Finally! ...Spring arrives...

3 or 4 Black capped chickadees were scoping out this little birdhouse that Lo painted! Delightful to think of a family of birds to view, but I just stuck the birdhouse on this cut branch that is leaning in the corner of our deck-very precarious!!! We'll have to find away to secure the whole thing! It was wonderful to sit and watch them explore it while I sat in the sunshine and finished up Lo's new doll.

Unexpected beauty! Our forced branches that we glue-gunned tissue blossoms on are actually sprouting leaves!

The last few days have been GLORIOUSLY sunny and warm! 60 degrees! The snow is melting fast up on the mountains and I'm amazed at how quickly our yard melted! Within 3 days we experienced The Melting(a noticeable diminish in snow pack), The Rivers(suddenly that melt is released and our property and driveway are inundated with little riverlets), and now we are in The Bog phase(still can't kneel on the ground without getting your pants wet). Usually this is drawn out for a week or two or four. Not so this year! And it's nice. Around this time last year we had experienced similar gorgeous days that had us out on the deck playing and doing projects in shorts and tanks. And then WHAM! we got hit with 17 inches of snow! Mindblowing! HERE is the page of posts on this freak snowstorm(scroll down). Now, a year and 1 week later, we have been out on the deck drinking in the warmth and light, working on party favors for Lo's Birthday party on Sunday .

I CAN'T even imagine a snowstorm happening now.And we're finally starting to see those welcome signs of Spring! Yay! We're catching up to everyone out there in the blogoshpere who have been talking about springtime for WEEKS!!!!

Lo was begging to get her ears pierced for her Birthday(Too young! Already went that route with Dea who couldn't stomach the maintenance!) so we settled on a new hair cut-looped about 5 inches off!

IT'S EARTH DAY!!! Celebrate your Mother..

WELCOME CRAFTY CROW and SPIFFY SPOTLIGHTS READERS!!!!!

We've been gaining about 5 minutes of daylight each night since the equinox. It's still light when we go to bed now. Soon we'll be experiencing those bright Alaskan nights .....One of the bummers about there being no real darkness in the summer is that I can't adorn our deck with all sorts of pretty fairy lights and candles when we hang out or entertain. The top of our garage will someday house 2 more stories but for now Huz did a great job setting up a temporary deck. We have a great table and umbrella which would be perfect for hanging beaded votives....Oh, I have tons of ideas..but it's just not a reality here.


But for those of you living in a place where you can experience warm dark, I've got a very cool idea for groovy mood lighting in honor of Earth Day.

Recycled Pop Bottle Luminaries:

This is a gorgeous luminary for both inside and out. Make a bunch for a party on a summer's night. Perfect to line your railing or your walk. Beats the whole sand and candle in the paper bag thing. You can use a real beeswax tea light or one of those LED faux tea lights.

All you need is:
2 pop bottles
scissors
"glass" paint
sponge brush
tea light


There will be 3 pieces nested together for this luminary.


Here's what you do:


1. Leaving the base of the pop bottle intact, cut out a fun wavy design that measures about 1/3 of the way up the bottle. The bottom 1/3 is now separated from the rest of the bottle.

2. Put bottom aside for now. Or have kiddos start painting it.

3. Using the top portion of the bottle, cut off the neck part and discard. This rounded top portion of the bottle will now be the BOTTOM of this piece. Make sure the hole you have just created is big enough to handle heat and flame from the tea light.

4. Now cut wavy pattern on the new "top" portion of bottle.



5. Repeat step #1 with 2nd bottle, but this wavy design should reach over 3/4 the way up the bottle.

6. Paint your 3 pieces in any way you like. Lo and I first dabbed on the glass paint and then found it fun to use our fingers to spread it and make designs. We also just let some of the paint drip on it Jackson Pollock style.

(It was sunny and 50 degrees outside today!!! T-shirt-for-the-hearty time!)

7. When dry just nestle to 2 bases into each other, put in your light and nestle the 3rd piece on top of that.
Now make about 20 more and throw a party for whatever!








*You've GOT to check out these beautiful pop bottle plastic butterflies-PERFECT if you still have leftover glass paint and bottles!

HAVE A WONDERFUL EARTH DAY!!!!!

New additions

Yesterday, while Lo got reacquainted with her bike with training wheels, I finally spent some time on the scroll saw making the chicks I had hoped to make for her Spring basket. It was a sunny day-Spring peeking in and making itself known!-so I pulled the car out of the garage and left the garage door up so Lo could ride around in circles while I worked the saw. I also worked on this cute polar bear that I had drawn up awhile ago. He was just waiting to come alive and I was quite happy with the results! I wish I had been able to get some chicks done before our Spring celebration-they came out so cute!

I still have aspirations to start an Etsy store. I figure now that it's getting warm enough to work in the garage with the door up I can get some more stuff done. We don't have proper ventilation for woodworking so I haven't been inclined to use the saw since last fall. I have a sketchbook with drawings of many ideas for toys that I've come up with over the past year and I would like start turning those ideas into reality. I think these two are a good start! There's a lot of fine tuning and testing for quality that I'll need to do before putting things up for sale. I made several of the chicks and I'm going to play with cutting and sanding techniques on each to see which one I like the best. Two of yesterday's chicks inadvertently became crash test dummies when Lo played with them and broke the legs off of one and chipped the "toes" off of the other. Apparently the pine is too soft and I'll have to find a heartier wood to use that the saw can handle. The idea of using some natural tree fall from the property is really ecologically appealing so I'll give that a go!

I've made a variety of toys in the last couple years-some were a drag to make despite the results and some where a joy from conception to tangible. The "joyful" toys are the ones I hope to set up shop with: Puzzles, Doll houses(I have a plan for a really whimsical fairy home!), wood animals, hobby horses and naturally dyed silks to name a few.

On another note, Lo and I tried out this wonderfully tactile project found on Deep Space Sparkle: Chalk pastel flowers, where kids can create the forms of flowers by drawing with white glue. Once dried, they go to work with the pastels, blending the colors in any way they like. Instead of "drawing" with the glue bottle, I had Lo just stand up and pour the glue onto her paper. Originally meant for way older kids, I found that Lo had fun with it but did get frustrated and needed help with guiding the flow of glue to create an actual flower. It was a bit hard to do from a standing position!

We both also made an additional picture by just letting the glue drip and pour randomly on the paper and that she loved doing! Cat #1 was quite intrigued as well. She was quite pleased with the effect of being able to blend, soften and spread the colors with her fingers. Dea joined in later, having had some experience with chalk in her art class and the 2 sisters sat on the floor together for while creating more pictures sans glue.

(snail)

It was a pleasantly artful weekend! Chalkwork, animals and a new batch of homemade ice cream-Peppermint Patty! Perfect for poor Huz's soar throat. Lo is all better after 10 days of sickness-5 with a fever. Last week it was Huz's turn. I really hope I'm not next. We're going to see SPAMALOT next Friday and I would hate to miss it!

MERRY SPRING! And kiss my Keister, Bunny of Easter.

What the HELL, Spring Bunny?!??! You come into my house like you just own the place, glom a ball of my good yarn, and unravel it all over the house to make one of your "cute" and "clever" games so that the kids will follow it all around to find that it leads to their Spring Baskets?!?!? Did you ever take into consideration, Ma'am, that they would tire of trying to roll the yarn back in a ball as they followed it? And that the Smarty Pants 4 year old would just bypass your precious yarn trail 1/2 way through and go straight to the end to find the baskets?!?! All at the crack of dawn and before our morning coffee?!?! Huh, did ya?!?! You got a lotta OOGATZ, rabbit.

Well, in relation to last year's Spring celebration(Easter, to some) we did pretty well! (I cracked myself up when I wrote last year's post on my Easter preparation angst, so I'm just gonna post it here at the bottom of this post and crack myself up again.) The extent of my shopping was a quick run to FREDS to pick up a bag of chocolate robin's eggs. And then to Michael's for crafty paraphernalia. We reduced the candy in the basket factor down to the eggs and 2 quality chocolate bunnies from a local pastry shop. Silly, laughing, happy bunnies- not any drug addled freaky bunnies like the ones in the re-post below. The rest of loot betwixt the 2 girls was a puzzle, book, toenail stickers, flower garland, Sarah's Silk rainbow vail, earrings for the older kiddo's 8th grade graduation dance(high school next fall, Je-SUS.), 2 gnomes, etc. I never got around to buying a mold and making my own bunnies w/chipotle, or scrollsawing the chicks or sewing a cute bunny, but there's always next year.....or next week if I'm ambitious...

