Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dyeing
I realize plenty of nursing mothers get by just fine without ever buying a single piece of “nursing” clothing. Others, I know, find the look of nursing shirts awkward and embarrassing.
My god though, it’s SO much easier. Ok, so these days, nursing is pretty easy. Ender and I both more or less have the routine down, and if I wanted to, wearing “normal” clothing would absolutely be doable. But in the early days weeks months of nursing, it was just one more thing to deal with, and I fell in love with the easy openings of nursing tops. I got in the habit. Plus, if I need to nurse Ender while I’m out and about, it’s way easier with a nursing top to not flash every passerby a glimpse of my crepe paper belly, never mind my boobs.
Unfortunately, (affordable) nursing tops are pretty slim pickings. I have exactly four long sleeved tops I’m comfortable wearing. And as of this morning, one of them looked terrible on me.
I like brown, and some browns like me, but this pilgrim turkey brown was not one of them (I meant to take a photo of myself wearing it, but didn’t remember until it was too late). So I thought I didn’t have anything to lose by trying my first experiment with RIT dye. Well, first since a tie-dye activity in the 2nd grade.
I didn’t bother trying to get the original color out, mainly because I didn’t realize it was possible until recently. Plus adding one more step to a project just makes it a little less likely that I’ll get it finished. I thought a bright red would combine nicely with the original brown, and even if it stayed more brown than red, it would be warmer color, and hopefully look nicer with my skin.
Stirring, for over an HOUR was a pain, and it looked like evil Jello. It turned out beautifully though. The color was even nicer than I’d hoped for, I can’t think of the name of the red, but it’s a color that makes me feel nostalgic, it’s the color I imagine Little Red’s riding hood should be.
To be totally honest, my craft whims don’t usually turn out this well, so I’m pretty psyched to not just have one more shirt I can wear without feeling ugly, but to have completed a project in less than a day. I have plans to buy and dye two more shirts, and next time, I think I may play with masking using some wax resist. I can’t wait to see how they turn out.
No Thank You Gymboree
Ender started in the Gymboree Play and Learn stage 2 at the beginning of December, when he turned 6 months old. He had just been starting to make crawling like attempts, and I thought maybe getting him at a place like Gymboree would help get him going.
His favorite place to experiment with movement is our bed. He has been wriggling and moving himself there for well over a month now, but when he gets on floors, carpet or hardwood, he tends to be a lot more cautious, which is probably pretty smart now that I think about it. Since Gymboree is just padded everywhere, I thought it might let him be more adventurous, without me having to drag him back from a bed edge every few minutes.
It didn’t work out quite as expected. First of all, Ender had almost no interest in trying anything at all at Gymboree. Maybe if I’d stuck around longer he would have gotten used to the newness and started to play more, but the bright colors seemed to bewilder him and something about the way the room was built made sounds echo unnervingly- it gave me a headache, and I suspect it is part of what kept Ender static. He DID love the colored wiffle balls, but you know, balls are easy to come by, and I’m not sure he loved them because of any particular quality of their own, or just because it was the only thing in the play area that was small enough for him to handle and shove in his mouth. By the end of the month, he was also pretty interested in the bubbles, which prompted me to buy some for him, since he’s never taken the slightest notice before.
It’s possible that Ender was just too young for something like Gymboree. Aside from thinking it might get him crawling a little sooner, I didn’t want or expect some miracle exercise routine. I don’t think it’s necessary or advisable to push that kind of thing on babies. Mainly, I think the purpose of baby activities such as Gymboree is to keep people like me sane, giving them something to do and a reason to get dressed and leave the house. I was disappointed all around though: Ender pretty much just sat there and watched everything until he got overwhelmed enough to cry (admittedly not often). And though he was the youngest baby in the class, the other babies didn’t seem much more engaged in the equipment or activities than he was. Left to their own devices, the babies played with the whiffle balls, and maybe occasionally grabbed the mini trampoline. Everything else was parent led, urging the babies to go down parallel slides together and watch each other to promote socialization (not kidding) or ride in the boat (the babies seemed pretty bored with it after the first 20 seconds) or roll a ball down the slope (they preferred to hang on to the balls actually, thank you very much). Not only is this overly parent-directed style pretty contrary to my ideas about parenting, it also made socialization a bit strained, because we were too busy trying to entertain babies who would have been content to chew on wiffle balls.
