What They See

Snow on little girls' faces:
Snow in little girls' hair:
So much snow, in fact, and wind, and chilliness, that instead of cleaning out the car in between picking up Willow from Montessori and heading off to my own classes tonight, we hung out inside and, for kicks, I taught the girls how to use my camera.

I never knew it would, but it was a blast to watch my girls joyfully wielding my camera, which is always such a joy to me. Watching Sydney fit my big, big camera to her little, little face and hands, carefully focus through the viewfinder, and snap photos of her Willow over and over, I wished that I had...well, a camera.

And let me tell you, the kids are naturals. We got lots of shots of toys, the filthy carpet, me looming overhead, the plant that needs watering, etc., but my favorites of these are the shots that each sister took of her sister. I was lonely as a child, and I envy their connection, I think. The camera is heavy, of course, so most of Sydney's photos point downward at her sister, showing sleeves too long and pants too short-- --but Willow, I think, captures in her photo what it means to be a small girl happy to be photographed by someone she loves very, very much:

We should all smile such smiles.

Heart Handmade: Some WIPs

Are you as stoked to ride the bus as my babies are? No? Well, then it probably wasn't as hell of a morning for you as it was for my babies, cause it was a hell of a morning for the babies this morning. Of course, we ride the bus something like every other day, so it's often a hell of a morning for them. Kids, you know?

And last night, my first night teaching for the semester, Matt made this for dinner:

It's going to be a hell of a semester, I can tell.

When I haven't been pre-screening Gone with the Wind or answering stupid questions ("Do we really need to buy ALL of the required textbooks for this class?"), I've been happily crafting away to a Valentine theme. After having monopolized our big living room table for nearly a week (carpet picnic, anyone?), I've finally finished the papercrafting portion of my Valentine's Classroom Card Exhange swap over at Craftster. Here are a couple of little peekies:

Next comes the beadwork and the adding of Christmas clearance tinsel, and after that comes the making of envelopes from old magazine pages. And then I send them. And then, in return, I get 23 lovingly crafted handmade Valentines from all my swap buddies--squeal!

One of the fun things I've been anticipating about this project is trying out some beadwork with some of the absolutely terrific vintage beads I scored at a garage sale last summer. I bought most of them intending to sell them on etsy, but really they need a more positive identification of provenance and material, so while I'm waiting for the library to buy me , I'm setting aside a few that I'd like to try crafting with myself, primarily ones with less traditional bead shapes that I can dangle as pendants from my soldering work, like these hearts:Resin? Lucite? Beats me. They rock, though, right?

This afternoon while the girls carefully picked out every single dried blueberry from the peanut butter and dried blueberry sandwiches I'd made them (you see why I need a creative outlet?) I finished cutting out the pieces for the two denim quilts with heart appliques that I'm planning--I was doing this a couple of weeks ago, but had to set it aside when I ran out of denim, and last week at the Recycling Center I actually had a pair of denim overalls in my hands, when some guy, I swear to god, walked up to me, took them out of my hands, walked back to his truck, threw them in the back, then got in himself and drove away. I called Matt right there on the sidewalk, totally incoherent with fury, and like a man he's all, "What are you talking about? Why do you want overalls?" Barf.

Anyway, here are some of the heart appliques we're decorating for our lap quilt for the living room:

And seriously, that's not even all of the heart-y goodness! The scrappy heart pinbacks that I put up in my etsy shop made some people happy (and therefore me, as well), so I've been making more. These use some old songbook pages, and I take unmitigated pleasure in putting a definitive sequence of notes on each pin:

I've been so addicted that I inadvertently passed on my addiction to my girls, and they have spent so long painstakingly choosing the exact one-inch circle punched from scrapbook paper and the exact tiny heart punched from a different scrapbook paper for each of a thousand pins each and then "helping" me make their buttons--

--that I've been spending much of that time patiently assisting them and also kind of screaming inside my head.

But it is through these kinds of sacrifices that a future generation of crafty divas is trained.

P.S. Check out my post about how much I heart Craftster over at Crafting a Green World.

But I Have a Disability

If I can't be bothered to learn my students' names this semester, would it be wrong to tell them that I have a disability that manifests as an inability to connect a person's name to their face?

That would be really wrong, wouldn't it?

I might do it anyway.

In Love, and Also Maybe Not

Have I mentioned that I have, of late, become totally obsessed with Old Crow Medicine Show? They may very well eventually join the upper echelons of My Favorite Musicians: Neutral Milk Hotel, Kimya Dawson, Rufus Wainwright, Bright Eyes, and the Pixies. Here's the very well-made and surprising video of my favorite of their songs, "Wagon Wheel."

Incredible.

In other news, I've spent most of my hours today prepping for a new semester--a daily schedule to write, the first week's lesson plans to update, a class Web site to post, videos to reserve, 50 copies of a 9-page syllabus to print and collate and staple, etc. Barf.

My Matt and I have also been goofing around, however, with the toy he bought me for Christmas: a Tamron AF75-300mm F/4-5.6 LD lens with a macro of 1:3.9. It's super-cool--

--but Matt was a little snowed by the marketing because really it's a telephoto lens with the capability of focusing on a subject at a little better than one-quarter life-size, which is one definition of macro, but not a true macro lens. A macro lens is what I've been wanting, and I like the way this one focuses, but the telephoto aspect of this lens means that even to get the macro focus I have to be at least 3.5 feet away from what I'm shooting, and it's a little weird, if not nigh on impossible, to get across the room from the thing I want to photograph. Shots from above are likely out, unless I put my stuff on the floor and then stand on the table?

