Interpretations

Inspired by a recent trip to LACMA in Los Angeles, and more specifically a room-sized racecar exhibit called Metropolis II, we have been filling idle moments this Easter break by trying to create our own high rise car track.  Was it just a little over ambitious to reassure the boys that it was possible? Avoiding the rain earlier this week, we scoured the local home improvement store for just the right material. There were grand plans about twists and turns and impressive loops plus an escalator to raise the cars to their starting position (as in the genuine article). Our interpretation doesn't quite have the complexity of Chris Burden's installation, nor the evocation of 'the stress of living in an dynamic, active and bustling 21st century city' but still, it's fun to see what can be done with a length of garage door weatherizing strip (draught excluder if we are being bilingual about it!)

Because Instagram is so much fun...

I'm probably the last to catch on to the Instagram app - the one which can make your phone photos have the grainy history of something circa 1970.  Someone asked for a photo of our clothespeg snowmen and that seemed like a good excuse to use it here - et voila. These were copied from others given to me by my Mum many years ago (not quite 1970). Dom's old shirts are getting so much milage (bunting, bags, hats, gift wrap...) and here they are again as scarves for our little gathering. I asked Max what the collective noun for a group of snowmen might be - maybe a 'frosting'?

A whole lot of making...

There are so many inspiring blogs from people making things.  I get my fixes mostly from here and here but of course those sites can lead you to all sorts of other great places. I'm annoyed I never really took this therapeutic activity very seriously.  My problem is that I like the challenge of making something once, and then I get bored if I have to make it again, so I can never produce very much of the same thing.  This Christmas has been pretty crafty though. The boys got totally overexcited about decorating the tree this weekend. I had to remind myself, 'this is Christmas' as I watched them teeter on the arm of a chair (even while I berated them) to try and put a decoration on the topmost branch.  'This is Christmas', making a wreath with Oli and Jack in the afternoon sunshine, compiling our annual most-listened-to music to share, the excitement about making pastry for the mince pies and listening to carols and Christmassy compositions. Christmas cannot be condensed into one day. It is the snowman decorations that Max and Oli are loving making, it is the unorthodox present for Jack that they are helping with (check back after the 25th to find out), it is the debate about religion that emerges when Max asks, 'is Jesus dead?', it is the den the boys built this morning by the nativity scene or in Max's words, 'near merry Jesus', it is the cake we have yet to decorate, it is the many nights when the sitting room is lit just by fire and fairy lights, it is all the making and decorating, the chat and love and fug.

A wreath

We have a new wreath! After many years of gathering greenery and twisting it into the semblance of a circle and then watching it quickly fade to brown in the late Californian sunshine on our south facing front door, I decided on a different approach.  A ball of yarn and some felt balls, which should survive the sunshine and since there's a porch, won't have to brave the rain. It is a hash-up of some fun wreaths I saw while idling online. Oli was the chief architect, picking out the wool and helping me with the balls.

Felt balls are funny little things; fairly pointless but still fun to make.  I'm reminded of an article by the talented Catherine Newman where she made some disparaging comments about felt balls, or perhaps the makers of felt balls - didn't they have anything better to do? (I can't for the life of me remember where I read the piece - possibly Brain Child - but you can read more of her stuff here.)  What then, am I doing, finding time to make felt balls? The fact is, it's a gentle innocuous activity at this time of year with a three year old. We made them in the sunshine with a bowl of soapy hot water. Jack, on the other hand, went off-script and tried several times to baptize himself, at one point even trying a reverse-tip-back technique - he is nothing if not determined! It kept us all entertained for a sunny half hour.

Crafting quickly...

I think it was in The Creative Family that I read about 'crafting quickly'. If I had it my way, I'd do nothing very quickly. Although I'm a keen multi-tasker I like to take time to do anything. But parenting has made me quick to realise that if you spend too long in procrastination and then some more in preparation you will never get anything done. With that in mind, I introduce to you to our first Hallowe'en decoration, Mr Bones...