What it comes down to I think, is that I’m spoiled. When Ender was about 3 months old I discovered story time at the local library. Then I realized that there are seven different Cuyahoga County libraries within 20 minutes of my house, and they ALL have story time. I can go to story time every weekday- a story time geared towards 0-18 month olds. It’s short, about 15 minutes, which is about as long as the babies can go without getting restless, and it’s followed by an open play time with library baby toys. We do rhymes, songs, and usually one or two short picture books. And it’s FREE. During the free play after I can chat with other moms (and the occasional dad) while Ender gnaws on the library toy nearest him, and then when he decides he’s had enough, we can leave. If he’s cranky, or ready for a nap, or if something else comes up on any particular day, I can skip story time without feeling guilty, because 1) it’s (once again now) FREE and 2) I know I can try again the next day. Ender loves watching the other kids, (far more of which are crawling around at story time then Gymboree) and the only suggested “activity” is, you know, reading stories. I decided to give Gymboree a try in December, because the story time series took a break over December. It started back up today.
So Gymboree didn’t do much for us. I have to realize though that this is only because I already had something better.
*Gymboree image from flickr user sully213
Dense
For Ender this year the plan is to make him a set of three “discovery” bottles. I originally thought it would be cool to make him one of those wave machine bottles — you know: oil, water, a bit of food coloring. It’s simple and fascinating enough that it should amuse him for at least a few years, and while he’s learning to crawl, it will double as a rolling toy.
It’s easy enough to make one with an empty soda bottle. I think think this is a pretty typical kindergarten through 3rd grade craft project slash science experiment. I wanted something a little nicer and more permanent than that, and most importantly, bigger, so I could do a couple other things on the inside.
You’d think it would be fairly easy to find a large empty plastic container, but everything shaped the way I wanted either has a lid too large, or is made of glass. Finally I decided a big plastic food container would work since I couldn’t find anything more sturdy, but I couldn’t find any with a mouth large enough. So far I am still without a container, but I think we’ll go to Costco this weekend and I think I’ll be able to find something there.
Inside the bottle, aside from the blue water and clear “air” (oil) I wanted to have a layer of pebbles on the bottom, easy enough, and a boat floating on the water. The boat is where I’m running into trouble.
I KNOW there are things that float on water and sink in oil. I remember it at least vaguely from 10th grade chemistry. What I don’t remember is what those objects are. I must admit that while I generally did well in science, density bottles were not my strong suit. In my density bottle, I added a layer of soap so even my oil and water mixed together.
My first thought was to make the boat out of a walnut shell, because everyone knows walnut shells float, right?
Walnut boats do float on the surface of water, but they float the same way a metal boat floats… based on shape. And like a metal boat, they will not rise to the surface once sunk. This is important obviously, since I can’t guarantee the boat in my wave bottle will stay upright on the surface, and once it’s sealed up, I won’t have anyway to rescue the wreckage.
That pretty much used up my imagination. I expected this to be pretty easy to find out online, but it’s remained surprisingly mysterious. I found a yahoo answers post that gave the relative densities of water and oil, which makes it completely easy because it’s so easy to find out the density of any particular object. Not that I really trust yahoo answers anyway. I also found sites suggesting that “some” plastics would float in water and sink in oil or “some” woods. So nothing simple and obvious.
I found a post somewhere that said wax would work, which seemed plausible. I didn’t think wax would make a very convincing boat though, and I was sort of stuck on the walnut shell, so I came up with the idea of filling the walnut shell with wax.
Then I came up with a brilliant alternative: crayon catamarans.
I bought two packs of crayons (so both sides of the catamaran would be the same color) jewelry wire and a whole bunch of other bits that I thought might work together with the boats, but when I sat down with oil and water and a broken black crayon… it sunk to the bottom of the water glass.
Terribly disappointing. No catamarans. Unless it was just that I used a black crayon… maybe a lighter color wouldn’t weigh as much (yes I’m joking. No need to correct my science please).
I did another google search and someone mentioned a rubber band. Obviously a rubber band won’t make a great boat but it DID give me the idea to try a bouncy ball.
And finally… a possibility.
So I have something that I know floats at the right level, now I just need to play with it some to see how I can make it look like a cute boat.
The current plan is to find a few bright colored bouncy balls, cut them in half, drill a hole through the middle and attach a sail using jewelry wire. I thought I’d use a glass bead to weigh down the bottom and make sure the sail stays pointing upwards, but I may be over-thinking this thing. For the sail I’m using a bit of fabric, and I’ll polyurethane the whole thing to keep it somewhat water safe.
I’ll post an update as soon as I figure it out.
Meanwhile, enjoy my rubber Saturn.
*First image from Flickr user Sean Rogers1. All following from me.
Nice Niece Bedroom
A little while ago my sister-in-law (J) moved with her daughters to a new house. I offered to redo the girls’ bedroom, which I’m sure they regretted agreeing to since it ended up taking me about a year to finish.
When they moved in, the bedroom was a little boy’s room with a duck border and a single wallpapered wall (I think it was kind of a meadow/lake thing? To go with the ducks?) with the other three walls painted cream.
The girls, aged 7 and 5 (8 and 6 by the time I finished, I was not over stating how insane long it took me to finish) liked the ducks, but we wanted to give them a fresh room and they were excited to have a room painted to their specs. (Somewhat. Even without previous experience, I know better than to take my design instruction 100% from kids, otherwise the room would have ended up half neon orange and half neon pink. Just saying.)
