.

A lot of the rest of the weekend was spent laughing at Eleanor. See why here and here. I have no idea where she gets her musical preferences or dance moves. But I must say, it’s highly entertaining.

Project Night

Some wine, a creative project and a good friend. What could be better?

Altered photos

OK, I admit it. I can get completely carried away with techno geeky stuff. It’s all Martha’s fault that I just spent at least the last hour creating the amusing little things. Check out her lovely creation that got me going in the first place. But really, come on, how fun are these things?

See a couple more of my creations or try some of your own.

Sun Prints

Being at my parents always brings back memories. To top it off, they have a gigantic house filled with remnants of our past. They’re trying to pair down all the stuff in preparation for retirement and the simpler life. I’ve gotta tell you though, I almost don’t want them to. I’m proud of their efforts to reduce the material side of their life but I’ve also always been proud of how they never waste anything. All scraps and miscellany have always been kept for future projects. As we’ve always been a very prolific family when it comes to creative projects that means an unbelievable amount of miscellany. When I got the wild hair to do leaf rubbings, not only did they have the perfect materials, we ran across plenty of other inspirational items. One such was a package of Sunprint paper. Seeing as they use to sell these kits in their store which closed in 1981, this little kit was more than 25 years old. Would it still work? You betcha!

Although the kits are meant for ages 6 and up I thought we could give it a try. I’m guessing there are two reasons for this age bracket – danger of ingestion of the chemical paper and the patience needed to complete the project. Regardless it worked fine for us. As this was a spur of the moment project I, of course, didn’t read the directions very carefully and pretty much went from childhood memory. Luckily it all worked out OK in this area as well. For those of you that haven’t seen sunprints, it’s simply a chemical reaction to the sunlight hitting the special paper. We only made a couple due to that patience requirement I was talking about. That, and the fact that I didn’t want to go all gun ho only to find out the paper was too old.

The first step, in the shade I might add, was placing the paper on a board and something opaque on the paper. We then laid a small sheet of glass over the top to hold it steady. The kits actually come with plexiglass but our sheet must have been lost in the last 25+ years, so I used a small sheet of regular glass from a picture frame instead.

We left the paper for a few minutes until it turned white and then ran it under water to stop the development. I would recommend having a pot of water on hand to place the images in that you can then place a lid on to block out the sunlight. This would probably make for a more crisp print. After a few minutes under water we laid the images out to dry. As the papers dried inside I was a little worried as the whole sheet was turning blue. I guessed that the paper must have just been too old. Not the case! In fact the areas turned white by the sun then turned blue and the areas that were blue under the opaque items turned white. Obviously I had forgotten this part. We left the papers to dry on the counter and then flattened them under a heavy book and ended up with these:

Simple but still fun. This is not the best photo, still if I had read the directions and planned a little better the images would have been much more crisp. Now that I know the paper is still good, we’ll certainly be trying these again during our next visit. Maybe next time we can use some kitchen gadgets or get into my mom’s button collection to find our opaque items. I can certainly see Seth getting more into these as he gets older. It’s a nice little science experiment to boot. Check out the Sunprints gallery of images and tips page for more info.

Swap!

Functional Felt Swap partner emails have been sent out!!! See Jen’s post for more info and news on the giveaway winner!

I-Cords

I’ve been having fun with i-cords lately. I-cords are basically knitted tubes and have many uses such as handles on bags or ties on headbands. I found a felted project with i-cords that I wanted to try and started working on it last week. I thought a felted project might be an excellent first i-cord as it will hide mistakes and loose stitches. Therefore giving me practice without wasting yarn. I didn’t really think about the fact that I would need to knit twice as much as normal to give room for the shrinkage that comes along with fulling the yarn into felt. Oh well, more practice, right?

