Category Archives: I made something

The circle skirt

August 15, 2011 – 11:52 am

The kids and I have memberships to Bowers Museum and Kidseum. A few Saturdays ago we decided to go do Native American Sand Art at the Kidseum, it was cool! I wished I had brought my camera, but I was still on my reflective, weblog hiatus. The kids got painted on by a face painting lady, but they all wanted their paintings on their arms … ? Go figure (Dadda is a tattoo artist, in case you don’t know). Jonny got a snake, June got vines and flowers, and Aveline got a horse. The Kidseum was cool, the kids found things of interest there that I easily would have overlooked, which kinda goes to show that they know what they’re doing at that place. I tend to be the one loving museum kids’ stuff more than anyone in the family, so it was super refreshing to see them get into the exhibits (which are all hands-on, yay!) for long periods of time. Their favorite area was the dress up area. There is a floor to ceiling, wall to wall mirror and hats, from cloches to sombreros, shoes, from Asian platform flip flops to high-button boots, dresses, tunics, caftans, in all sizes, I was so impressed at the array of cultures and time periods represented in those fun clothes. I couldn’t help myself from trying some on and fantasizing about stealing them! See how sad it is to go on a reflective, weblog hiatus? I would love to have shared pictures of the fashion going on that day. Well Miss Aveline Mae found a skirt that she did not want to part with, the display it brought out of her was beautiful to behold, dancing, twirling, I could tell she felt that skirt. So what could a sewing mother do but offer to try to make her one of her very own? Stay quiet is a good option, I suppose. Incidentally, it was a circle skirt, I hadn’t sewn one before. Here is how it turned out, she styled the photo completely, she even went and got me my camera, since I was having a good conversation with my visiting friend.

The fabric is from Japan, Rei and Hata from Inkrat always bring me amazing gifts, since I am the wife of Hori Shido (Sid’s Japanese tattoo master title). One time I asked for fabric and received more than I’ll ever use, unless I make more circle skirts! I’m happy to say that Miss Aveline Mae loves the skirt, which isn’t always the case when I am trying to recreate something she has her own ideas about. I’m not sure she feels the same in it as she did in the one in the museum, but who knows what history and magic is lurking in that one’s fibers, surely I cannot recreate that.

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home education home life I made something

I got a Serger!

August 10, 2011 – 8:22 pm

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh! I went to an estate sale put on by my favorite estate sale ladies last weekend (all by myself!) with some super strong, yet tempered hopes, because in the email announcing the sale, they mentioned there was a White brand serger for sale… I did my research beforehand as far as what models of White sergers are better, older, newer, etc. I wrote it all down and went off to Garden Grove to check it out. There it was, a Superlock 634D! I plugged it up and it ran smoothly, so exciting! I had read of a woman who loved her Superlock, she had for 25 years, more than the newer ones she also tried using. So I bought it! $175. Not too shabby.

The manual was available online for $10, so I was able to print it out and put it in a binder with page protectors. The manual has proved indispensable in my efforts to use the machine properly and to it’s potential. I’m a happy, happy sewer/serger!

And so, last night, at our biweekly Needles & Knockers -or- Stitches Be Crazy sewing club meeting, I got to bust out some hankies! My heart is heavy-ish that the hankies are meant to go inside the backpacks of my two older children, who will be attending 3 consecutive classes together on Mondays this school year. I’ll be okay, but I am a little trepidatious about the whole affair. Knowing they will have a special, soft place to wipe their boogies while in class helps me a little. I know it appears that I favor the feminine hankies, but really Ave didn’t like the fabrics I selected for her, so I had to make a few more, and there’s a Spiderman one that eluded my camera and picture taking time.

After sewing club, Aveline was playing dress-up games on the computer and became inspired. She commissioned me to make her a mini neck-scarf. It turned out so cute that I made a couple more, and by the 4th or 5th one, tweaking my serger all along the way, I found the sweet spot so that the rolled edge turned out perfect! That perfect one is being mailed to Ave’s BF today! I love to do things like that. I imagine such sweetness in BF’s heart as she receives a gift from a sweet friend. Aveline let her know in the card that she has a matching neck-scarf and that they should wear them together the next time they see each other. Their friendship blesses my heart.

