We Built an In-Home Ballet Studio for our Young Ballerina

The genesis of this project/home remodel was the PVC pipe ballet barre that Matt and the older kid made for the younger kid for Christmas last year. I suggested it as a present because I thought that she would love it, and she did, but...

...apparently, if you give a ballerina a ballet barre, she'll ask for a full-length, wall-mounted mirror to go with it.

It took me a few months to casually suss out the logistics, but finally, in consultation with the younger kid and Matt, we decided that--well, remember those wall-mounted shelves that Matt made?

I'd insisted that the shelves shouldn't go all the way to the adjacent wall because we have yet another door to the outside there (we have FIVE doors to the outside in our strange, not-really-that-large house) and I thought it would be weird if the door knocked into the shelves when it opened.

Well, it turns out that if you actually don't care about that at all, you've given yourself another full six feet of wall to work with!

BUT you're going to have to empty those shelves--

--unscrew them from the floor and wall, and move them.

They're maybe a teensy bit wobbly now, but don't tell Matt.

I was excited about emptying the shelves, because that's where we keep board games, puzzles, and floor toys, and now that I've got these great, big girls, I expected that I'd be able to get rid of just absolute loads of games and toys. After all, these big girls don't still play Secret Garden and Professor Noggin, do they?

They do.

They don't still want Lincoln Logs and Kapla blocks and marble runs readily accessible, do they?

They do.

They're not still interested in building race car tracks and zipping their Darda cars through them, are they?

Actually, they're not, they say, and so I have it on my to-do list to ebay that giant Rubbermaid bin full of Darda tracks, but even those got one last huzzah:

We bought two of these 60"x36" mirrors, and with much terror and uncertainty about the quality of our walls, Matt mounted them in our brand-new swath of wall space:

He's got my stash cushion foam there to pad the mirrors while we were fiddling with them. I really should use up the rest of that cushion foam and free up some closet space, but then what would we do if we wanted to mount more giant mirrors?

 

When they were mounted, all we had to do was move the kid's ballet barre in front of it, and she's all set!

It's a great place to pester Jones, the world's crankiest kitten:

And it's also a good spot for some impromptu ballet practice, because of course technique class and jazz class aren't nearly enough dancing for one Saturday!

I'd like to add some framed prints and signed programs to the kid's studio area, but I'm hesitant to put anything above the mirror that could even remotely be nudged off of the wall by pounding ballerina feet, and there's not enough room on either side of the mirror, darn it.

Perhaps a couple of posters could go above the mirror, or a stenciled quote...

Let me know if you think of something suitable!

We Made Pressed Flower Bookmarks!

I am absolutely enchanted by this nine-year-old tutorial for making pressed wildflower bookmarks, even more so because the author states that the tutorial was originally found in a 1950s Boy Scout manual.

And now here's me interlibrary loaning a bunch of old Boy Scout manuals from our university library (You know I already interlibrary loaned all the old Girl Scout manuals and read them years ago)...

The kids are working on earning the Wildflowers of Ohio fun patch--each of them has just one more activity left!--and one of the steps asks girls to "make something" with wildflowers.

Obviously, that's my favorite step!

I gave the girls some options, including inventing their own wildflower craft or looking through Pinterest to find something that appealed to them, but I also showed them this particular craft that I've been wanting to do for a while, and I asked if they might want to try it with me.

They did, and so we did. And it turned out amazing!

Our first step was to spend an afternoon collecting and drying a bunch of flowers, some from a neighborhood wildflower walk, and some from my garden:

Fun fact: if you're not drying your flowers in the microwave, you should be!

We completed the tutorial pretty much as instructed, except that I collected several templates--playing card, bookmark, business card, 8x10 cardstock--and we traced the template that we wanted onto the wax paper first, so that we could arrange the dried flowers prettily in the space. Syd make bookmarks, and Will got quite invested in one 8x10 piece that she can use to embellish a journal cover:

I actually really like painting the single ply of tissue over the flowers. It's fussy and it takes a while, but it's easy and you can listen to music. Here, we listened to the Hadestown Broadway soundtrack and I interrupted it every six seconds to expand on the theming, wax rhapsodic about the choreography, add context, and basically blather on endless annoying interjections.

Just as the tutorial states, we then let them dry for a day, backed them with watercolor paper and sewed the fronts and backs together, and dabbed on matte medium. We let them dry for another day, and then they were absolutely perfect.

Here's my bookmark!

And here are some pieces the size of playing cards that I made:

I'd originally intended them to be handmade business cards, because I am ALWAYS in need of more handmade business cards, but now that I've made them I might love them too much to simply toss them in someone's Pumpkin+Bear order (unless you ask me to--then I happily will!).

Instead, I'm kind of wondering if I could use them as permanent, reusable gift tags for our family holidays. If I got Matt to write a recipient's name on the back very prettily, and we were quite careful, couldn't we use the same tag for a gift to that person on every holiday?

Of course, I'd need lots more if I wanted to cover, say, an entire Christmas worth of gifts to every person, but over the course of several years it would surely be a more eco-friendly option than gift tags that are used and tossed every year, especially if I also found a reusable gift wrap solution.

Any excuse to make more of these dried flower cards, I suppose!

August Favorites: Space Operas, Broadway Musicals, and Ballet Studios

I got some vacation reading done while the kids and I were away in August. I burned through this book during a couple of evenings in dog-friendly hotel rooms--



--and I loved it! I'm a fan of travel memoirs written by bumbling travelers (apparently this is an Especial Thing done by bumbling hikers in particular), especially when the writing is able to endear me to the narrator, and I found myself, two nights in a row, eating from a styrofoam cup of Ramen and getting super invested in the condition of Strayed's feet.

