I haven't been able to get too much done lately, but I'm trying. I am almost finished with a custom basket that someone asked me for from Etsy. It is larger than the Easter baskets I had made previously, so it is has been a lot harder to get it to stand up presentably. I've also started a quilt for my sisters new daughter that is ready to arrive any minute now. I'm not in a hurry because it's summer and I don't think she'll be needing a quilt anytime soon. I've also put in some time trying to design a website for myself. My husband is now a computer programmer so I figured I should have my own website, but in reality, he is way too busy to make it for me, so don't expect it anytime soon. Here's some ideas I had for it...



So far I really only like the top one, the other two are too strong for me, maybe if I just toned down the colors... Which one do you vote for? In the end I'll probably come up with something like none of the above, so you can vote for that too.

Also Kim blogged about a little munchkin (who would be pouting, indignantly, right now if he knew I had called him a munchkin), and just happened to use a picture that showed a monster puppet (the one on the left) that I made for him for his birthday, back when I was going through my puppet making phase. That phase only lasted through 3 puppets, a monster, a dragon, and monkey. When I started on the monster I thought I'd make a cute little monster, that wouldn't get in the way, but as I made it, it got bigger and bigger and bigger until it was the size of a small child...oops. The monster on the left in the picture was made by his mother, it had a hole in it's belly with another smaller monster in it, in that monsters belly was yet another smaller monster. It was really awesome. The funny thing was that we both independently, not knowing what the other was doing, made him monsters for his birthday, and they were both blue and brown. I guess some things are just meant to be.

I drew this dragon here in a canoe for my father while he was in the hospital for a few days. It wasn't supposed to have any correlation to his situation. I was just drawing a dragon, and my father likes canoes, I threw in the sharks just for good measure. If you really think about it , the dragon can just fly away, so he isn't in any danger (he even has two wings!)


And a picture by my son for Grandpa. If you look closely you can see the yellow pencil marks. My son calls them "invisible", if you can see them you must have superpowers or something. I didn't ask him what the rest of the picture was about, it should be self explanatory anyway. Can't you tell?




In any case my father is home and is doing well, as long as he doesn't cough or sneeze. I'm sure he doesn't want me blogging about him, so hopefully he doesn't read my blog.

My son and I broke out the pastels yesterday, and this is what came of it, at least on my part. He drew two black waterfalls, subsequently making a very creative black mess all over his hands and the inside of one nostril.

I have a hard time drawing things with much dimension to them especially dragons, so although I only got one wing on there, I am proud of myself that I gave him two arms and his tail comes toward the front of the picture. Hooray for me, and down with anything that this guy has to say.

Here is a sketch I did, of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene, while I watched Conference. When I keep my hands busy I usually listen better. This time however my mind kept wandering to the fact that I would like to take some drawing classes, especially so I can learn to draw human figures. And when I finished and showed Dan he reaffirmed it by telling me I drew girly features. Maybe I can find a class down near my parents house...

Due to circumstances, I will be spending a lot of time at my Mom and Dads house for the next while. This means that my ability to work on "projects" will be limited. So my postings may be few and far between...I mean fewer and farther between. We'll see. The good thing is that I will get to do more crosswords. Don't worry, I won't bore you with those details.

I am not a bag toting kinda gal. I like to stick my wallet and keys in my pocket and run free without all the baggage. But I am also a mom, so I do need a bag every now and then because diapers and wipes don't fit in my pockets. I've been using the bag on the left for a long time. My mom made it for my son to take his crayons and paper, and a few small toys to church with him, but now I am the one who gets to carry this around, and it's really cramping my style. So I made a new bag. I don't think it's quite my thing either. I need something inconspicuous and much more bland, maybe I'll make this same pattern in a plain brown or black.

It has been many years since I have sewn clothes. I can only recall one skirt that I have made since high school. I almost sewed my wedding dress, but decided I didn't really want to and ended up buying one from a display at a fabric store. For some reason, I have the clothes sewing itch right now. Maybe it's because I have a little baby girl, and I've been looking at other peoples blogs who make really cute little girl clothing, also spring-like weather is very inspiring. What ever the reason, every time I go into a fabric store I tend to find something that I want to make into an outfit for my baby.

This first outfit I made turned out too big, so she'll have to wait a few months to wear it. I made the pattern up myself, gauging it against clothes that fit her right now. I guess I was lenient with the sizing because I didn't want to make it too small. I tried to try it on her, but playing dress ups with an almost one year old isn't as easy as it sounds. After the first time I put it on her she had figured things out and knew that when I approached her it was time to squeal and laugh and run, she is so silly.




This is an up-close picture of the print on the fabric. I am a sucker for thistles. I grew up playing in them. I would recommend a yard of thistles, before a lawn with rose bushes, any day.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, you're stinkin heavy, please don't fall.

