Hiya.

How you doin'?

I'm fine, thanks for asking.

No, really, I am.  A little busy, maybe, but nothing to worry about.  I seem to have gotten out of the rhythm of blogging, though.

There's been a flurry of class-giving, and the usual end-of-the-year madness.  A considerable amount of unavoidable stress is staking its claim, and some big change is afoot chez nous.

The wanna-be vegenarian ---that's a vet who doesn't eat meat, according to Akiva at age 5---found this little guy on our front lawn last week:

Despite the heartrending protests of my earnest loinfruit, our feline foundling's living with a wonderful neighbor.  Too many cat allergies in this house.

Oh, and it's spring!  Our garden is still hanging out in the kitchen at the moment, but I'm feeling almost warm enough to bring those seedlings on outside.  Soon.  And that Pinterest thing with the celery and the green onions?  Totally works on leeks, too.  How cool is that?

I've missed you guys...

Toothpicks and q-tips and bleach, oh my!

Yup, it's almost Pesach, which means I've been neglecting you, my little bloglings, in order that I may bleach the living bejillies out of most everything in my house.  This evening, my trusty razor blade and I excavated the cracks and crevices of the stove, bringing forth all manner of unspeakable gunk.

Right now I'm itching to clean the kitchen table so I can dress it up in the mind-blowingly fabulous oilcloth I finally scored at my local JoAnn's...

... but first I have to reassemble my poor candelabra, which got completely dissected, cleaned, and polished this evening.  (Note---this was not so much a Passover chore as a "Good Heavens, who was President when that was cleaned last?" chore, but all of the kids were really excited to take on the task.  For the first ten minutes.  Then, guess who futzed with it for an hour and a half?  Why, yes, that  would  be me.  How clever of you to guess!)  It looks better than it has since we brought it home from the store, but (naturally) a piece went missing during The Great Cleanse, so it's all kinds of wobbly.  Not cool.  And the kids are all sleeping, so I can't even bribe them into tracking down the wayward nut.  Nuts!

In other news, my littlest sous-chef did some onion peeling earlier.  She was appropriately garbed for her chore. (Yes, I totally wear these while I'm chopping onions.  When I had contacts, my baby-blues were impervious to onion tears, but now I'm a regular wuss.  I slip these stunning goggles over my shades and look perfectly ridiculous while I'm chopping---and not crying.)

The classes in my studio are coming along really well.  Last week we made puzzles and did some printmaking.

I'm looking forward to a new batch of girls' workshops and a ladies group at the end of the month!

Before I head back to the salt mines, here's a peek at the annual Pre-Pesach Picnic:

Table for 10?

We had company for Shabbos this week, and one of my poor, unfortunate children found themselves seated upon (gasp!) a folding chair.  A small amount of whining ensued.  I blew it off, though, because we're lucky to have guests on a regular basis, and we only have "proper" seating for 8, although the dining room table can seat 10 comfortably...

So yesterday, I was driving carpool and I spied a pair of perfectly sturdy wooden chairs in dire and desperate need of immediate reupholstery. 

  

 Natch, they went into the trunk, and I was lucky enough to have leftover fabric from my last batch of chairs.  This was a speedy recovery---done in less than 40 minutes. 

In other news on the home front, I've been teaching art classes out of my studio.

My guys are happy to sit in. :)

And we have a new resident.  Meet Lizzy, our bearded dragon.

And I finally tried that baking-soda-and-peroxide trick from Pinterest.

Before (left) and After (right).  Whoa.

2012: Mindful

Maxabella loves is having a blog link up focusing on one word for 2012.  I let this one rattle around in the old noggin for awhile and came up with a bunch of good ideas---which other, more expedient bloggers had already used.  (Perhaps I should choose "timely" as my word instead?)  So I put it on the back burner for a day or so, and settled on mindful. 

I find, as my kids get older, that it's tough to hang on to all of the little moments in the day---that the carpools, the dishes, and the laundry (and let's face it: the Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter time) can crowd out the important things if I'm not paying attention.  Too many times I tell them,"Just let me finish this...(load/post/call)," and when I'm done, they've flitted off to their own diversions.  (Or, on special occasions, they've set the neighbor's dog/sofa/box of Mike & Ikes on fire.)