The older niece (we’ll call her N1) wanted a jungle/forest room, and the younger (N2) wanted a princess room, because when kids are sharing, nothing is simple. So I decided to do a sort of enchanted forest thing, with animals climbing the walls for N1 and a floating castle peeking through the trees for N2.
Most childrens’ rooms can end up looking awfully cartoon-y. We seem to have the notion that all childrens’ decor must be primary colors, or at least painfully bright, and if it works for a 6 year old they’d better outgrow it by the time they’re 7. My goal was to design a room that would work for both N1 and N2, and preferably continue to work for them as they grew into preteens.
The first thing we did was hang up the curtains from their old room, then started stripping wallpaper. This was gunky messy work, and the girls were able to help which I think they both enjoyed.
The texture left on the stripped wall was cool, almost intentional looking. It reminded me of a map, and made a nice backdrop to the globe. It almost seemed a shame to paint over it, but of course, we painted over it. In picking paint we (J and I) stuck to two main background colors. As I said, I wanted something that could grow with the girls, so we went with fairly muted colors: a yellowish bamboo green and a greyed out purple. The green went up first. J did most of the painting.
It’s always hard for me to tell how a color is going to look once you get it on the wall, but I LOVED the green.
Next I put up masking tape, in a non-pattern pattern to represent “trees.” I used two different widths of tape to keep it from looking overly ordered. Since the final intended effect would be flat, I hoped it would also create a sense of depth that unified width “trees” would not.
The effect of the tape on the green walls was striking. I think the girls would have been happy if we’d just left it like that.
For the next step we (and again, in this case we means J) painted over everything in our purple color. This didn’t look nearly as cool as the tape on green, and it stayed this way for several months which I felt a little bit bad about. N1 and N2 were remarkably patient, though I think every time I saw them N2 would ask me when I was going to paint her side pink. Eventually, I got around to the next step, painting clouds on top of the purple. This is a terribly stereotypical little-kid room motif, but I like to think I put a different spin on it. Once again, J did most of the actual painting after I outlined the cloud shapes on the wall.
With all the clouds up, I was able to start detailing the clouds. From here on, I think I can honestly say I did all the painting, rather than just stealing credit from J. 
I outlined the clouds in a metalic paint that was supposed to be silver, but looked more gold or bronze depending on the light. It was a much darker color than I expected, which I think worked out quite well. One of these days I’ll learn to make art that looks cool according to plan instead of accident, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.
Once I finished all the outlines, I started sketching in the little details, a castle for N2 and some jungle animals for N1. N2 only got the one fantasy element because the castle took so much more work than the animals. I googled Disney castles and pulled a bunch of images that I thought N2 would like, then freehanded it with pencil on the wall. I don’t quite have the painting confidence to just paint without pre-sketching, and chalk didn’t work, but fortunately the pencil came off in the end.
The details went pretty quickly, but I still had to leave long gaps between steps because I don’t live super close.
Once the pencil was up I was able to start painting. This took far longer than I expected, because the undercolor, white, required several coats to look convincing. Once I got the white up however, the color went on more rapidly. Of course N2 got a PINK castle. I tried to match the color to the comforters and curtains, but I think I ended up going a little overboard and used a color that looked more like a highlighter exploded on the wall. N2 LOVES it though, so I guess that’s all that matters.
N1 got three animals. She specifically requested a monkey and a cat, but I decided she also needed a koala. I think the cat is her favorite, and the spots were quite fun to paint.
I intentionally kept the wall facing their beds a little calmer than the wall behind their pillows, with the notion that you don’t want anything TOO exciting to look at while you’re trying to sleep.
I have insomnia, so probably I’m a little oversensitive about that. We didn’t really have any plans for the door or the closet door, so I was pleasantly surprised that the cream color looked nice against the mural, and we didn’t have to do anything at all. The blue carpet does not match quite so nicely unfortunately, but it’s not a big deal. I think the eventual plan is to pull it out and restore the wood floors underneath, which should look incredible. All in all I think the room turned out well.
N1′s animals are mostly orange with a bit of the pink, and N2′s pink castle has touches of orange to tie them together.
The girls added the butterfly stickers.
Ultimately I’m not sure I succeeded in giving them a room that will stay timely into their teens. N2′s castle especially is pretty age specific, very little girl. Despite my attempt to broaden the visual style with black outlines and stark, limited color, I can’t quite see N2 wanting the hot pink princess castle next to her bed when she’s ten. At least it gave them a dramatically different space and they had a lot of imput in the creation. Possibly they would have been happier with something cartoon-y-er, I’m not sure. I honestly don’t know that I could have done a good job on a typical cartoon style childrens’ mural anyway. This simplified flat color with line detail is much more suitable to my artistic style.