My big brother made this mirror for me a long long time ago, back when he worked for Ironies. It is super heavy, being made out of cement and glass. Unfortunately, he initially forgot to put the hook on the back. Fortunately, before the cement had hardened too much he remembered. Unfortunately, he didn't have the time to center it correctly. Thus it hangs a wee bit askew, okay, it is crazy crooked. One of these days I'll figure out a way to hold it straight, right now I'm just too much in shock over the 84 holes I had to try before I gave up finding a stud. I ended up using a special picture hanging device found at the hardware store that says I don't need a stud.

11 more to go.

It is rare that I am ready for a holiday on time. I actually don't even like holidays, but for some reason here I am doing Easter things before St. Patricks day. I've been making cloth Easter baskets.

I was pretty happy with the first one I made, and I thought it would be cute to see my little girl walking around with it. So as she wandered into the kitchen whining a little I handed it to her. 2 seconds later she had filled it with barf. Not just baby spit up, but genuine stomach flu bile. She's got great aim. Thus began an absolutely non-productive week of simply holding the baby. We are now back on track, and I have completed 3 more baskets. I'm trying to sell them on Etsy. We'll see how it goes. If they don't sell, well then, I have 3 gift bags ready for Easter. (Don't worry the one the baby barfed in is not being sold)

Two Quilts

The green one on the left is the quilt I made for a little nephew of mine a while back, the other one is the quilt that I just finished for my little niece Harmonica (my son is convinced that is her real name.)

Here is Harmonica's quilt opened up. It's a fairy and a dragon having a little tiff. I think the dragon must have said something unkind about the fairy's mother and she rightly challenged him to a duel.




And here is the other quilt. It's a dragon attacking a helicopter, over a city, or maybe the other way around. In any case, I'm pulling for the dragon.

Old stuff again. Just trying to keep everyone entertained while finishing my latest project. This is a drawing I did for my Uncle a while back. No, I don't know the story behind the picture,. Why don't you tell me?

Nothing Current

I am currently working on a baby quilt for one of my siblings new arrivals, and it won't be done for a while. So in the mean time, here is something I painted many moons ago for a color theory class.

It took me days to make these silly things for Relief Society so I figured I should blog about them. I hope they don't scare anyone away from attending this event, they might be too wild for some of the reserved women in our ward. Oh well, that's what they get for asking me to do it.

They took me so long to make because I still haven't gotten the hang of this new program we have called Fireworks, it's very similar to Photoshop, but I hadn't ever really gotten the hang of Photoshop to begin with, plus it's not a program geared towards printing, it is more for webdesign. Here is some of the art I was trying to copy the style of, and I emphasize trying.

http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-10927p1.html

Christmas is now officially over. I finally finished my sons Christmas present.







I gave it to him on Christmas morning, looking pretty shabby, with the promise that I would finish it later. In all actuality he probably didn't even need me to finish it. He was happy to play with it when it was just raw plywood. But to satisfy my own need, I had to spend countless hours working on it.

I had pictures of the castle's progress as I went along, but some mean person decided to accidentally wipe the drive clean on our computer where I keep all my stuff... (just a reminder to everyone to back up all the important stuff on your computer especially all those precious pictures of your kids.) Fortunately we got most of it all back, it's just impossible to find anything... grrrrrrrr...

So this is how I made it: We had an old 3/4 inch plywood door out in the barn that we took out of our house when we remodeled. I cut out all the main walls for the castle out of this wood, I used my table saw for this feat. I am lucky that I didn't cut off my fingers numerous times. I need to take a class or get some better instruction on how to safely use this great piece of machinery. Not only did I imperil my fingers during each cut, but I also made so many misplaced cuts that my motto became "Good thing this is going to be covered in paper mache!"

And so it was. After I screwed the whole thing together, I put a layer and a half of paper mache over the whole thing, using the strips of paper and glue method. Then I used the method of making a pulp out of paper in the blender and adding glue to make the stones.

Then I painted the whole thing and sprayed it with a sealing coat of varnish.

Last of all I made a little prison door out of wire because my kid likes to throw bad guys in jail. He's such a great kid. The other day he announced that he was going to catch all the bad guys and teach them math. He is of the belief that if you educate your inmates they are less likely get back in trouble. We'll see how his program works on these bad guys...

Done. Done. Done. The white quilt is done! I washed it and it didn't fall apart or shrink in a funny way! Now I would like to sell it, any buyers? If I charge 50 cents per hour, it should cost approximately $3,474,575,688.44

Here is the book.

I hereby declare this year, the Year of the Wall Hangings! And to kick it off I have created its very own logo.