A quick little story on that – After the BFs had spent time together one afternoon I asked Ave what she and Chloe had talked about. She said, “Well, I asked her, ‘So, what’s it like to be Chloe?’” I told Aveline that I thought that was a very thoughtful question to ask! I would love to be asked that by a friend, and actually aren’t we all just trying to make others know what it’s like to be us in most of our relationship dealings?

That’s all for now.

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In the Garden

June 17, 2011 – 10:02 am

We’ve got some food growing in our backyard. I am experimenting to see what I can successfully grow and in the coming years I hope to grow just a few things really well and maybe get to eat them all year with the help of some preserving, dehydrating and freezing. This year’s food is more abundant than last year’s, but still sparse. All in all I’m satisfied.

I tried to grow a three sisters (corn, beans and squash) garden again, but the corn did even worse than last year. (The pole beans are supposed to vine up around the pole-like corn.) It was a bummer to admit defeat on the corn front and I only did so the day before we left on a motorhome trip. Since the tendrils were already searching, I needed plan B-poles pronto. Dried sticks which the recent strong winds had delivered from the trees to the ground have worked well and held up much better than I expected and I love the way they look, although I do wish the beans had a more complete network of support so that they could reach their most fruitful potential. Oh, the gardening-social analogies, you just can’t garden and not have life lessons confirmed along the way.

Beans

Squash

Tendrils

Tendrils fascinate me, how can there not be a brain behind something that searches?

Snap Pea

Snap pea flower

A drop of water in a weed

Swiss Chard from last year, on its way out.

I had to photograph it, it has provided many a nutritious leaves for us in the past few months. It looks so stately and monumental against the sky.

And a seesaw we built 2 weeks ago!

We had so much fun on the one at Caspers Park, I talked everyone into building our own. It needs some slight redesigning (more weight toward the fulcrum), but is working well enough for now and provided some education to throw into the kids’ files for the end of the year paperwork.

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food home education home life I made something my thoughts travels

catch up

May 22, 2011 – 3:13 pm

Oh wow, it’s been so long. Not that anyone’s asking, but my reasons for not blogging for so long are quite simple. The demands on me in this season of my life make it more difficult to notch in the time to blog. But another factor is that I used to mostly do the blog on Saturdays and now Saturdays are my breadmaking day. I’ve been making those two loaves of whole wheat Tassajara bread every week, and if my family didn’t love it so, so much, I might give it up! It’s time-consuming and the kneading is physically demanding to someone so out of shape as I. I’m getting soft in my mid-thirties :) Sid works on breadmaking day, so I usually have Indy in a hiking backpack carrier on my back, which adds to the exertion, you know? Anyway, I have even experienced some tension over creating this post right here that I’m doing right now. I kinda want to give the whole thing up just to eliminate yet one more source of tension in my life, but I really like doing/having this blog. Having more than doing, though. So, nowhere to go but onward, yes?

Let’s catch up a bit so that I can hopefully share more recent stuff sometime soon.

*We celebrated Aveline’s 7th birthday!! And boy is she 7! She and I went on a date up to the American Girl Store at The Grove.

We made a stop at Sid’s mom’s house so Ave could open her present.

Aveline and her beautiful Grandmother.

American Girl shopping, oh yeah!

Mom-daughter time was so cool. I can’t remember the last time we spent time alone, aside from the here-and-theres we grab amongst the others.

We went to D-Land to celebrate with her cousins, as well. So fun! She loves Tower of Terror!!

*We also planned and prepped for a motorhome trip. We’ve already gone and come home from the first leg of it, athough we didn’t plan for there to be multiple legs of it at all. But the motorhome’s resignator is hopefully good as new and we’ll be heading out again this week. (More on that first leg later.) Luckily preparing for this trip turned out to be very fun in itself, even if we didn’t make it as far as we thought we might, so here are some pics of the prep.

Enjoyed a great deal of these on our trip! I like to pretend I’m roughing it by manually grinding the coffee beans, and using the french press, but I heat the water over the LP stove in our rig! I want to be more adept at campfires, I’m truly working on it.

The lower two titles proved indispensable in our hunt for and exploration of what’s left of some of the old mining towns. I can’t wait to share those experiences here!!

Good stuff, these.

Sadly, we didn’t make it far enough North to go on a proper Bigfoot hunt. Fooey.

