DIY: Rainbow-Painted Pegboard To Organize a Teen Crafting Space

Will can occasionally muscle a puzzle onto the kids' shared playroom table, but mostly it's Syd's domain, held by the simple means of attrition. How can a kid stretch out a 1,000-piece puzzle or a coloring book and her pencils when another kid already has the entire table covered in fourteen different slime recipes, all halfway done and half-spilled across each other? And the one bit that doesn't have slime has Perler beads and polymer clay AND a bunch of paint tubes and a wet canvas?

It's madness, and hugely messy, but Syd adores her space, and spends much of each day at that table, listening to audiobooks or YouTube video tutorials of even more weird crafts, crafting her heart out and happy as a clam.

Last summer, in an attempt to contain at least some of the mess (and, more importantly, to keep Syd off of MY work table as much as possible!), I created a couple of giant pegboard organizers for the walls adjacent to that table.

I bought a small and a large pegboard, and taped them into seven sections--the best thing about pegboard is that you can just count holes to make your measurements. The green stripe is going to be slightly narrower than the others, though. That is never not going to bother me.

If I had this project to do over again, I think that I would have bought real paint. They have these "sample" sizes of paint that you can buy that are like just a cup's worth; those and small paint rollers would have been soooo much easier to use, and I wouldn't have had to do so much taping off.

Oh, well. With the spray paint that I used, I had to tape off the area that I wasn't painting, for every single stripe, and it was terribly tedious:

And it got spray paint overspray all over the driveway, but y'all know that has NEVER been something that I've been concerned about.

I think it turned out quite lovely, even if my poor photography skills mean that you can't see how nice the purple stripe looks. Bossy blue washes out shrinking violet!

Matt mounted the pegboards for me, and the next step of the process involved more purchases than I prefer, and the revelation that there exist in the world TWO DIFFERENT SIZES OF PEGBOARD HOLES. So there we went, returning half our purchases and trading them in for a slightly different size.

We've actually had this setup in place for almost a year now, and while it doesn't look as tidy as I'd dreamed, it does contain the mess and chaos and nonsense and keep it off the table and the floor... mostly:

She's organizing her glitter stash in rainbow order, obviously.

That right there is everything that you need to make slime or polymer clay creations, or repaint Monster High dolls or squishies.

Next up: wouldn't it be nice to organize and contain all of the American Girl doll mess and chaos and nonsense?

Lucky Number Thirteen

My tiny dancer isn't so tiny anymore:

Syd at almost six.

Syd at almost thirteen.

 In fact, she's now my brave, beautiful teenage ballerina!

Syd at two and a half.

She's growing by leaps and bounds:

Syd at ten.

Syd at twelve years and 364 days.

She's still a sweet sister:

Syd at 22 months and Will at 3.

Syd at almost thirteen and Will at fourteen.

And very much still her daddy's little girl:

Syd at seven and Will at nine.

But she's most definitely still definitely my baby:

Syd at one.

I'm not sure how I got so lucky with these two:

Syd at four and Will at six.

It's an honor to be this amazing kid's parent.

Syd on her eighth birthday.

Syd on her fifth birthday

Syd on her thirteenth birthday

Here's to another happy year!

April Favorites: Orpheus, Alice, and Temeraire

Don't even bother trying to smash any records with your reading goals, y'all, because Will has already read 118 books this year.

Thirty of them in April!

She's sad, silly girl, because this isn't as many books as she read in March; we've been outside more, and she's been studying a LOT more for her AP European History exam in two days.

Will finished the His Dark Materials series last month, and now counts the entire series as among her favorite books from the year:



She read Moby Dick, and amused me to no end by how much she genuinely loved it. I would NEVER tell her that I think a book is boring before she's had a chance to read it for herself, and so I do think that as she read me tidbits of the book, laughing over inaccurate information about whales and despairing over the captain getting crazier and crazier, she really did so in ignorance that much of the literate world considers the book to be a mournful slog through overbearingly obtuse prose.



Another of Will's favorites is another old friend, and she and I both adore the His Majesty's Dragons series. Will is the one who first got me into the series--of COURSE!--but this book is new to both of us, as the library didn't have it until I asked them to buy it. And they did!

It's not on my list for this month because Will took it from me and read it instead. I actually looked for it this morning so I could start it but couldn't find it anywhere so I started The Andromeda Strain instead. It's around somewhere, probably under the couch or on the stack of books on the kitchen table or, ooh! Maybe in the backpack that I took to last Friday's Girl Scout meeting!



Here are Will's other favorites from the month:



And here's the rest of what Will read in April!



I didn't read much in April, and what I did read I didn't like much of. This little graphic novel that I zoomed through on a Saturday afternoon was actually my favorite of the bunch:



It has all my favorite things: camping, badge-earning, and bookish loners who don't know how to socialize.

I also read a disappointing novel about the workers of the Manhattan Project's Secret City; a parenting book that has mostly succeeded in pissing the kids off because now most afternoons I kick them out for an hour of "unstructured, active outdoor time;" the Alice in Wonderland books; and a biography of Lewis Carroll that tried sooooo hard to convince me that he wasn't a pedophile.

I'm still pretty sure he was a pedophile.



Just like books, YouTube is a great place to delve into our random obsessions. In the car a few weeks ago, I heard an NPR interview with the composer of Hadestown; I barely managed to make it to the gym and then back home before I was on YouTube looking for clips. It's a post-Apocalyptic/Depression-era retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice--are you surprised that I'm obsessed?

Here's Persephone:



Ooh, and here's Persephone with Hermes and then Hades, and a little bit of Eurydice at the end:



Here's an older recording of the soundtrack, which I'm also obsessed with. The new recording of the Broadway version is going to be out next month--mark your calendars!

Syd really likes to watch ballet videos, so we watch a lot of those when we hang out together in the evenings:



And then often the suggestions after those videos lead us down some very strange rabbit holes. Did you know about Japanese precision walking?!?



And then this apparently iconic cheerleading competition performance that shows that cheerleaders are REALLY good with rhythm--



--which led us to wonder what cheerleading competitions used to be like. A lot tamer, it turns out, but that's surely too high to stack people:



Will discovered these Architectural Digest videos, and now that's what WE watch when we hang out together:





Rich people homes are ridiculous.

Did YOU read or watch anything ridiculous in April?