Ever since Dan and I got married we have pretty much just had one picture hanging on our wall. The picture of George Washington praying beside his horse. Dan bought this from the bookstore up by the Oakland Temple back in the day when he had freedom and money to spend on things like that, that was before we got married. I really like the picture, but I hate the frame it is in. Dan swears that it is the best frame in the whole wide world, so I am stuck with it. It could be worse.



Since we remodeled this house, we have not pounded one single nail into any of the walls, I think I will cry when we finally do. That means I should cry at least 12 times this year. Once per month. This year my second New Years Resolution is to hang one thing on a wall every month...or just 12 things total. (My first resolution, as it is every year, is to be nice to Dan.)

Sounds easy right? Not for me. It isn't just the little tiny hole in the newly patched and painted drywall that holds me back. I have to have just the right thing to hang. It has to meet certain criteria. It has to be the right colors, it has to have a good frame, its subject matter must be of some importance to me, and most importantly I have to like it. This last is very arbitrary, I like some things one minute and hate them the next, so it will have to catch me at just the right moment and keep me liking it until I actually get it on the wall. Not easy at all.

And to make it even harder, I have a list of all the other projects I would like to finish this year to compete with all these wall hangings. Starting the year off I have two major projects that I have to finish from last year ASAP. One is my sons Christmas present and the other is the white quilt I first blogged about (I am so close to being done with it.)

I will accept submissions for wall hangings, but then I will most likely reject them all, or hang them in an inconspicuous corner or the house or in the garage like the mystery painting found in my parents garage...(This painting might have been found in my grandparents house, somehow I got it and just don't know. If anyone in the family knows...?)

This is the wall I want to cover the most, due to the large gray electrical box on it. I've got a few ideas running around my head as to what to put there. Unfortunately all the ideas will take me millions of hours to complete.

At long last. It is done. That secret project that Kim and I have been working on is finally done. I wrote a story for my little niece that was born way back in March. I had started it even before that, hoping to get it done as a present to congratulate her for being born. I didn't get it done on time, and since I had my baby shortly after, the project has drawn on and on until now 9 months later it is finished.

This is how it all went down. I wrote the story, Kim amended it a bunch and other people made a few suggestions. (Dan, my husband, wouldn't even read the whole thing, because he is too manly, so he doesn't get any credit for it's content, but he does get a big Thank You for keeping our baby happy while I was working on it.) Then I illustrated it and scanned all the pictures into the computer and arranged them with the proper words from the story. Then I had Kim and the great and notorious Sha'Niqua make some final changes to the text. After that I was ready to print and bind the book. I would have just stapled it all together and called it good, but luckily Kim's expertise stepped in and we were able to do it right with real book binding materials. So now it looks like a real book, (one of these days when the battery in our camera is charged I'll get a shot of the finished product).

Here are some of my favorite pages. The story doesn't even mention a dragon, but I tend to like to include dragons in just about everything I do, so the fairy is riding on a water dragon across a pond chasing a Wish.





And in this picture the fairy is pulling an earthworm out of the ground, this isn't especially my favorite picture, but I like the fact that the dirt around the worm, isn't neccesarily dirt, it's worm poo. Hooray! I also think it's funny that when people see this picture they ask whether she is putting the worm in the ground or taking it out. What do you think?
On Christmas day I was very happy to finally be able to hand the present over to my little niece who I think would rather eat it than read it. She has the only signed copy of it in the whole world. That should make it worth millions! Unfortunately since we accidently bound a few pages out of order it's worth was diminished and it's value is really only a good read and a bit of attention for me!

An up and coming project. A pair of angry ducks, with arms, made out of tin foil. Don't worry, these creatures should look a lot better when they are done.

Nacho Cheese in a #10 can. This is a blog for Kim. I could probably hack into her blog and post it there, but she only gave me permission to do that once, and I won't betray that trust.

Last night Kim brought up the topic of really big cans of Nacho Cheese sauce. You know the kind that's only one molecule away from being plastic. She said our brother was willing to go in on a can, but they needed one more participant to be willing to eat the stuff so that it got eaten before it turned into toxic waste. I enthusiastically agreed. Sometimes, I buy the little cans, but that's not a cost effective way to chisel years off a healthy life span.

When Kim brought up this blessed topic, my husband asked something along the lines of "You mean the stuff that has a freezing point, and hardens at about 80 degrees?" And I answered "Yup, and it turns to a gas at approximately 98.6 degrees..."

Now you might think this topic has no place on my blog, it doesn't follow my theme, but you are wrong. It just so happens that Kim had come over to help me with one of my projects. It's a secret one so I can't tell you what it is, until it is done. Lets just say that it's punctuation and sentence structure will be much more correct than my blog.

In my house we have priorities. Lego's come first. And you don't bother "Mom" while she is playing with them.