Lo is finally feeling a bit better and was very into the egg dying. We tried different techniques. We dyed wood eggs, used the bleeding tissue paper, oil pastels, sticker relief, and natural dyes from cabbage, turmeric, and the like.

Now we're taking off to NatureLady's house to eat a little lamb. Don't tell Lo what it is!

HAPPY SPRING!!!! Hope you are all having a wonderful day no matter how you celebrate!

Easter '08-Chocolate bunnies=HOLLOW

(FREAKS.)

Our family celebrates and rejoices in SPRING. EeeeeeeeeeEASTER......Meh.“Holidays” have become so tired anymore. Especially when you don’t adhere to any particular religious doctrine. Easter-another capitalistic bull-shit holiday. Easter-the epitome of obnoxious. The time of year when i could just PUKE pastels. I’ve decided that for next year I’m gonna get all Martha Stewarty and make my own damn chocolate bunnies. Shopping for Easter basket paraphernalia and the obligatory chocolate bunny at our local Big-Box Mart proved to be a surreal experience. I passed, unenthused, through aisle upon aisle of chintzy stuffed chicks and lambs, fussy foo-foo dresses, pastel schmunskies, and then on to the Isle of Chocolate Bunny Rabbit Sarcophagi . By the time I was halfway down the aisle I was wholly freaked. Repugnant rabbits! The eyes, oh those Blue and yellow EYES! Who’s the miscreant who decided on sticking candy eyes on the bunnies?!? Manic and Marty Feldmannesque! Those ocular orbits were on the verge of exploding forth from their cranial confection. They goggle all around in different directions like a chameleon’s! Those Psychedelic eyes… staring off at some other realm of existence. Those poor bastards must have eaten the brown acid… Chagrinned, I grabbed two of the least demented bunnies of the lot. "Parsnip Pete" to be exact. A kid’s gotta have a chocolate bunny in their Spring Basket, right? Upon receipt of her basket, my youngest one picked up and considered her Parsnip Pete for a moment… and promptly plucked off its eyes and ate them. “See! Now they’re friendly." She then asked her sister if she could “ have yoursez eyes?” Nope. Next year no more carny prizes. Just meaningful things. Homemade bunnies. My husband is a former/eternal pastry chef for Christsakes. Milk chocolate for the 4 year old. White chocolate for the 13 year old. And one for my hubby made with a Mayan flare! Ancho and cayenne! Chipotle! They will be ROCKIN’.

Bringing in the Spring

More spring pretties:

We're getting a little impatient for spring, now, so this past week we worked a bit more on creating our Inside Spring.

We glued some tissue paper blossoms on a branch

to go along with the ones being forced. Lo ripped little pieces from our tissue paper, crumpled them and gave a little twist to the bottom so that I could glue-gun them to the branch right on top of the actual buds. Kids can also use regular glue-it's trickier and since Lo has been sick she didn't have the patience for that! :(

Last week we started making Spring batiks on fabric. This one is quite easy. Using Elmer's glue(the blue kind that fades when dry is ideal-believe me! As you can see, we used white and it was difficult to see) kids can squeeze out or paint a Spring scene.

Lo made a flower garden on a sunny day and I made some budding birch trees. We let it dry over night and then painted them with watered down acrylics.

After drying another night we washed them to remove the glue. The colors faded quite a bit, much to Lo's chagrin, but I liked the effect! We attached them onto alder branches and left the edges of the fabric torn for a rough look. Wouldn't it be cool if they blossomed! Art in transition!

Aaaaaaaand, here we have your standard run-o-the-mill tissue paper and pipe cleaner butterflies. Perfect activity for Lo's lack of energy but quite pretty and cheering after we hung them on a branch by the window!