He is small fry by comparison to our decorative neighbours. Most houses near us have spiders the size of doors climbing up the exterior walls and have polyester cobwebs that appear to seal the entrance to their homes. There are Frankensteins and severed limbs, black cats with wild green eyes and pumpkins inflated on the rooves. As I write this I realise I should take some photographic evidence of this stuff - next year.  Oli, who I believed was scared of nothing has taken it upon himself to be terrified of Mr Bones, though he saw that he was made (in less than half an hour) with that All Blacks T shirt (sorry, Sally Anne, you knew Dom would never wear it!) and how we stuffed him with old socks and stuck a pole in him so he'd sit up straight. But perhaps that's simply scary in itself - to make a little body, larger than Oli's - out of relatively nothing and stick a pole up his bottom to make him behave.

Distractions

Lots of things have been keeping me from writing recently. Not just boys, but work on the house - I'm trying to avoid renovation posts in this blog but you can intermittently follow our progress over here. Another distraction has been that the computer has been out of action with hard drive problems and then logic board issues, then I was back to the shop yesterday with software problems. All very time consuming for those precious free hours.  I did snatch some sewing minutes over the past week or so, and dedicated them to making yet another hat.  The repurposed jeans that became a sun hat last summer did not survive the chaos that ensued when Jack was born - I think it was lost at school and by the time my brain was functioning enough to ask the teachers about it, it was winter and raining and no-one had seen a sun hat in weeks.  Earlier this year I hastily made a Christopher Robin style one - call it speed crafting - it's floppy and suits our resident AA Milne fan, but then I found the perfect pattern and had to give it a go - even though it talked about poplin and involved interfacing. But for the $2 cost of the interfacing an old shirt became a hat...

It turned out to be for Oli and his larger than average head circumference. He seems to love it and I'm sure it's because he helped with the sewing. He was controlling the stitch of my sewing machine saying 'red light', 'green light' as I stopped and started the foot pedal. He was also adjusting the stitch size and tension when I wasn't looking which was a little less helpful.

Make Do...

Last night I had my geometry set out; compass, set square, protractor. I was trying to design a pattern for a sunhat.  Send Max out for a minute in the sunshine without a hat, even if he's slathered in factor 50 and his ears start bubbling. It's not pretty, let alone healthy.  The past few years have seen lots of sunhats grace our home, but they seem to go missing with alarming frequency.  So rather than buy yet another one to lose to the wind, it seemed only right to turn to my bag of fabric scraps and my trusty geometry set.
Various parts of my super soft Seven jeans that ripped at the knees (and elsewhere...) have now been reincarnated in my attempts to patch up my childrens' clothes, and I thought I'd use the last remnants to test out a hat pattern.   And so the Recycled Seven jeans sunhat was born.
While I was pouring over my tracing paper and trying to remember some rusty facts about circumferences and radii (is that the plural of a radius?) it occurred to me that making clothing patterns would have been a much more sensible use of my GCSE Maths class than struggling with vectors, which always alluded me.  What about it Mrs Scott, in your apricot pencil skirt?
Turns out pattern making is, in fact, a lot harder than actually just sitting down and making a hat. 3D is somehow more meaningful than 2D. I cut a beautiful circle with a 16cm radius (yes, it is radii, but you don't need it in the plural) and then I fairly quickly abandoned the paper and mathematics and just got on with making the hat.

I think the finished article still needs some work but it's hot these days and we are in need of the hat, so it is prematurely off the production line and being put to use.  It was actually meant to be the 'test' hat that I would then remake in nicer fabric, but then Max gave me a hand at the sewing machine while Oli was sleeping, and decided he wanted that hat, his hat and no other.  Working at a sewing machine with a four year old is both enlivening and infuriating. There were lots of questions about the mechanics of the machine, particularly about the foot and the little jagged bits that help feed the fabric under the needle.  It reminded me that there are parts of the machine I still don't fully understand or know the names of, and it is especially useful having the very person you are designing for so close to hand.  His head was almost permanently in my way.  Less useful is it, when you look on the floor for a dropped pin and find your stitch and tension adjusted by the time you sit back up again.  Luckily the spool ran out half way through so we had the very exciting diversion of putting thread on a bobbin.
And now I'm feeling like quite a hat-making veteran.  Last Christmas my dad got a home-made version of a Breton fishing cap to replace an old, ripped, rotten one that had blatantly been loved too much. I stole it from his fishing cellar and set to work on a replica.   Today, recycler of old jeans; tomorrow, milliner to all the family...

Mending

Miss Harvey.  Imagine a woman with a full waist, a full floral skirt and a chin full of whiskers.  Mrs Tiggywinkle, in fact. In my mind she wore sensible laced shoes and nude tights, probably stockings, and a cardigan even on the hottest days.  Her chin fell off her face to her ample chest and wobbled when she talked.  It seemed that she was always smiling, or chuckling, at least to us kids and calling us 'ansome'.  Did she wear glasses? I feel she must have, she was surely in her seventies and spent most of her time sewing. The combination must have resulted in the little round spectacles I remember.  Yes, she wore them on a string, like a necklace. The fact that she came to sew for my mother for a week in the summer seems alarmingly antiquated, but there you go.  Thinking about her brings back some of the magic of the summer term at school.  What was it that made it so special?  The summer uniform, a turquoise cotton tunic which meant we didn't have to wear a tie.  Or was it that we were allowed to play in the school garden rather than on the concrete parking area? There was a tyre swing at the bottom of the hill and endless shrubs to hide in.  Maybe it was athletics and the build up to sports day.  Or that when we came home it was still light for hours and the combine harvesters rumbled on past bedtime.  Was it knowing Miss Harvey was at home, perhaps even sewing something for me, for one precious week? My mother will say she mainly hemmed curtains and mended bedsheets. But I know she sewed me a tutu, with candy pink voile. I remember posing for photos in it, standing on the hot slate outside the kitchen windows.  I think I might have insisted on wearing it til bedtime. I have a horrible feeling it was too tight for me. Not so Cinderella after all.  I think Miss Harvey had to let a seam out.  I do remember that I got my pet rabbit's claw stuck in the trim and blood on the shimmery silk.  I wonder if I wore it again, I was no Darcy Bussell. I have a vague memory of an actual ballet performance - just the one - I was the marshmallow at the back.
In her youth, I think Miss Harvey had worked for my paternal great grandmother - as a full time seamstress? The luxury of it! Surely I must be in line to inherit a mansion somewhere. But perhaps I have it wrong.  I know she was proper Cornish and by the time I was observing the detail of her chin and wondering if I too would grow whiskers, she had decided to never again leave the county.  I think it was she who announced 'I don't go abroad no more', meaning she wouldn't travel north of the Tamar.  Beautifully put.  My mother tells me that as a teenager she was advised by her aunt not to marry her sweetheart or she'd be 'dead before she was 21.' We are only left to wonder whether the aunt was particularly vicious or especially insightful and wonder too about the boy and what became of him.  Miss Harvey never married.  All this has come back as I sit mending endless pairs of boys trousers.  Dom's been away this week so it's occupied my evenings - what a riveting life I lead - but I admit the idea of sewing for an hour is a lot more appealing than a morning out shopping, with or without a boy or two.  And you know, I think I've found the method for a near perfect patch...Miss Harvey would be proud.

Handmade(ish) Christmas

Last year we managed to make some wrapping paper and a reindeer pop-up card (too taxing to repeat), oh, and of course the CD of Max's favourites. This year...well that might give too much away. Happy Christmas!

Good enough to eat?

Not sure about the colour of the icing, but the glace cherry looks very convincing. It's actually soap. Max and I could well have stumbled on a winning homemade Christmas gift idea. Hot layers of melted glycerine poured into a cup cake mould.

Plywood reality

Oh, will you just look at this! The Garage has been completed. It has a lift and a ramp and perspex in the windows and an awning thing where the pumps are meant to be, and a tunnel.  Breathless enthusiasm?  Trust me, Max is almost as excited as I am.  Don't ask me what the cars are doing over the pump shelter when there's ample parking on the roof; or why there's a petrol pump and another vehicle on top of the elevator.  I think the police have it in hand.


I know what you're thinking; it could do with a lick of paint.  But Max kept asking me if he could test it out and I thought, you know that's not such a bad idea; if he immediately overcranks the elevator it's better that I mend it before I've glued the roof on.  But in the end he's been surprisingly gentle with it, although aggressively territorial.  And I'm going to leave the paint job for another time.

Plywood dreams

I need to frame a memory for you, a memory I have of a man called Pop.  When I was growing up, Pop lived across the road from us, in a cottage in the yard. The cottage was part of the farm we lived on (although it no longer functioned as such).  Pop was in his eighties, or at least very old, and he lived with Jean and Tom.  He wasn't our Pop, but he was presumably theirs, and it didn't cross my mind that we should call him anything else.  Jean helped clean our house, and Pop sometimes came over to join her for a mid-morning coffee and to eat drippings of lard on toast.  He always wore blue nylon overalls; the uniform of the nearby tannery where he'd worked in younger years.  The smell of the leather-curing chemicals lingered in the fabric.
Pop kept bantams and spent most of his time in a small shed which backed onto our chicken run.  He sometimes threw seeds and bread rusks to the birds over the stable door.  Inside his shed, the whitewashed dry stone walls were dark with dust and cobwebs. The sheets of corrugated plastic on the roof were covered in dirt and the place had the musty, fungal smell of droppings and feathers.  Jam jars of shrapnel, nails and netting staples were balanced on makeshift shelves.  Pops' bantams roosted above him on a support beam and the floor was wood chippings and sawdust.  It was not a place in which I ever lingered, but that gave it a curious appeal.
Pop's shed didn't beat my dad's for size or tool quantity.  In dad's shed the rafters were packed with coils of rope, rolls of chicken wire and folded fruit netting. Any size of hammer, spanner, chisel or screwdriver was available, snugly held between nails in the walls.  The work bench was as thick as a mattress and deeply etched with the scars of earnest sawing.  Dad's shed smelled of creosote and weed-killer and produced things on a grand scale like guttering systems, paint-stripped grandfather clocks and pheasant coups.  But Pop's shed produced toys; plywood creations for my brother and I.  Tool sheds were indeed wonderful.
Among Pop's toys for us there was a dolls house; two levels, four rooms. I loved it even though Barbie's legs stuck out of the window if she lay down in her bedroom.  He also made a fort for my brother.  I think Jos can still summon up the fury he felt when unjust parental arbitration meant that I was allowed fort-playing time - even though it was his.  The last creation was a stable that, having no interest in horses and being more familiar with cows, we turned into a bull pen.
With that shared, it might go some way in explaining why I decided, that in the absence of a San Franciscan Pop, it should fall to me to make my children a building out of plywood.  I've chosen a garage because cars have had an enduring presence in our house for a while now.  Here's what I should have known before I started:
A project like this should NOT be attempted without a tool shed.
We do not have a tool shed.
It really is cheaper and much, much quicker to buy a toy garage for your child.
If you produce a saw, a three year old will want to have a turn.
Working out the size of a drill bit in fractions of an inch is beyond my maths skills.
Max and Oli will have moved on to Star Wars before the project is actually finished.

Some scraps of fabric and a bucket of sand

It's a door-stopper in it's middle age, a little saggy around the waist but still does the job. Inspired by a similar one in a shop in St Mawes, my parents became the recipients of my craft efforts earlier this month; something to stop a sou'westerly banging all the doors closed when you're having supper outside and trying to keep an ear out for sleeping children.

Pillow Talk

I'm in haste to post something, anything to be honest. There's been a creative dearth in this house for a while and I need to put an end to it. I blame it on the streptococcal germs that put me in bed for a full 4 days last week. Thanks guys. Now they've gone and so far we've managed to avoid the bout of 'chicken pops' that's laid a few others low around here. ('Is that like lollipops?' Max asked) With a long haul flight not too far ahead of us I am hoping, please, for some continued health and happiness. And to celebrate my own good health I have finally finished a floor cushion I've been making. It's taken weeks. I took this project very slowly and very carefully in order not to screw it up and end up consigning it to the basement. I took it so very carefully but still managed to cut the initial panels out an inch short. But I'm fairly happy with the finished article, and Max seems pretty snug on it too...

Credit crunch casuals

Here we have classic recession wear, Dom's XL jumper, felted in the wash, now in the new-look junior range. Not sure about the fashion photography, especially with the the curtain pulley as choking hazard illustration, but you have to admit the fashion is pretty fetching.
I had 'felting' as one of those craft ideas I might try one day when I had a spare inch of brain space and half an hour to myself. Then like a ray of sunshine on the rug, it was suddenly upon me. I gathered up all the jumpers that I'd even stopped wearing on the daggy days when I wasn't planning to see anyone (except the kids, oh and Dom of course). I put them on a hot wash and waited. Nothing happened. So, it turns out they were all felted already. I should have just trusted my lazy laundry gene (The part of my DNA sequence that goes I'll-just-put-it-in-the-machine-this-once-and-next-time-I-promise-I'll-hand-wash). The great thing about felting is that it doesn't need hemming either so I cut and sewed this jumper in about 5 minutes. Voila. Only 4 more jumpers to reversion, now I'm just waiting for that ray of sunshine again.

The Wigwam

It was meant to be ready for the birthday party - and I was actually quite curious to see how it stood up to the test of 5 three year olds mauling it - but it wasn't to be. I have now finished it though. Five poles and two pairs of Dom's old jeans. It was too hot outside earlier so we set it up in the kitchen. I'm waiting for the call that 'Daddy's trousers have fallen down!' when the stitching fails but Max seems more interested in enjoying rather than destroying...

It's in the bag...

Rule Number 1: Do not attempt a sewing project at nine thirty at night after 2 glasses of champagne.
I know, we're in recession, but there are still things to celebrate...and the other night, having not shown my sewing machine the daylight for months, it was suddenly of the utmost importance to start and finish a sewing project within the hour. Dom had very sensibly taken himself off to bed. I, on the other hand, was switching feet, jamming spools, adjusting tension and snipping through the thread I'd used in endless attempts to sew up one of his trouser legs. I mean, surely there are only 2 or 3 ways in which you can sew the wrong sides of the fabric together - I seemed to create infinite possibilities of error. Back to the sewing up of the trouser leg...this was not my version of an April Fool (although it's given me a very good idea - I haven't done a really well-crafted April Fool in years...) No, I found this project online - it's where you make a bag for your yoga mat out of an old pair of trousers. Well, for some reason, I've been keeping some old cords of Dom's that are threadbare at the crotch and now I know why; they are crying out to begin a lifetime's commute to yoga with me. But even though there was a step by step guide, with photo illustrations and v e r y s i m p l e instructions, my yoga bag had considerable trouble emerging from the crysalis that was, until this evening, just a trouser leg. But tonight I finally managed to finish the project - how hip did I feel watching the Oscars with a needle and thread in hand? Ladies, gentlemen and members of the Academy, I give you the finished article...

Thrifty thinking...

I'm a self confessed hoarder but even I was surprised when I found a pair of socks - with huge holes in the heels - that I had bought in Peru about ten years ago. Why hadn't I thrown them out? Oh well, it turns out, when sewn together, they make a rather fetching draught excluder!

Wrapping it up

This kept Max busy for a good ten minutes...we got out a set of stamps and went to town on the packing paper I saved from our move earlier in the year. Now we have some very distinctive wrapping paper for Christmas.