trick or treating starts in, well, seven hours and i've still got one costume to make and some pumpkins to carve. zoinks. wish me luck! what time is it socially acceptable to start drinking beer and swearing at the sewing machine and trying to lower my kid's expectations? that's what i want to know.
in the meantime, here are some pretty pictures i took this week. i love the colors outside right now.
have fun tonight!
did you know that halloween is right around the corner? i sort of forgot about it, for a minute, even though the kids have been diligent about reminding me. this year's costume requests: a piece of cheese and a totoro costume. the hunk of cheese is achievable with cardboard, paint, and some suspenders (thanks to the elaborate 10 year old sketches provided to me on a regular basis) but i am a little bit anxious about the totoro situation. i can't sew worth a damn, and it makes me laugh on a regular basis that some of the most-searched posts on this blog are for things i bumbled through with my sewing machine or embroidery floss. this year will probably be a lot like last year's uglydoll costume, in that i will lie him down on the fabric, trace the general shape around him, and pray. there will probably be beer and swearing involved, too. possibly some tears. possibly many tears.
there are actually a few tiny pumpkins around the house, finally. i think the kids would happily tell you that one of my biggest shortcomings as their mother is my complete unwillingness to buy creepy, talking, moving, plastic halloween decorations. it isn't enough for them to enjoy these things when we trick or treat in the neighborhood, so the kids roll their eyes and hand me more sketches of what our house could look like 'if only it was awesome.'
would you like to know the two single best presents you could ever get for a 10 year old? i'll tell you.
this is not a book, by keri smith (i would very much like my own copy, too.) i've given many, many copies of wreck this journal as gifts to other kids, but this one is the brand new one. and it's fabulous!
assorted rolls of colored duct tape - enough said. it's a perfect present! she's a happy camper.
it has been a busy week, spent alternating between packing my babies kids for sleepaway camp and working on a huge freelance illustration job that's due next week. plus there's been the managing to keep the feelings of total hopelessness at bay while looking out the window at day after day of rain and heavy gray fog. i cried a little in the trial-sized aisle at target while i was buying the kids each their very own soap dish, because this is their first sleepaway camp experience and i am going to miss them terribly. but later that day when they were determinedly trying to choke each other, i thought to myself that a week away really isn't that long for them to be gone.
i did see a wee patch of blue sky up above for a total of about five minutes today. it was something special to behold, let me tell you.
if you live in or are visiting maine this summer, i wanted to let you know i have some working hanging + for sale at two of my favorite places on mount desert island: the burning tree restaurant in otter creek*, and at lisa hall jewelry in northeast harbor.
*they don't have a website because they are too busy cooking the world's most delicious food in the history of ever to worry about such paltry concerns, but you can see a picture i took there here.
am i the kind of person who pulls her son's top secret drawings out of the recycling, takes pictures of them and posts them on the internet for the WHOLE WORLD to see? yes, yes i am.
i think this is just about the best thing ever. i've been crying inside a little ever since i found it. (+ i've received the sage advice to tuck this away and save it for his wedding.)
also, since it's been raining pretty much non-stop, we've been needing to come up with some indoor play plans. i overheard this yesterday when they were playing little house on the prairie, ellie and chase style:
"ellie, play a really
sad song on the piano, and i will just stand here with my pa ingalls
hat on, looking into the distance for a long, long time."
ha.
what does your kitchen look like on the friday morning before valentines day? i hope it is tidier than mine.
i have frosting in my hair and a nice big drive-by streak of it all over my favorite velvet coat. and it's a pretty sure bet that the kids are going to come home from school wrecked from sugar and covered in glitter.
i saw this wonderful video on dear ada last weekend and everything about it made me feel happy.
have a nice weekend and a happy valentines day.
a little bit of glitter can do wonders for the february funk.
just a quick reminder that worldwide free shipping in my etsy shop ends tomorrow night, october 31st, at which time my children will most likely be in a post trick-or-treat sugar-induced coma and i will be thinking i might like to eat a mini three musketeers or two. it is hard for me to talk about promotional stuff here, i've decided - it makes me feel shy and i have never thought of this blog as only a place to talk about my business life - far from it. i don't exactly know what it is i do here, but i think i like it light-ish on the business side of things. so anyway, free shipping. okay.
i don't often post pictures of my kids' faces here, but lots of people asked so here is a picture of my son's elvis costello costume:
happy halloween!
halloween is not my favorite holiday. i don't hate it or anything, but i never get super excited to line my front path with skull lights or make a tree of little white ghosts, either. nothing against skull lights or little white ghosts, but you know what i mean. my kids, however (and of course) love everything about halloween with fierce intensity. they've been talking about decorations, costume plans and trick-or-treat routes for at least two months. the costumes have gone through several different phases of sketching and planning, with my daughter finally deciding to be a particular life sized uglydoll. both my kids are huge uglydoll fans and love to draw them and make up stories about them. (my son was easier: he wanted to dress up as elvis costello, end of story.)
i told her i'd give the life sized uglydoll a try, but i couldn't promise excellent results. first, sewing is not really my thing. i can do it, but the way i do it is extremely unscientific/fly by the seat of my pants. it turned out much better than i'd hoped, though very much the aw, what a nice homemade costume kind of costume.
in case you're curious, here is what we did: we bought a couple of yards of gray fleece and a wee bit of yellow, black and cream colored fleece, a couple of yards of fusible interfacing (to give the costume a bit of stiffness,) yellow and cream colored embroidery floss, fabric glue and gray sewing thread. i had a coupon from joann's, so we spent a total of $22.50.
when we got home i laid her down on the interfacing and traced the general shape of babo around her. (ie, super unscientifically.) i cut out two identical pieces of interfacing and two pieces of fleece, then ironed the interfacing to the fleece (this part didn't work so well but it was passable - i was afraid to turn up the iron too much and melt the fleece or something else dumb i am often prone to do in these situations.) we planned it so the mouth would roughly line up with her eyes. i machine sewed the wrong sides together, leaving good sized openings for her arm holes. we flipped it right side out and added eyes with fabric glue. i stitched around the eyes with yellow embroidery floss. then i cut a large slit for the mouth and i machine stitched two long, thing pieces of black fleece on the top and bottom cuts, and we added two teeth with cream colored fleece and stitched around those with cream colored embroidery floss. i had her try it on three or four times during the process to make sure i was one the right track.
she can see through the mouth opening really well, which was a relief. i wasn't sure how that was all going to pan out. the costume comes down below her knees and she's going to wear it with a gray sweater underneath and gray tights for her legs.
she declared it 'the best costume ever' and said she'd 'never been so proud of me in her whole entire life'. dude, i never really thought about what hearing that would feel like - it's pretty excellent. it sort of even made me like halloween a little bit, though i still draw the line at any super crazy decorations. (and don't let the ones in the backround of the top photo fool you - my kids put them up by themselves. :)
i spent a lot of friday night gearing up for PICNIC, printing prints and packaging them up, + getting myself organized. in the middle of my mad dash, ellie decided to make a pair of slippers out of duct tape but cutting up a whole bunch of cardboard and slapping it all together with a ton of duct tape. my last-minute chaos always seems to fuel her need to create stuff, which can be a little bit totally annoying sometimes but mostly it's excellent. the slippers would be a great project if readymade ever does a kids issue. (i totally think they should do a kids issue.)
PICNIC was a lot of fun on saturday. from a vendor perspective, it was great - i thought it was easy to unload and well organized + laid out, with lots of room for each booth. the weather was lovely. lots of people showed up + were friendly and happy to be there. the bands sounded great. i sold a lot of stuff. all in all, the whole thing was pretty much perfect. i didn't get a chance to take many pictures, though, which always seems to be the way.
my kids had a great time there, too. there was a lot of space behind the booth so they spent a good amount of time running around with the offspring of other vendors + friends. by the end of the day they were filthy, sweaty, somewhat feral and totally exhausted. i think that's the sign of an excellent day in kid terms, right? chase bought an old radio tube from karen gelardi's boyfriend's booth, and came running over saying "mom! this is totally vintage! from the 80s!!!" oh my god, child. those are fighting words. charlie corrected him and said it was from the 40s, and reminded him not to plug it in anywhere. :)
thank you to everyone who stopped by ink and peat on saturday night to see my work there. wish i could have been there with you! have a great day.
