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.

Here is something I made a long time ago for a contest. It is a time machine. I didn't win the contest.

Just so you'all don't think I really am that idle and that I acctually do accomplish important things in my life I wanted to post this little bugger:




And here is what my young'n made (In case you can't tell, it's a compost pile):



This little activity with modeling clay has inspired many more ideas for more projects with modeling clay, one involves a really fun website that is going to make me and Kim and my brother Brent a lot of money...that is, if we ever do it.

If you are here, you probably know that the name of my blog is different than it used to be. Of course you may not have ever known that the old name ever existed, and that is okay, you'll live. Or maybe you won't, but don't blame me.

One night I lay in bed trying to come up with a name and I thought up "Project-aisle" or "Project-isle" I later found that these names, or words together, have already been used by someone on the internet, so I didn't want to claim them for my own. I mentioned the name to Kim and she thought I said Project-idle, which is a much more fitting name than the other spellings. That's what this blog is all about...projects that I'm not acctually doing. So now all I have to do is find a way to incorporate projectiles into my post so that the name can truly fit, maybe it's time that I started shooting the bow my husband got me for my birthday a long long time ago. In order to do this I'll have to start working out because the reason I haven't used my bow previously is because I'm not even strong enough to pull it back...I'm a wimp. My baby isn't helping either, she's way to scrawny, I think I'm getting weaker everytime I pick her up. If I start working out then I won't have time to blog, which was the whole reason to start shooting the bow in the first place. Man it's amazing how complicated life is.

A funny thing just happpened. First I was thinking, I should post something to my blog, so I clicked on the create a new post button, and then I sat there for a minute not knowing what I wanted to say. And then I remembered I want to change the name of my blog. A few certain someones have pointed out it's closeness in spelling to a term I don't wish to have any association with. So I went to get my trusty dictionary off the shelf so that I could come up with some ideas for a new name. On my way into the other room to pick up my dictionary I passed the unfinished white quilt and thought about the next project I was going to work on. I realized it was Labor day and Jo-Annes craft and fabric store would probably be having a sale. I thought, "Maybe that one kind of fabric I need for that one blanket I wanna make is an affordable price..." I couldn't remember what the fabric was called, for some reason I can never remember the name of that fabric. Maybe it is because I used to wear flourescent pink bikershorts with a black stripe down the sides, made out of this fabric, to school in the fifth grade, and I am trying to blot out that period of my life. After getting the dictionary and deciding that I'll go to Jo-Annes today I sat down again in front of the computer and randomly opened the dictionary to the section where all the words happen to start with the letter S. My eyes scanned the pages... sozzled -not a good word to know, it wouldn't be good in scrabble... a bunch of words starting with space, including a picture of a space shuttle... spancel-a noosed rope with which to hobble an animal... spandex... (insert vinyl record scratching sound) WHAT? That is the name of the fabric! I have taken this as a sign that this is truly the next project I should work on. That's right, a spandex blanket!

There is a little more to it than just spandex, the details will come out when I acctually start making it. In the mean time, I'm going to continue trying to come up with a new name for my blog. If you have any suggestions feel free to make them, but keep in mind that I don't think anyones ideas are good, except for my own.