Usually we just have the big Lego's out, that way we don't have to worry about the little carpet cleaner getting them in her mouth. But the other day the older brother asked, "Mom, can I help you clean the whole house so that we can get the little Lego's out?" To this I heartily agreed, thinking it would be nice to have help and motivation to clean the whole house, I guess I didn't remember that he was only 4 and he was done cleaning with me after about 5 minutes. The whole house didn't get clean, just the play room, and we did get the little Lego's out.

So that is what I have been doing for the last 2 days. Playing Lego's and fishing them out of the baby's mouth. Talk about idle projects...

Remember that spandex blanket that I said I was going to make a while back, well I have finished it. I spent way more time on it than I meant to, and I am not happy with the results. I had been looking for affordable spandex for quite some time and finally found two pieces that would work at DI (Deseret Industries). One of them was pretty small so it limited the size of the blanket to baby size, which is good because it would have taken me a life time to finish it if it had been a large blanket. For a couple of days my kitchen table was the meeting place for polystyrene beads and bread crumbs. The rest of the house had it's share of those little static charged clingy white balls. The baby crawled around with them stuck to her bottom, we shied them away from our dinner and I even pulled one out from between my teeth one night as I was flossing. I tried my hardest to finish this project quickly and completely so that my marriage might be spared.

Here it is, don't laugh...



In this picture you can see better how it's made up of lotsa bumpy cells.



Some people like to ask what the black dots are. If you are one of those people the answer is simply, black dots. Or you can pretend that they are nuclei.

This is one of those things that I don't want to keep around the house, but I can't just go throw it in the trash. It would make an excellent White Elephant gift, maybe I'll throw a white elephant party just to get rid of it.

This is my husbands Pinewood Derby car. I made all the little items to go on top. It's just like in real life. He provides the car and I pack it full of junk. I especially liked the little igloo ice chest on back. Needless to say, he didn't win any of the races, too many potty stops at each and every rest stop along the way.

This is what I did this morning. I was having a bit of trouble with Mary's face, as you can most likely tell, and I gave up in frustration leaving it a muddy mess. I'm pretending like I meant for it to look that way, so don't make fun of her.

On another note, I have realized that Kim is out of the country and won't be posting any blogs for a while. Thus, she has diverted all her traffic to me. I hope, that by the time she returns, I will have brainwashed you all into believing that Kim never even existed. You will be all mine, mine, mine!

...o.k., o.k., we all know this isn't going to happen, we all love Kim and I am just no substitute ...sigh... (this pity thing is one of my brainwashing techniques) Poor me...

I accomplished another project!

I was contacted this morning with a request to make a campaign ad for my favorite senatorial candidate. The ad was past due in order to get it into the paper on Monday, so it was a rush order. I got the baby fed and down for a nap, locked the older one in his room for the morning and then got busy...




...I didn't actually lock him in his room all morning, just until he stopped crying about something silly. Then he happily played Monopoly by himself and ate Halloween candy. The baby, on the other hand, woke up and made things difficult.

If I had more time I would have solved the problem of that funny dark blue box with the white letters. It's kinda ugly and cumbersome. Oh well, there wasn't time.

I don't know how this is going to look printed on newsprint. You can find out for yourself if you subscribe to the Salt Lake Tribune, or the Deseret News.

I have acctually finished a project! Or at least I am calling it finished. If I gave into my perfectionist tendencies I would start all over and redo the whole thing from the beginning, or put it away in a box and figure I'll fix it later. Fortunately I am not giving in (this is why I am not really a perfectionist, I rarely give in.) I am calling this project done. And I am even finished way before my deadline.

For the past week my kitchen table has looked like this:




My kitchen table still looks like that. Some day when I can afford it I am going to stop renting out my basement and use that for these kinds of messes so that I don't have to share project space with peanut butter, enchiladas and cookie crumbs. (Don't ask me for the recipe, it's an old family secret.)

This is what came out of the mess:






It was not my intention that this dragon costume look so mean and evil. Hopefully my son doesn't have nightmares about himself dressed as a dragon coming to eat himself. There is a really adorable dragon costume being sold for mega bucks by Pottery Barn. Lets just say that if I was aiming to copy that costume, I really missed my mark. Oh well, its done, and my son really likes it, he asks if he can wear it all the time. I think I'm going to have to make him one to wear just for fun since this one isn't easily washable.


Here is one kid slaying the other kid with his dagger (note: it is not a sword, the kid with the sharp implement has been correcting me all day when ever I mistakenly call it a sword, it is most definitely a dagger.)




And here is the kid who is the littlest dragon slayer. She knows of a little striped dragon that lives in a lair under her castle. Come Halloween that little dragon better watch out!



It seems as though there are dragons popping up all over the place around here. Those dragon slayers had better sharpen their daggers and keep on the lookout.