My favorite book of the month, though, is one that I scavenged from Will's reading log:



Space Opera sucked me in despite myself. I started off irritated that it was just seeming really derivative of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, my FAVORITE book, and also the main character was annoying and unappealing.

Will, it seems, has an affinity for main characters that start off irritating and unappealing and then, as this main character did, as well, draw you in and make you love them in spite of yourself.

And no, Space Opera isn't anymore derivative of Hichhiker's than anything is in an age in which the Guide has long been part of our collective canon. Instead, it's appreciative of glam rock in a time in which we've recently been reminded of how bittersweetly we loved Freddy Mercury, and also it's winkingly derivative of Eurovision, which you know by now that the kids and I ARE DEEPLY INTO.

And there's a reconciliation between two people who were friends in the best days of their youth. I cried, because it speaks to probably my fondest, most impossible fantasy. I miss you, Mac.

Here's the rest of what I read in August!



Will had a LOT of favorites in August. For one thing, she's been randomly obsessed with Tom Swift, and counts one of his adventures as a favorite for the month:



She also adored this little children's fantasy novel:



AND this children's sci-fi novel. Have you ever noticed how innovative and imaginative children's literature can be?



And would it even be a Will's Favorites list if it didn't have a Tamora Pierce novel on it?



When I was Will's age, I was just as into fantasy as she is now, so I think it's fun to see all the "deep in the middle of the series" fantasy books that Will counts as her favorites:



And this is a favorite of Will's that I've put in my own must-read stack for September!



Probably not this one, though. Will has a LOT more patience for Avi than I do!



I AM requesting this favorite of Will's, though. It sounds magical!



In all of the escapist fluff, it was lovely to find this beautiful novel, set in post-World War 2 Germany:



It's moving and complicated, and I'm sorry that it seems to be out of print. Perhaps your library, too, has an old copy!

Here's the rest of what Will read in August!



In the World of Weird YouTube videos, here's what Syd gathered the entire family around to watch recently:



She thinks the giant waterslide looks AMAZING. I think that kid is just one bottle of baby oil away from flying off it at forty miles an hour and landing in a stand of sharpened bamboo.

Here's another one for Syd, although I get the credit for finding it. We love odd ballet performances!



We also really like these Royal Opera House lectures. We've seen this one several times, and I still think it's super interesting!



And here's an example of the kinds of rabbit holes that Will falls down! She wants to up her dog training game, so that led to watching some dog training videos, and of course if you're watching dog training videos YouTube is going to suggest that you watch some dog agility trials!



Fun fact: if you watch enough dog agility trials, YouTube will also suggest that perhaps you'd also like to watch Corgi races:



Reader, you would.

My own rabbit holes in August were related to Broadway musicals, as usual, but also grizzly bears. I LOVED this documentary on the making of just one scene in Broadway's Annie:



I won't share with you the video that I watched on grizzly bear attacks, but I'd just finished reading a VERY vividly-composed chapter on bear attacks in Death in Yellowstone (that will be on my September book list, because I only just finished it this weekend!), and wanted to see if there were any videos on the topic.

There are. Feel free not to watch them.

Instead, tell me what YOU loved to read and watch in August!

DIY Rorschach-Style Ink Blots

The older kid recently studied the Rorschach test as part of her AP Psychology curriculum, and revealed to me that it's not actually WHAT you identify in the ink blot that is analyzed, but HOW you come to that identification. Apparently, psychologists are more interested in your thought process, perceptions, decision making, and communication than whether or not you think everything is a guitar or two dogs playing poker or whatever.

Which is all really cool, but while Will was telling me all this, I was mostly thinking, "OOH, we should make ink blots again!"

The younger kid went through a major symmetry obsession back when she was five or six, so in those days we spent a LOT of time making ink blots together.


It's only fitting, then, that I dug out the remainder of those seven-year-old BioColor paints on a recent lovely afternoon so that the kids and I could revisit this long-ago beloved craft.

Can you believe that Syd didn't even remember that we'd done this before?!? How the passage of time can fade the memories of that which we once loved...

In order to avoid having that crease in the middle of the prints, we tried out a different technique this time. I'll once again let Syd demonstrate:

1. Cut a piece of aluminum foil or wax paper to size, then crease vertically. Add paint.

2. Fold the foil or wax paper along the crease:

3. Open it up to reveal the symmetrical image!

4. Lay a piece of heavyweight paper on top of the paint. We used this watercolor paper:

5. Use a brayer (or rolling pin meant for play dough) to smooth the paper, making sure it has good contact with the paint:

6. Carefully lift the paper straight up and admire (or be disappointed in) your art!

It was a quite relaxing, and rather fun way to spend part of a nice afternoon!

Although honestly, I don't think that the end result of a page with no vertical crease was worth the extra time and materials involved in making the aluminum foil print first:

A traditional set of ink blots has some that are black ink on white paper, some that are red and black ink on white paper--

--and some that are multi-colored. The kids were mostly interested in making the multi-colored blots:

It would be fun to make a correct set of these and then have a go at analyzing each other!

If you're interested in Rorschach and his ink blot test, here are a couple of other resources:





Surprisingly, there aren't many good ones, and no living books for children, although if you were super into it, you could definitely access the official test materials to play with.

And what this really tells you is that if you're an aspiring children's book author, there's plenty of room in the market to start with a picture book bio of Rorschach!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!