*There’s that bread I’ve been missing out on blogging for. I have to report that that is so far, to date, the only thing I have cooked/baked that every member of my family has eaten a ton of every time I make it. (That makes it sound like I’m a horrid cook, huh? Well, I don’t think I am.) At least there’s one thing =). And I do hope to add more foods to that list.

*Now I’ll leave you with some fun photos that the Jonster and I took of ourselves and each other . . .

Phew. That was extensive. Next time, Stankovits CA Desert Ghost Town Tour and Lake/River Downtime.

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contemplative mothering home education I made something my children

Prayer for Japan

March 20, 2011 – 11:06 am

Every week we have some friends come over and play. Us moms organize some type of craft or activity to do while we’re together and this last week we decided to make a strand of Tibetan prayer flags in prayer for the people suffering in Japan. I had a Tibetan Prayer Flag Pack, which I bought from Montessori Resource a couple of years ago and hadn’t used. It came with two strands of prayer flags, one printed with a traditional Tibetan design featuring a horse, which is said to carry the prayers on the wind (pictured above), and one strand of blank flags for us to add our own prayers to. It came with pens, too. I read the little book it came with so that I could briefly (accommodating hyper-friends-are-here! attention spans) explain what the flags were all about.
This was our setup:

It’s so cool that what we choose to pray for, using this medium, can be expressed in different ways. It has expanded my view of prayer, because I don’t ever draw my prayers. (Maybe you can see why, haha! This one’s mine.)

Even if it doesn’t have an appealing aesthetic quality, it’s nice to be relieved of the task of finding the words to match my heart’s cry. The other way that this activity expanded my prayer life, is that the colors of the flags catch my eye often throughout the day – since I can see them through windows from inside the house, as well as when I’m outside – and when they do I can’t help but pay attention to God and my heart connects to Him, and to those suffering in Japan.

Here are the kids working on expressing their prayers.

And here are those precious prayers, expressed. We encouraged them to include any prayers on their hearts.

Us moms sat down to the table after the kids had gone off to their playing, and we filled in the blanks with scripture and prayers of our own.

I’d like to suggest, if you feel led to do this in your own home, that you could easily make this project from fabric scraps, staples and ribbon or string. And any permanent markers will work well on the fabric squares. Google image has plenty of beautiful photos of the flags to inspire you. There was one picture that I printed out to show the kids, in which there was just a multitude of flags, and I was happy to share with the kids that the people of Tibet often pray for peace for every inhabitant of the earth, so one of the flags in the picture might have represented a prayer for us!

By the time we got around to hanging our flags, our friends were gone.

I hope that this will become a tradition in our home (it’s up to me and I won’t make any promises) that when tragedy strikes in the world, in our community, in our family, or in our home, that we will assemble a strand of flags in honor of those affected by such a tragedy. That we will make it a habit of connecting to the suffering of others.

And so now our prayers hang outside, carried by the wind and reminding us to keep praying. Tibetans let their prayer flags go to tatters outside, reminding us of the impermanence of things. When they are all worn out they are said to have done their job.

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I made something my children

I knitted Little Indy a jacket

February 26, 2011 – 5:08 pm

First it looks like this.

Then you fold it, sew up the shoulder seams and sew on the buttons and it becomes this.

Then you put it on your cute little sucker and it becomes this.

There is love in every stitch, I tell you! And there are prayers in them too. Prayers for this boy’s life. He was meant to be and he’s the sweetest baby I’ve known. He was born of my dream and my story and here he is. He is not cold. I hope I get to give this jacket to my grandchild someday, but if it doesn’t make it (or I don’t) at least the jacket (and me) will go on living here in this corner of the cyber-verse for a long, long time. That kinda doesn’t make sense, but that’s just how this day has been.

It’s the Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Surprise Jacket, introduced to me by Amanda Soule of Soulemama. Not being a very experienced knitter, I ordered a DVD showing how to knit it, step by step. It was a lovely experience, the DVD eliminated much frustration.

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4th child journal home life I made something my children

to keep him dry

January 11, 2011 – 11:16 am

Little Indy has been showing signs of teething for a few weeks now. Drool-soaked shirts don’t seem too comfy, so I made some bibs for the little dude. I used old flannel flat sheets for the bodies of the bibs and various scraps for the embellishments.

Ave took this next shot.