Pointe Shoes and Twinkle Lights

 The other day I bribed my favorite ballerina into indulging me with a holiday photo shoot:

Syd badly needs a new pair of pointe shoes (something to add to the holiday to-do list!), and that is always my favorite time to commemorate how a well-used pair is meant to look.

A photo shoot with Gracie is generally all the inducement Syd needs to submit to her own set of photos. For each of the next images, imagine me in Photoshop painstakingly lassoing and filling in about a thousand cat hairs from her marley. 

Ah, well... the marley needed a wash anyway!

We then tried to get some photos of Jones, but turns out he's terrified of roll-up dance floors and twinkle lights.

So then Will and I tried to get some cute photos of Luna, and, well...

Back to pointe shoes and picking animal hair out in Photoshop, shall we?

We're not really a Christmas card or family holiday photo sort of people, so I think this will do for commemorating the season!

Homeschool Art History: A Timeline of the History of Photography

 

The kids and I are doing a short art history study on the history of photography, so it's a fine time to bring back our absolute favorite homeschool staple: the DIY timeline!!!

We still speak often about our big basement timeline, and I wish so much that we'd continued it in this house. But its magic lives on, I suppose, in the kids' happy memories, and in their eagerness, even at the ripe old ages of 15 and 17, to DIY this photography timeline with me.

I used A Chronology of Photography as my main resource for deciding upon the photos to include. I added in additional photos of LGBTQIA+ history and the history of People of Color, but looking at our finished timeline I can clearly see that I need WAY more non-Eurocentric photos, too, yikes. I also added in photos of important events, like the first Moon landing, World War 2 events, etc., because I want the kids to remember that photography, along with its artistic value, is an important way to explore and analyze history. Photographs are also cultural artifacts that speak to the time, place, and culture of their creation, so it's helpful to also source photos where those aspects are easy to identify.

 To get a high-quality image of a photograph, do a Google Image search, click Tools to reveal a set of filters, then filter the Size for Large:

Anyone else obsessed with the Cottingley Fairies? The kids and I talk about these world's greatest pranksters ALL THE TIME. 

Even though the photographs that I'm printing for this project are only about a quarter-page at the widest, if I'm going to the trouble to find and download an image, I like to get the largest size possible.

Because what if next year I need a wall-sized version of the Cottingley Fairies photos, hmm? What then?!?

I rename artwork images Title Artist Year, and put them in folders that I'll hopefully be able to make sense of later, ahem. 

Once I had a good selection of photos representing the history of photography, I sent the images to Matt, he put them four to a page for me, and I printed them onto cardstock and cut them out:

On the back of each photo card, I wrote the work's title, artist, and year, and that was our stack of photos all ready to go!

To play a game with these, deal out a few photos to everybody, and leave another stack of photos as a draw pile. Take the top photo from the draw pile, read out its title, artist, and date, then place it down to start your timeline.

The goal of the game is to place your photos in their correct spots on the timeline. You put your photo where you think it goes, then turn it over and read out the title, artist, and date. If your photo is in the correct spot, your turn is over. If your photo is incorrect, correct it and then draw another photo. The first person to correctly place all of their photos is the winner!

The game gets harder as it goes on and you fill in all those big gaps in time!

Look at that lovely, long timeline, chock-full of fascinating moments of history and interesting artistic interpretations:

I wanted to leave our timeline on display--maybe the kids will memorize some dates, and maybe it'll allow us the space to have more conversations about some of these images--so Syd and I tacked twine to the front of our big bookshelves, then the kids transferred the completed timeline to it:

We're slightly overlapping the map for our Meso-America study--oops!

The result isn't quite the big basement timeline of our memories, but it IS chaotic and messy enough to remind us of it!

The kids are currently working on a separate photograph analysis project, so we'll definitely add those photos to this timeline, and now that it's up I might as well keep adding more photos relevant to our other studies. You know how much I love context!

And then we'll take some photographs of our own!

Here are the resources that we've used so far:

Easy Handmade Gift: Matted Photo in a Thrifted Frame

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2016.

 Need a gift that's easy to make but still personal? A matted photo that you make yourself can be just the thing! 

You use a photo or artwork that lets your recipients know that you're thinking only of them, and yet the actual matting and framing of the photo takes less than an hour and costs less than five bucks. 

 Key to this project is the thrifted frame. If you've never gone thrifting for frames, I highly recommend it! Many people, when they get tired of what's inside the frame, just donate the entire piece, frame and all. Our local Goodwill stores have monthly 50%-off storewide sales, and whenever I go to them, I always look through their frames and take home the ones that I like. I generally repaint them for use in my own house, but this gold one that I pulled out of my stash (with the price tag on the back: $1.50!), even though I'd have painted it navy or slate for myself, will actually go perfectly well as-is in the recipient's home. That's one fewer step for me! 

 If you do want to refinish your frame, check out my round-up of the best methods. Scroll down to the paint and fabric tute to see how I refinish my frames 99% of the time. 

 The next thing that you need is a lovely paper to cover the thrifted frame's existing mat board. You're not making a piece that has to look perfect in a thousand years, so I don't worry overly much about the acidity of the papers that I use. This is a gift for your grandma or your girlfriend, not the Queen of England. 

In my own house, I have frames covered in dictionary pages, comic book pages, and wallpaper samples, but for this particular frame, I'm using handmade paper from a little book that has a looooong story, full of drama, from my wedding. So much drama that some of the pages ended up getting torn out. Ask me about it in the Comments and I'll tell you. Buy us a pitcher of margaritas, and I'll tell you some even worse stories of my wedding drama! 

 I decoupaged the handmade paper to the mat board, tearing the paper into strips and overlapping the edges into straight lines to make the piece look somewhat orderly. The handmade paper is neutral-toned, as well, so it doesn't distract from the photo. 