Now of course, I’m planning my second mural/room design, for our baby‘s bedroom. I have the same goal of longevity (so I don’t have to paint over it in 4 years) that I had for my nieces’ room. My friend Kim is going to help me with the painting since I’m getting less mobile by the day, and also because she loves painting murals and is awesome at it. Hope to have something to post photos of soon.
Make a Wedding
Today is Matt‘s and my 1st anniversary.
Once we got home from the honeymoon last year I did a series of posts on the wedding, and one of the posts I wanted to do was on the crafty aspects. I never got around to it because it would make a long post and I was intimidated at the thought of all the how-to. I’m not going to make this a complete guide, but I thought it was worth at least highlighting all the things we and our friends made for the wedding, and share some of the cool photos I haven’t had a chance to share yet.
1. Flowers
I don’t like flowers. Wait. Let me reword that. I love flowers growing in the ground, or in pots, and I love plants of all kinds, but I’m no gardener, and I don’t really get the point of cutting flowers off their plants to die. I realize some flowers actually grow better if they’re cut, but the whole idea, especially for a wedding, sort of annoys me.
Initially I didn’t want flowers at all, but after thinking about it, I wondered if we could do some kind of steamerpunk-esque flowers, maybe with hinges, or clockwork moving parts, or… I got a little crazy in my imaginings. In fact I sort of let the whole idea go until I mentioned the idea to one of my Kims (we had two Kims and Maid of Honor Amy in the wedding) who said: “Ooh that will be so much fun, let’s do it.” Actually I’m not sure that’s how it happened, but she doesn’t read blogs so I figure I’m safe blaming her.
We took a trip to Pat Catan’s (like a cheaper version of Michaels) and just picked up a bunch of… parts. Cool metal looking buttons and beads, 3 colors of substantial foil, weird clock things, modeling clay, star sequins and all sorts of bits. We had a couple parties (by we, I mean Kim, who hosted everything) with Amy, both Kims, Jack and my brother Brian. After a bit of experimentation we gave up on the clay and mostly on the hinges. We did manage to get LED lights through the center of seven flowers on the bouquet, plus Matt’s button flower thing (whatever those are called, I refuse to try and spell it).
Making the flowers was not that bad, relatively speaking. I say this, because to be totally honest, Kim did most of the work. We rigged the bouquet up with a switch so I could turn the lights off, but the wiring got messed up somewhere and it didn’t work. We managed to “fix” it so that it was permanently on instead. I’m not sure when they eventually burned out, but when we got back from the honeymoon they were still burning bright.
There were three kinds of flowers: the lilies made from gold foil, the- I dunno- flower-flowers in copper foil, and the baby’s breath.
The baby’s breath was the easiest, though most tedious, and this is the only flower I ended up working on. All we did was take some of the thin jewelry wire, twist a couple silver or gold star confetti/sequins on the end, and twist it off. Eventually Kim discovered that it made more sense to do this seven or eight times per strand which saved a lot of time. This was somewhat unsatisfying, since the yield per time was pretty low, but they looked extremely cool. I think real baby’s breath is pretty useless stuff, but this shiny delicate spray was something else altogether. Kim made a more continuous strand of this as well, which she twisted in my hair.
The copper flowers were also pretty simple, and invented by the other Kim.
They cut copper foil into roughly flower shaped bits, folded away the sharp edges, and crinkled, then used the jewelry wire to thread on a textured silver button and twisted the whole thing onto cooking skewers.
The lilies were a bit more complicated as we wanted them to light up. Kim (the first Kim) used the gold and silver foil to cut out shapes the same way you would for paper flowers, but slightly more angular to keep with the metal look. As a plus, they kept their shape much easier than paper.
We wired up some long strands to the LED bulbs, gave them twisty stems from the thicker gauge wire, stuck them in the center of each flower, and sort of… sewed the whole thing together with the jewelry wire.
This was all far more complicated then it sounds, but it turned out amazingly beautiful. The guys got silver foil cala lily button flower things, with confetti/sequin deely-bob centers. These were much easier. Matt got another normal lily with copper foil, a light in the center, and the sole hinge, because we discovered that was just too much of a pain in the neck to do it for all the lilies. The bouquet took a CR2032 watch battery messily taped up in the center (we covered it with leather ribbon to make it pretty, and Matt’s took a very small watch battery (he doesn’t remember the serial number and I never knew it).
I was sort of shocked at how beautiful the flowers ended up; after buying three giant bags of STUFF I suddenly became positive that they were going to look like crappy cheesy foil things made of a bunch of… well, stuff. Instead they looked amazing. The end result of the flowers was AWESOME, in the literal sense, awe inspiring (I can say this since Kim made most of them).
We used the rest of the random craft bits to make charm bracelets for Amy, Kim, Kim and my sister-in-law Jen (just to clarify, she was not my sister-in-law at the time, being Matt’s sister) who was also in the wedding.
Which brings us to
2. Centerpieces
We wanted a non-traditional wedding. We got a priestess to marry us, I had henna (and am clearly not Indian, nor any other ethnicity that can claim it as heritage) Indian food, an Irish-punkrock band, had the ceremony AND reception in a zoo, and metal flowers we made ourselves. Also, I wore a blue dress, not white, and everyone else wore pretty much whatever they wanted.
So we clearly wanted to do things a little differently, and for that matter, not spend hours of our lives struggling with the decorations (we failed there, but oh well).
The wedding favors were just boxes of animal crackers in the old school Barnum boxes, which was possibly the easiest part of whole thing even with hand written labels (it ended up being easier than printing them believe it or not). The centerpieces presented a dilemma though.
There are ton of low cost, simple centerpieces that would have looked great, but I was unsure how much light there would be in the building, and thought local lights might be a good idea. We considered using those stupid dancing animals and creatures that hook up to ipods, hoping they’d light up and dance to the Irish music, but we weren’t sure we could make them work, and honestly they’d be small enough that they probably would have ended up looking kinda dumb in the middle of the table. The simplest (and probably least expensive) solution would have been a bunch of candles. I’ve seen a few arrangements online that are cheap and beautiful, but the zoo was kinda iffy about open flame, even in candles, and we didn’t feel like messing with it.
Soooo… I suggested light up trees. Because THAT’S easy.
Ikea had some cool LED lamps that inspired my idea, only they’re something like $60 which seemed like more than we wanted to pay, and are actually a bit larger then made any sense. So we collected various online guides to LED creations (couldn’t find any of the initial links we used, but guides are pretty easy to find) and got started. The construction was, in theory, simple. Wire frames (gauge about the same as a coat hanger, maybe a bit thicker) twisted together at the trunk, then branching out for the… branches. Long single strands of insulated wire with LEDs soldiered to the end, taped once around the connections, wound around the wire branches then taped again to hold them on the end.
Matt ordered some C battery holders, we got more switches (and these actually worked) we stuck in the batteries, taped the exposed wire with electrical tape, taped the whole battery mess with clear packing tape (to protect any unnoticed exposed parts) then stuck the whole thing in a glass cylinder and filled the whole thing with silver tinsel (which is why we needed to be so careful with the tape… the tinsel is actually made of metal and could cause some problems).
(BTW… worst definition EVER of cylinder: “Geometry. a surface or solid bounded by two parallel planes and generated by a straight line moving parallel to the given planes and tracing a curve bounded by the planes and lying in a plane perpendicular or oblique to the given planes.” from dictionary.com. I knew what a cylinder was before reading it, now I have no idea.)
I will say right off, that they looked fantastic on the tables at the zoo. There turned out to be plenty of light in the room, but they gave great mood lighting and may be the only centerpieces in the history of weddings that disappeared without the desperate couple urging guests, “please, take them!”
Matt and I managed to snag two (the one from our table was a bit different so I wanted one of the normal ones as well) but it took some effort to make sure we got them. I will also say that Jack and Kim once again came through like champs, letting us bury their home under wiring components for what might have been weeks.
The major thing I must say though, is that by the time we were almost finished with the second tree, we all wanted to scream, and if we hadn’t already paid money for all the electrical components (more than planned) and if we hadn’t been weeks away from the wedding, with no time really to come up with something better, we would have abandoned the whole thing to the depths of craft hell.
Oh yeah. Also. Our friends are amazing.
Anyway, Matt and I couldn’t really give up, and our friends were as mentioned, amazing, and stuck with us (possibly because it was the only way to get all the wiring crap out of their house, but still) so we sort of assembly lined it and eventually got all 10 trees finished (doesn’t sound like much, does it? You have NO idea).
I didn’t end up doing any of the wiring on this one either, instead I did all the tree structures (gloves and goggles both very necessary). With all the loose wires, batteries, and tape, the house looked like a bomb factory.
Each tree had 15 bulbs. We soldered all the positive wire ends together in one clump and the negative ends in another, then soldered them in place with the battery holders. As they were being put together, I started to worry that they all looked freakish, then decided I didn’t care, and eventually, realized they looked quite nice even if they didn’t quite look like my initial designs. I suppose the frustration was worth it, but if we’d known, we definitely would have chosen something easier.
Even so, I suppose as wedding work and wedding frustration and wedding decoration and wedding flowers goes, Matt and I got off pretty easy. I say weeks, but actually we got the trees done in just a few LONG sessions. Most of the wedding party chipped in to help with at least a bit, and Kim did most of the bouquet herself (she claims she enjoyed it, so I try not to feel too guilty). If we’d had ten friends (and maybe 5 soldiering irons) helping with the trees, we probably could have done it in a couple hours. As it was, the centerpieces ended up being the biggest headache of the whole wedding, so really, I guess I shouldn’t complain.
3. Other Bits
The flowers and trees were really the only wedding things we made ourselves (well that and our vows) but there were all sorts of other things provided by others.
When we mentioned we needed a broom (to jump over) for the ceremony, Kim (the other Kim) volunteered to make one, using broom grass and other plants from her garden. She tied everything together with cooper wire which sort of connected it with the flowers and centerpieces and all. My brother dug up a staff I’d picked up on a camping trip, left at his house and forgotten all about. The result was lovely, not quite dried, and is now hanging on our bedroom door (dry!) until we figure out where else we can put it. It looks very welcoming there, and we’d love to leave it where it is, but it gets a bit battered with all the opening and closing, so we should really put it somewhere safer soon.
I think I covered most of the other makers in posts last year, but just to re-mention… here goes:
There was the intricate henna for all the girls done by Lisa (also the person who married us) and then the gilding for me on the wedding day. Jeff, a talented local jeweler, custom made our rings from our ideas and his own, giving us something completely unique, and perfect for the two of us. Amy put together a surprisingly fun bridal shower (bridal showers are not my idea of fun) in spite of my inability to give her addresses until the very last minute. Kim (first Kim) helped me turn my dress from something shapeless to a surprisingly pretty roman looking thing (I’ve always said my dream wedding dress was one of the dresses Lucilla wears in Gladiator). The band we found (a month before the wedding!), the Mickey’s, kicked ass Irish rock style. The lady (owner I think) from Create-A-Cake listened patiently to my out there cake ideas, looked politely at unlikely sketches, turned them into something actually possible, and even seemed excited about it, which is always a plus. India Garden catered with super yummy Indian food and ended up taking over ALL the food and service details that Matt and I hadn’t really considered (table cloths, utensils, plates, servers, food warmers… they even provided plates for the cake) AND they gave me roses which was just amazingly sweet. Our family provided support and funding, which gave us the opportunity to have a dream wedding and honeymoon both. Finally, our friends John and Holly TOOK OVER the day-of planning, acting as guides for the guests and participants alike. Their generous intervention is probably all that saved our wedding from our lack of planning, which, I’ll be honest, was vast. They also found us our photographer, their daughter Willow, who did an amazing job.
I think that’s the real reason I wanted to post this today (and to be clear, I absolutely did NOT write it today, I’m busy celebrating with my husband). There are so many amazing people in our lives. I think of people I know with “frenemies” and I can’t imagine why. I read about people who cringe at their in-laws and am extremely grateful that I actually love mine. I guess everyone’s wedding is special to them, but I think ours will stay special to us, because it was about so many more people than just Matt and I. We have wonderful people to love and to love us, and we are both so thankful. Happy Anniversary.
*photos by Willow, Jack, Amy, etc.
Last year’s Wedding Posts:
Wild Wedding – Part 1 (posed photos)
Wild Wedding – Prepare (henna)
Wild Wedding – The Ceremony
Wild Wedding – Party Time
Celebrate (a VERY short honeymoon journal)
Slinking Suburbs
I heard a story on NPR the other day (ok, maybe the other week) about a weird trend in recent post bubble real estate, where realtors pay ACTORS to pretend to be neighbors in suburbs, with staged barbecues and invitations to nonexistent little league games, so that an empty neighborhood would seem to have people living there on Open House day. The feeling I got from the story, and that I get hearing people talk about suburbs in general, is that does not just represent the dishonesty of some realtors, it is an example of an atmosphere of duplicity that is increasingly associated with the suburbs in general.
Why does everyone hate the suburbs? Why have the suburbs come to represent all that is evil, all that is fake, soccer moms and security moms and helicopter parents and materialism? This annoys me, because as Matt and I start looking for a house I find myself having to defend our choice to look in pure suburbia.
Really I know the whys. One of the first culprits is Tim Burton. More specifically, Edward Scissorhands. I’m sure this movie wasn’t the first vision of suburban sameness, but the uniformly green grassed sameness has come to be part of popular consciousness, whether people realize it or not. The creepy echoes in Buron’s invented neighborhood are a fairly accurate reflection of many developments in post 1960s America, but they just as well describe the world of Camazots from Madeleine L’Engle‘s A Wrinkle in Time. Not exactly positive associations, as was clearly intended.
And that’s fine. The artificiality being satired in Edward Scissorhands absolutely exists, and it can often be found in the suburbs. The problem I have is with the modern assumption that the suburbs are the cause. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, a small enough city that it might as well be a suburb of itself. In my memory I lived in two different houses that were both cookie-cutter floorplans resulting from Eugene’s relatively rapid expansion. In spite of this supposed “sameness,” there was NEVER during my childhood, any sense of conformity in the homes around me. I’ve seen developments where the only difference from one house to the next is the paint color or a window shape, or a brick pattern. In the neighborhoods where I grew up, there was no need to fight for differentiation, because in spite of the repeated architecture, there was no standard look that the residents needed to fight against or conform to.
The sameness we find, I think comes from desire rather than actual similarities. The reason is not the location (suburbs), it’s that keeping-up-with-the-Joneses race that probably helped get us into the whole real estate mess in the first place. I need a bigger, more perfect house, because the neighbors have one. He needs a BMW because his cousin just bought one. It’s stupid, and it has nothing to do with a place, it has everything to do with people.
Matt and I eventually want to live in a house with a bit of land around it, in a safe neighborhood, with decent schools (since we’ll eventually be having kids) and less than an hour commute to the city. These are really not ridiculous wants, and the obvious answer, the only answer, is the suburbs. We hope to keep a garden that grows as much of our food as possible, maybe put up some solar panels or even small windmills, to keep energy costs down. I grew up with a backyard and I want my kids to have one too. We’d like some sort of woodland nearby. Basically, we want a compromise between urban and rural living.
If the human race is to survive into the 23th century, or the 30th century, I imagine someday we’ll all end up living in cities. This is (or could be) the most sustainable way to live, and at some point we won’t have a choice. In suburbs, people use hours worth of gas daily getting to and from work, burn up heat in poorly insulated homes, and spend gallons of water on uselessly green lawns. Maybe that’s why living in the suburbs is so detestable: the seizing of privacy, of space, of control and resources may well be selfish. I am occasionally drawn to the idea of living in an urban environment, with rooftop gardens and shops downstairs. There is appeal, until I remember that I can’t breathe after a few hours in New York, that I get itchy when I hear my neighbors through paper-thin walls, that the only thing I would own of the outside is a door. Someday I hope, large buildings will be planned with more public space, more green space, more space in general to keep us sane. Right now urban living is fun for some, but not a life I can imagine.
Ultimately, the life I’m seeking may not be sustainable. Suburbs, and most rural life, may fade away as energy sources dwindle and people are forced to huddle together for conservation. My response to that is to try and make a life with as small a footprint as possible, mainly to assuage the guilt that we’re contributing to the problem. I do think it’s possible to enjoy living in a dense population, I just don’t think it’s possible for me, today. I can only hope that by the time we have no choice, urban designers have come up with ways to make living wall to wall more tolerable.
*First photo by Wildernice, all others by me.
Chicago Coffee
I meant to write this post after our last trip to Chicago, then I forgot all about it. Fortunately, when Matt and I went back to Chicago last week (ok, two weeks ago?) and I remembered again.
We found this funky coffee shop somewhere near Evensville. In terms of design elements, the main thing that caught my attention was the use of coffee mugs: they had an entire segment of wall pegged with non-matching mugs. 
There were a few pretty ones I guess, but most were nothing special. They weren’t all that different from a collection you might expect to find in a less organized home cubbord. Some of them were pretty dated, some were downright ugly, though not ugly enough to be really special, if you know what I mean. The total effect was interesting. The fact that they didn’t match just made the collection more impressive, it looked fun and eclectic, and really matched the feel of the coffee house. Also, eco-friendly– using obviously recycled mugs instead of buying new ones or using cardboard cups– which is nice.
Another feature I liked was a more common coffee shop element, a collection of for-sale artwork hanging on the walls. This is a great, probably free (or even profit making) way to decorate a coffee shop that also supports local artists (I assume local) which is fantastic. 
I love to see businesses helping each other, realizing that it’s possible for more than one party to profit at once; not everything is competition.
I’m not sure whether it’s a common occurrence, but the night we were there, a drum circle was practicing/preforming. When they started out I thought I was going to have to leave, the rhythm wasn’t all that, well, rhythmic, and it was unbearably loud. Pretty quickly though I got used to the noise level and, more importantly, the drummers warmed up, and pretty soon I was really enjoying it.
While I was there I did some sketching:
Edit: Sketches added in later post.
Day of Drawing
Haven’t had any time to come up with any deep topics to share today, I’ve been working on a project for someone. I thought maybe people might like to take a look at my process, though I don’t think it’s necessarily much different from the process most artists use.
One possible difference is my reliance on hard pencils. Most people sketch with a soft pencil becuase it’s easy to change and intended for dark, loose lines. I use a hard pencil from habit, when I’m being more diligent I use a softer pencil like I’m “supposed to” and I recognize that it actually does work better, but I just like the paler line.
Before I ink I like to put in as much detail with pencil as I can, even though I’m often disappointed at having to get rid of all the graphite lines. I love the look of the graphite lines along with the ink, but leaving the pencil is usually not an option because by the time I get there I’ve managed to smudge and overwork all the pencil.
I guess one option would be to add in the “sketch” lines after it’s been inked and erased, but that seems a little dishonest. Still, I guess art is all about visual tricks.