Further more, the instructions in the book (which will remain nameless) neglected to mention that I should use double pointed needles. It also forgot to tell me what size needles to use, but that’s beside the “point”. So there I am, trying to figure out how to make an i-cord with regular needles. If you’ve ever made an i-cord before your probably already laughing. For the rest of you, the reason it’s so funny is that after knitting a row you are to slide it to the other side and knit off that end. Well, if you have a knob on that end it’s pretty darn hard to knit off of it. Luckily I remembered the good old internet and found a lovely tutorial to help me out.

In the end I’m going along strongly with my i-cords. I still think felting them will be great. I also now think that i-cords would be a wonderful introduction to double pointed needles. Usually double pointed needles are used in sets of 4 or 5 and enable one to knit in the round. In the case of i-cords it’s still only 2 needles but it’s a baby step toward using the whole kit ‘n caboodle . I wish I had tried i-cords prior to jumping in with both feet to the awkward knitting in the round that a whole set of double pointed needles provides. Instead I made this plush for Eleanor (it’s also very lightly felted). I love it and enjoyed the challenge but would have appreciated breaking my teeth on something a little easier.

Assuming I pull this first i-cord project off I may try a Knitting Nancy next time to see how it compares. I found the idea through a thread of posts starting with the Crafty Crow’s mention of Zen Crafting’s Knitting Ned kid version. Has anyone out there used a Knitting Nancy and have any comments on them? Also, what do you do with i-cords? Better yet, what can you imagine doing with i-cords?

Note to Functional Felt Swapers – You should be receiving your swap partner within 24 hours. Please email Jen and I at functionalfeltswap {at} gmail {dot} com if you don’t get an email by end of day Wednesday.

Leaf Rubbings

Funny story. I, of course, stopped reading blogs for a few days. When I did start reading them again there were so many posts I mainly just skimmed and looked at pictures. One by Jean at the Artful Parent caught my eye and reminded me that I’ve been wanting to do leaf rubbings with Seth for quite some time. Had I actually read her post I might have held off. But as it was I just saw the images and it was a sunny day in a location that actually had a lot foliage unlike Minnesota right now. I tried to get Seth to collect leaves with me but he ended up falling in the lake. Don’t ask. Half an hour later I tried again but all Seth was interested in was tossing stones in the very same lake. Fine, I gathered some foliage myself, including a plaster impression of a large leaf one of my parents had made. Recognizing that Seth needs to do art on his time schedule not mine, I simply waited. Luckily things turned and he decided to join me. I think it was actually the plaster leaf that peaked his interest the most. Whether it was because Seth is a year older than Maia, the plaster leaf or that we found cool large flat rectangular crayons the project worked pretty well for us. I can see this working even better for ages 5 and up. He did request a bit of help as he tired out quickly from rubbing large images so I’d say the younger the smaller the leaf should be and sticking to just one at a time would be good as well. The large flat crayons helped with motor control and covering large surfaces more easily. Maybe use some little soap molds to make melted crayon blocks? The older the child the more complex you can get – imagine arranging leaves into the shape of a person or landscape and doing the rubbing.

When all was said and done we had 4 lovely pages and Seth wanted to make a book out of them. When he’s in the mood I’m not about to stop him so I quickly came up with a plan and grabbed a glue stick. Here’s the skinny:

Using all same size papers, these are 8 1/2 x 11 text weight, fold each page in half and one extra for the cover.

Arrange, glue and press each “signature” into place.

You should now have a stack of glued together, folded little pieces of art. 4 sheets worked well but you could probably go up to about 6. More than that would be too thick for the cover. Glue the stack to the inside of the folded cover sheet. Front to left half, back to the right half.

After a little more pressing, you’ve got a completed book! Let the child decorate the cover or title it. Don’t forget to put his or her name and the date on the backside.

The next day before we left the grandparents house I suggested to Seth that he give the book to his grandma or grandpa. Normally, he likes this idea. This time he hugged it to his chest and emphatically stated “no! it’s mine!”. I guess he liked the project. Sometimes it’s good to simply be inspired by images and go with the flow instead of always reading the “how-to”.