To attach the paper to the mat board, I just used double-sided tape. Now, tape is something that you DO want to be picky about, because a lot of tape is horrible and will begin to discolor your work within months, so it's best to have handy some kind of tape that says it's "document-friendly." 

 If you've got that document-friendly tape, you can also use it to attach the photo to the decoupaged mat board, but if you're worried, just use photo corners. 

That was such a beautiful road trip!

 Honestly, the biggest pain in the butt when using a thrifted frame is cleaning that glass! These frames have sat in someone's house for decades, sometimes, and I don't know what all they have on them, but it can be gross. I use straight vinegar in a spray bottle, scrubbed off with crumpled-up newspaper (this is also how I clean windows and mirrors), repeated until whatever gunk is all over the glass finally comes off. 

 The last thing that you have to do is simply re-assemble the frame, making sure that you have the hanger on the back correct. 

Wrap it up, add a pretty bow, and wait for the squeals of happiness when your thoughtful gift is opened!

Pollinators Love My Milkweed

 

I am loving how happy my common milkweed is in the side yard that I've allowed it to overgrow. Now that it's blooming, I'm even happier to see all the pollinators also loving it!

I really like this photo of the bee that I accidentally caught in flight:

The butterflies don't quite sit still enough to get their pictures taken:

All the pollinators are going to be even more thrilled when my perennial sunflowers begin to bloom!

The Fire Department Burned My Neighbor's House Down

 

This is easily the most exciting thing to happen to me during the entire pandemic so far.

A couple of months ago, a form letter from the county showed up in my mailbox, telling me that the fire department was going to burn down a neighbor's vacant house. This house has sat unoccupied for SO long, long enough that I've periodically contemplated sneaking over to steal their perennials (I didn't, but I totally should have) or to climb in through the OPEN WINDOWS to see if they had any antique fixtures I could "salvage" (I didn't do that, either, and that one's probably just as well since that's probably a bigger crime than digging up daffodil bulbs). 

Anyway, that's how Operation: Structure Fire began. The letter didn't include any information about when this burn was supposed to occur, so I became obsessed with keeping a weather eye on the house, because god forbid I MISS A LITERAL HOUSE FIRE!!!! Fortunately, the window next to my desk (the one that also serves as Jones' kitty TV) looks in that direction, but as if I wasn't already afraid enough of venturing out into the real, germ-filled world, I became even more reluctant to go out and about, because what if the day I chose to drag my family out hiking was the day the fire department burned the house down!?!

I got even more excited when fire trucks from all over the county started showing up to the house, even though they'd just pull up, hang out for a few hours, then leave and be replaced by new ones. This continued for DAYS. Matt's best guess is that everyone was coming by for some kind of structure fire instructional seminar or something, but it threw me enough that I seriously considered not taking Syd to some random mandatory in-person standardized test the high school arbitrarily assigned her to (it doesn't even count for anything! They made her miss three actual classes to take it, and now that everything is online you don't even get a break on your homework if you've got an excused absence from class!). I did take Will to our regular Girl Scout volunteer gig with the Backpack Buddies program one county over, but I swear we have NEVER worked so fast to pack weekend meals for schoolchildren!

After all that, it turns out that one extremely rainy Saturday morning was The Big Day. The fire trucks came back, the drive-in next door filled up with firefighter overflow parking, and everyone milled about under their pop-up tents while my family sat on lawn chairs in our backyard and eyed them through binoculars while simultaneously eating Cheez-Its. 

It was a legit party, y'all!

For the first few hours, the fire looked mostly like this:

A firefighter who was cutting through our yard and had the misfortune to come upon us sitting in lawn chairs, eating Cheez-Its, and gossiping about his buddies while staring at them through binoculars kindly explained that they were starting small fires in the house, then sending all the rookie firefighters in so they could get some real-world experience. You know how big firefighters are on experiential education!

But when all the rookie firefighters had had their opportunity for experiential learning, the real fun began! We'd gone inside after becoming desensitized to baby fires, but when I saw black smoke begin to drift up, I bolted from my window look-out station. On my way outside I ran past Syd, who was in the middle of Zoom pointe class, and was all, "Tell them you have to go! THE FIRE IS HAPPENING!!!!!"

Obviously, I was really, really chill about this long-anticipated excitement:

Matt is always way more genuinely chill:

Matt and Syd traded the binoculars back and forth, while I used my telephoto lens to pick out all the lovely details of a house on fire:

But then sometimes you've got to zoom back out, so you can see the fire in all its glory!

It maybe got a *little* less exciting as enough of the house was burned to make the fire die down a little, but that just means that you could see the details better, vote on what part of the house was going to collapse next, and then cheer whenever it did:

Eventually, just a couple of the sturdiest corners were left actually standing:

Eventually even those corners collapsed, but by the next morning the foundation was still smoldering... which... okay, I guess that's fine because it was pretty much pouring this entire time, but, I mean, I live right over there? Next to that unsupervised but still smoldering literal house fire? Just alongside a woods full of trees and a multi-storey plywood movie screen?

Whatever, it was fine. 

You guys, I don't even know what I should look forward to next that has even half the excitement level that this has brought to my life. I mean, I'm excited about taking my Girl Scout troop camping, but that's also a lot of work. I'm excited about remodeling the kids' bathroom, but that consists of spending money and also work. I'm excited about an upcoming road trip to see Matt's relatives, but also insanely stressed out about it because, you know, that whole global pandemic that we're in. 

It just seems like it's going to be a lot of effort to find something else in my life as magical as sitting in a lawn chair in my backyard, eating Cheez-its, my cat weaving back and forth between my feet, and watching a house burn flat to the ground. That is a SERIOUSLY good way to spend a Saturday, you guys.