I have a really poor sense of balance.

Scrappy Saturday

I woke up this morning in the middle of a little-girl sandwich (Matt had long ago escaped to the girls' bed, after they'd escaped to ours). Each little girl snuggled and snuggled up to me, and if I tried to roll from my stomach to my back, the space I left as I rolled would be filled by little girls before I could re-occupy it.

And then I woke up. And then Matt and Will went to their Lowe's Build-and-Grow workshop (do you go to these? They're awesome) while Syd got to watch The Land Before Time as a bribe for being left behind. And then I went to work out (If you ever want to see a bunch of ladies lose their shit, throw them all into Curves with another lady who doesn't change stations every 30 seconds when the intercom says, "Change stations now"). And then we got groceries. And then I ate sushi. And then Matt made me a big desk (out of a door, of course). And then the girls fought over a library book (The book had a giraffe in it--obviously, punches were thrown). And then I finished Ringworld. And then I worked on my syllabus because spring semester classes start on Monday (barf).

And then I made these:

Bear with me, because I'm kind of ridiculously excited about them. They're little, and cute, and made with scraps of paper that I was going to recycle, so that's, like, bonus points, and it's the first time I thought to layer the papers that I put in my button machine, although now I'm all, "Of course!"

And so I made, um... a lot. Some are for my girls, some are to give to Will's classmates on Valentine's Day, some are to save for go-to presents for birthdays and such, and some scrappy little heart pinbacks are up in the pumpkinbear etsy shop.

I'm super excited about the ones I'm going to make tomorrow out of old songbook sheets.

And check out the dinosaur sweater Willow is sporting in her etsy photo shoot--Salvation Army. Twenty-five cents.

If IHad a Wish

Friends, I am about to humiliate myself solely for your amusement.

The back story: When I was very little, I liked to write--well, I still like to write, obviously, but you know what I mean. I wrote stories and poems and product ideas and the rules for games in a succession of random notebooks.

Nearly all of it is utterly atrocious.

Imagine an overweight, unsocialized, extremely precocious, verbally abused, really well-behaved four-eyed girl with an infinite amount of free time on her hands because she was enrolled in no after-school activities (my mother still talks about the ONE Girl Scouts meeting we went to--she was forced to socialize with other mothers (gasp!) while I was forced to clean up after snack time and play a series of intricate games whose rules I was not taught. We did not return) except for Weight Watchers when I was in the sixth grade. My sixth grade teacher also went there, and sometimes I'd see her at weigh-ins.

Now imagine what that child would write:
["If I had a wish," thought Jason as he stared out of the view-screen in his bedroom, "I would be captain of a starship just like Daddy. I would be brave and strong and lead my crew into battles with the enemy. I'd travel the universe and be rich and famous."

Jason Robert Daniels was a small pale 12-year-old with long, softly curling blonde hair and big green eyes. His father, Michael Daniels, was a tall, rough-looking man who captained the U.S.S Empire. He was perfect for an exploratory vessel such as the Empire. The Empire was also one of the first ships to allow the families of crewmembers to live on board. This was hard on both Jason and Michael, since Jason had lived with an ancient-looking aunt for the last 10 years and until last week, had seen his father a total of 14 times. But now that was all to change. Jason and his dad were together, and hopes could run wild.

"Jace," said Michael as he interrupted his son's daydreams, "If you want a tour of the war deck you had better come now." ]

It goes on from there with a LOOOOOOT of description, some father-figure idealizing (Did I mention that I don't actually happen to know my own father? Hmmm...), etc., until...

[Suddenly, the lighting of the rooms turned red and sirens wailed loudly. Jason, now cowering unnoticed in his corner, watched the proceedings too panicked to move. The crew ran hurriedly but orderly to their stations.]

And you don't even want to know where it goes from there. One hint: there is a very wordy, quite melodramatic funeral scene about four pages later.

If you're good to me, maybe sometime I'll show you the story I wrote in which the main character (who is totally me), is a professional racing-diver and finds some caves underneath her house which turns out to be a handy clubhouse for her dozens of super-smart pets.

Nana, 107 Years Later

My Nana was born in 1902 and died in 1999. For those of you who never tasted her apple fritters, too bad for you. I've been writing a series of posts on Crafting a Green World about finding my Nana's quilts stuffed away in a back closet in my Papa's house over Christmas; admiring, airing, fluffing, carefully re-folding them and putting them back nicely in that same closet (likely to be aired, fluffed, and carefully refolded every time I visit); and spending some time exploring the online quilt collections held by museums worldwide.

One of Nana's quilts, however, had apparently been put aside as a wedding present for me and long-lost (I've been married...um...I never can remember off of the top of my head on account of my wedding was a nightmare and I've repressed the majority of my memories of it). The huge fuss I made over Nana's quilts jogged my mother's memory, however, and one quilt that had been stuffed away unseen for probably 30 years now lives in the light on my daughters' bed.I taught myself to quilt a long time before I learned that it's a passion I shared with my great-grandmother. I just hope that ten years after I've died an old, old lady, all the quilts that I've ever made will still be danced upon by little girls in dress-up clothes: