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We're having a camping themed birthday party for Oscar (and Mr. H and my dad since all three birthdays are within a week and all the boys like to camp).
We're only inviting family but cute invitations are still important. Made of topo maps and complete with handprint campfires and t-shirt knit tents.
Less than a month and our little guy will be one. I'm feeling the perfect mix of happy/sad. It's going by so quick.
We had 10 entrants in the Picture Windows give away--the first in my It Takes Two textile experiment.
And the winner is......as selected from my handful of little slips of paper...Mark!
Who is actually my mom :) It was random, promise!
I'll get this in the mail and she and her preschool class will continue the experiment for us all. Can't wait to see the photos! And if you didn't win, stay tuned, a few more quilts coming and I think I like the next two better than the first....
Thanks for playing!
From the comments and conversations with friends it seems folks are a bit intimidated to enter the quilt giveaway. Don't be! It's really not hard and there's no such thing as screwing up an experiment. Whatever happens happens. Really. 24 hours left and I'll draw a name. Of course if this sounds totally lame to you, don't enter.
::
Right now I'm heading out to the craft shack to sew up some more samples/practice for my quilt class TOMORROW. I should really be more organized. I'm teaching patchwork pillows at Beverly's. It should be a fun time! And I'm even MORE excited for my next class. Just as soon as I work out the details ;)
I need to make a bunch of muffins for an upcoming field trip for Biscuit's class (like 50-100 muffins). If you can point me to a tried and true muffin recipe I'd be very grateful and will, in return, post my mother-in-law's bran muffin recipe for you. I thought of Swistle's pumpkin muffins but pumpkin seems wrong for spring. Ideas?
This week has been a busy one. All good stuff but I'm really not cut out for having activities every night of the week plus both days of the weekend.
Tonight's big event was Biscuit's very exciting Writer's Showcase. Her teacher submitted her story "Daisy Goes to New Zealand" so she was among about 50 kids from all the schools in our district who were invited to this event to be honored as young authors.
The speaker was real. live. author. Patricia Newman who kindly gave each young author a signed copy of her book. Nugget on the Flight Deck is all about an aircraft carrier. (Nugget is a boy with a really unfortunate name; I had assumed this was a book about a dog). If you have a kid who's into military stuff/airplanes/ships it'd be perfect. I read it to Biscuit and was impressed with her curious questions about pilots "punching out" of a plane and other elements of the book but had to laugh when 3/4 of the way through she said, "wait, this is a BOAT? It's not a BOAT! It's an AIRPORT." And I said, "uh, ya. That's sort of the point of this book," and then we spent a really long time trying to figure out how big an aircraft carrier is relative to things she is familar with. I decided it was approximately the size of one of the big fields at school. I have no idea. We need to plan a trip to tour the Hornet.
The whole evening was completely adorable and fun marred only by the fact that Oscar smelled quite strongly of puke. After months without spitting up he broke that trend right before pickup tonight when he puked all over himself. Puke, not spit up. Of course I didn't bring spare clothes so he spent the evening in a smelly onesie sans cute overalls.
We got home and I put him in the very last diaper in the entire house and was grateful we've still got the cloth diaper thing going. I could procure more diapers while wearing my jammies by just washing the laundry. I'll still need to get some disposables at the store tomorrow--Mr. H hasn't quite come over to the world of cloth diapering. Oh well.
Drawing is now closed--winner was Mark!
First up in my little experiment--Picture Windows.
It may not look like much now but this quilt is full of color.
It's constructed of muslin with brown cotton sashing and printed binding. Flannel provides a lightweight batting.
The entire piece is machine quilted. The size is approximately 40x52 inches.
All this quilt needs is YOU.
A winner will be chosen from the comments and the winner will keep the finished quilt.
By leaving a comment you agree that you:
Special requirements for this project (this will vary for every project):
To finish this quilt, the winner will need a flat surface that is larger than the quilt and unable to be stained or damaged by water. A grass lawn is pretty much the most ideal surface.
Ready to go? Leave a comment on this post and make sure it includes your email address. Comments will be open for one week (closing on Sunday April 22). I'll announce the winner and ship the quilt next Monday.
With thanks to my friend for the perfect name I'm finally ready to introduce this idea on the blog. I've been thinking for months about a series of, for lack of a better term, "interactive" quilts and textiles. Basically I create a piece that is in some way incomplete and then someone else finishes it.
Sort of like those stories where one person writes a sentence and passes it to the next. But with a quilt.
Here's how "it takes two" is going to work:
I know it all sounds a bit odd but I'm really excited about this. I have at least 10 ideas in mind and 3 projects already complete or partially complete. I hope to post once a month or so until I run out of steam.
Want to play? I'll post the first quilt today!
Thanks so much for reading and hopefully for playing along.
It's absolutely pouring rain outside--so fun to listen to, especially after this winter where it barely rained at all. The rain is thwarting day 2 of my "get back into running" plan (I'm not that hardcore for an after dark rain run). Oooohhhh, now it's a thunder and lightening storm. Fun!
Since I'm not running I thought I'd sit down and write the post I've been meaning to write for a month--a kid update. Of course in that month Oscar is a completely different child (a month ago he was a child that slept. Now? Not so much.) A month from now he'll be a different child again (one that sleeps? I certainly hope so!). I best capture the right now, right now. His baby book is a bit sparse.
Biscuit:
I'm not sure Oscar could have a better big sister. She loves to play with him and is so good about keeping an eye on him when we ask. Currently it's all about hide and seek. She hides, he's confused, she pokes her head out, he spots her and crawls over, she hides again, he's confused. I can't imagine how it's fun for either of them but it seems to work.
Easter: She was pretty excited about the Easter bunny and provided him (her?) a detailed note about where she'd be sleeping (on the couch with Aunt Laura) and where the egg hunt should be held (at Grammy's house). The funniest thing was Mr. H's idea to color the chicken eggs and return them to the coop. Boy was she impressed/surprised when she went to collect eggs Easter morning and they were fully decorated. Her theory was that the Easter bunny "had paints or markers or something" and decorated them and put them back in the coop. ;)
Moods: Maybe it's a six-year-old girl thing but wow is she moody and whiny lately. It seems like everything is an overreaction (to me). Tears, angst, oh. my. gosh. We're working on the whining piece. Last night we had a deal going (she agreed to it, not sure why) but she got a big piece of candy before her bath under the agreement that if she whined at all during the bedtime routine I would throw away all the rest of her Easter candy. She made it for quite a while but ended in tears with a whine over wanting to go running with me. I told her I threw the candy away but it's actually in the cupboard for my personal enjoyment. Now I'm thinking about letting her earn it back with whine free evenings. It was so incredibly pleasant last night to do the routine sans whine.
Writer: Tonight she was so, so cute and so, so excited. Her teacher called to let her know she was getting some sort of award for a story she wrote. The little event is next week and she's going to get to meet a real author. I don't think she could have been more excited if she was going to get to meet the Easter bunny himself. I'll have to post about her adorable book factory project. According to the marketing materials she developed the website is PaigesBookFactory.com. Smart girl :)
All in all, things are good with kid #1.
Oscar:
It's a blurry photo but that's our little cutie. All tilty head "hugs" and grins and teeth. Oh, and fingernails. The pinching/biting/scratching is a bit old. As I tell him several times a day it's lucky he's cute 'cause he's been kind of a butthead lately. Of course that's in comparison to his first 9 months where he was pretty much the easiest baby ever. These days he's getting up 2-3 times/night and is tough to get down for a nap or bed. He has such a strong need to pull up to standing and such an inability to get down from standing that he has to be put into his crib fully asleep. If he's even a little bit awake he pulls up to stand and gets stuck. I swear I've watched him in the morning about 95% still asleep but blindly grasping for the crib bars and hauling himself upward. Crazy boy.
Let's not talk about the sleep anymore, shall we?
Eating. He's trying to feed himself. You can be glad I didn't have a camera around tonight when he fed himself refried beans. That doesn't look good smeared across the face! He is a very fickle eater. On Monday he loved, loved, loved curried tofu (!) but on Tuesday he wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. He pretty much always loves applesauce, noodles, Cheerios, citrus and bananas and consistently hates broccoli but for the rest your guess is as good as mine.
Adorableness. He's playing peek-a-boo and it is SO CUTE I can't even tell you. He pulls a blanket over his own head and pulls it down with a giant grin. If you cover your face with your hands he yanks them off, smiles, and then slaps them back onto your face. He's a total mimic and likes to shake his head side to side, stick out his tongue, puff up his cheeks, blow on your face and, sometimes, give high fives. He's soooo big and soooo ticklish as soon as he puts up his arms.
As I tell anyone who asks, we totally scored some awesome kids. I'm feeling very lucky these days.
Thanks for the love on the reading pillow. It must have made it's way around the internets somehow because I glanced at my traffic stats as a I logged in tonight and a few days ago I had 12 times my (normally meager) traffic. Facebook, I'm guessing.
And this is where I wish I had something totally spectacular to follow up with but, no. I do have a project [this close] to done but give me a few more days to get done, done. Instead, it's more of what you may have come to expect here at Under Construction consistently inconsistent quality.
Art
Biscuit and I made this collage from pages we tore from an old book and then painted with acrylic. It started out as an abstract concept but somehow turned into a city.
We actually worked on it at an open studio type class at a local art store. Going there together was nice. Seems like lately we've been a sort of stereotypical mother/daughter pair:
Her: I don't want to!
Me: Nag, nag, nag
Her: Eye roll
Me: What's with the attitude?!
Her: Stomp, stomp
Me: Gaahhhh!
For some reason I thought this was something to look forward to when she turned 12 but maybe she's precocious? I'm trying to mellow out and adjust my own attitude. I know I've been extra grumpy/tired lately and that never helps. After much arguing about art projects lately (which basically boiled down to both of us working on our own projects and then her liking mine better and wanting to "finish" it for me and me saying no) it was nice to team up on this giant piece. No idea what we're going to do with a 3 foot by 3 foot cityscape with a giant yellow carwash.
Funny note: the carwash was a church with a giant "sign of God" (a cross) on the top but I asked her not to include the cross since she is hoping Mr. H will hang it up at his work (a school). Biscuit is very interested in crosses lately. She asked me a few weeks ago why that shape was always on the side of churches we drove past. I decided to just go for it and explained that Jesus was killed when some bad people hung him on a cross. Our conversation, paraphrased:
Her: Whoa! Did it hurt?
Me: I'm sure it did!
Her: Who killed him?
Me: Some people who really didn't like Jesus.
Her: Some mean people said they were going to kill Martin Luther King but then after he was dead they decided they actually really liked him.
Me: Yes, it's sad that somebody killed Martin Luther King. He was a good man.
Her: But I don't think he has a symbol.
So now every time we see a cross she shouts out, "look, it's the symbol of GOD!" and I try to imagine a symbol for Martin Luther King.
Maybe it's time for some sort of cultural/religious education? The Easter holiday should be just perfect for that. Forget chocolate and bunnies, let's talk about dead people coming back to life! (with apologies to any religious readers out there)
Sheesh, didn't this start out as a post about art? I think I better go to bed. Oscar isn't sleeping for shit lately. That sewing project I'm so excited about can wait another day (or more).