One of the weirder things about drawing is you end up with all these bizarre photos of yourself in strange poses. I occasionally use Poser, a software program, to give me anatomical dimensions, but sometimes a photo just works better, and often I’m the only model around. At least my current camera makes taking goofy self portraits easier.
I may post the finished drawing here later, I haven’t yet decided. I’d like to share, but this one might be sort of private.
Even if I don’t, there will be more drawings here soon. Once I finish re-writes on my novel, I’ll be spending much more time on sketching and finished artwork for my portfolio. I told my current advisor that I’d have those done by the end of January. When I actually think about that it sounds a little bit INSANE, which is why I try not to think about it. Actually I need to get quite a few things done by the end of January, and I’m really trying not to notice that it’s already the 22nd. Deadlines are necessary but painful. Sometimes I envy my cat.
New Header Image
Well I guess that’s pretty obvious really. New header image, see? (*psst* look up!)
Up until yesterday night the header image for my blog was the default image that came with the Emptiness theme. It was a nice nature image, tree branches or something, but since this is supposed to be my blog, and since I’m supposedly creative, I figured I ought to get my own image up there as soon as possible. So there it is!
If it doesn’t look awesome, that’s not my fault. I spent five hours trying to position it where I wanted it, and it still won’t look right to everyone. More specifically, if you see a white stripe cutting across the top of the tree, it means you’re viewing this site in Internet Explorer. Eventually I’ll fix that, but right now I’m designing for Mozilla because it’s a better browser, IE still has lots of quirks (including rendering my header image wrong). Eventually I’ll figure out how to fix that, but for now I’m kinda stuck. I’d suggest downloading Mozilla, not only so you can view my blog in it’s full “glory” but because it’s an easier browser to use, generally more correct, and less virus prone. If you happen to be using any other browsers than Mozilla or IE and my blog looks weird, please let me know so I can take it into consideration during design.
I want to keep the clean, open feeling of this blog theme, but I’m planning on adding a 4th column (that’s right FORTH) to the left side, for ads and other, less commercial applications. I’m hoping I can do that just by tweaking Emptiness, but I may end up having to start from scratch, which could be tricky since I don’t know PHP, am barely proficient in CSS and am still unsure of the difference between XHTML and HTML. Anyway, if you have ideas or suggestions of things you’d like to see in the design of this blog I’d appreciate the input.
You can see an underdrawing of the header image in an earlier blogpost. Eventually I’d like to replace the default avitar on the side of each blog post (the pink thing under my name) with different hand drawn avitars for different categories. Currently it’s set to display a photo for different authors, but since I’m the only author here, that’s not actually necessary. I’m not sure if that hack is possible, but I’m going to try. Ideally, the category avitars would be in a similar style to the header image, and could help to tie the whole thing together. We’ll see. I also need to figure out how to tie the blog into my overall website.
Shopping for the Economy
Technically, most of the shopping probably did more harm than good. Since almost all the money we spent today came in the form of giftcards from the wedding, we’re pretty much taking away money from stores. I think Macys can probably handle it though. 
In addition to a few somewhat more practical purchases, Matt and I got to buy some pretties. We’re probably most excited about the dishes we found, which are actually the only thing we ended up spending our own money on, since we didn’t have any gift cards for World Market. We bought ten, in hopes that it will see us through breaking a couple, and last a good long time. I love the pattern on them, which the lable claims is a “modernized cherry blossom print” but to me looks like some of the nicer 70s style illustrations. It reminds me a bit of this garden illustration from Outiart. Anyway, now we have cool plates! Somewhat dampening the excitement is the fact that we’re going to keep them in a box for about a month. Sometime in February I’m going to take a week and paint the kitchen, which badly needs it. It’s hard to see in the photo, but the wall is a pinkish with darker rose poorly sponged on top, the cabinets are a butter yellow, and the cabinet doors are sage green. It’s not as repulsive as it ought to be with that color combo, but it’s not good either.
One purchase from today that we WILL be using immediately is the biggest pot I’ve ever seen. It’s a 20 gallon stew pot, which we’ll be using tomorrow to make split pea soup (in a quantity which will barely reach the bottom 1/10th of the pot). 
This is somewhat useful now, though it makes our standard size range look like doll furniture, but it will be especially helpful in few years if we can get an extra freezer. Matt and I like to make soups and such to store then eat later, but right now we just don’t have the space to pre-make more than a couple meals at a time. Still, it’s a (comically) cool looking pot. We registered for, and already got, a whole set of these bulbous styled pots, stainless steel with thick bottoms and really neat looking. They look like the kinds of pots you’d see on movie set of olden days, or possibly in a hobbit hole. They’re fun. Normally I’m not a huge fan of shopping, but it’s more enjoyable for me when I’m shopping for house stuff rather than clothes. Especially when the money we’re spending isn’t real money. Gift cards officially rock.