This mindfulness should come in handy in my work, as well--- my impulsivity spawns countless wasted efforts when I don't slow down and think.  

 Here's to a 2012 full of captured moments.

My Creative Space: Sniff.

The germies have won this war.  Whatever little virus my kidlets have been passing around has hit the mama, and she's fallen, hard.  My throat is raw, my ears are itchy, and I have a hacking cough that makes me sound like an 80 year old man.  Jealous?  And in spite of it all, I'm plugging away, trying to get the shop back on track.  "All very nice," you say?  "Show us the craft," you implore?

So here it is.

I'm planning to do my first craft show next Sunday, and I needed to come up with a quick and cheap way to display my jewelry.   So I raided the garage and came up with a trio of collage frames that lost their glass in the move, and sprayed them with my old standby, Dark Walnut.  Then I cut foamcore to fit the frames and covered it with a piece of coffee sack I had left over from another project.  I stapled the burlapped  boards in place, and started playing around with display setups.    (Don't worry---this is just a portion of what I've got to sell.  There will be a rash of impromptu display-making throughout the week, I'm sure. 

See?  I just used some shiny little sewing pins to hold them in place---nice and flexible for ADD Girl's constantly changing idea-go-round.

More spaces here.

My Creative Space: still unpacking

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The side of our house gets a nice batch of empty boxes each day, as I slowly sift through the stuff we've yet to unpack.  Most of the boxes that remain underground are labeled "Art" or "Kids' Books,"  and I'm attempting to purge both collections as I bring them into the light of day. 

Not an easy task, mind you, considering the years I've spent amassing each, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that I can't hang on to everything.  So, yeah, if you're looking for a Boxcar Children book, I'm your man.  Also if you have need of a bunch of presser feet, a large, laminated Ben Franklin, or an assortment of bulldog clips.  Because we arty folks never know when something might come in useful, isn't that right?

For more creative (and less cluttered) spaces...

Rosh Hashannah Roundup

I'm in mega-procrastination mode: so much to do for Rosh Hashannah that I decided to ignore it all and blog for awhile.   But there's been all kinds of good stuff floating around Pinterest for the holiday, and I figured I'd link you guys up in case you'd missed anything pertinent.

For starters, there's this fabulous video that shows three easy-peasy ways to make round challahs.  I've always gone about this the lazy way---either the snail-shell cop out, or the big-round-ball-in-a-round-pan variety---but this year I'll be taking on the 6-braid with confidence.

Here's a mess-free, hassle-free way to de-seed a pomegranate, one of the traditional Rosh Hashannah foods.  My munchkins will fight over the seeds, so it's good to have an easy way to hang on to every last one.

Although we have a stash of apple-shaped honey dishes, I'm thinking of using this trick from Martha this year: (and if it works well enough, maybe I'll get rid of our honey dishes altogether!  Less to store...)

ANd if you're looking to keep your kids entertained for a few hours while you cook, check out this five minutes of fabulousness from Aish.  Warning: Your progeny will attempt, as mine did, to emulate the dancing yeahiva boys.  Hide your couch.

Yeah.  So I'm trying to find some good coconut milk recipes that don't actually taste like coconut, unpacking the stacks of boxes that still line the basement, and keeping the kiddos from killing each other for real.  Raiding the library on a bi-weekly basis, and waiting for the rain to let up so I can spray paint my night tables before it gets really cold.  Grocery shopping with a vengeance and a fury, cooking with slightly less fervor.  Admiring the kid-generated awesomeness that they come up with once they realize that "bored" is not an option.  What have you been up to?

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       Charlie and The Chocolate Factory---by

Esti

Brain Dump

I should be washing the dishes.  Or flipping the laundry.  Or wrestling to hang the just-washed shower curtain before I forget about it, and somebody heads up to shower in its absence.  At the very least, I should be taking out the recycling, or unpacking another of the endless boxes that are still choking the basement and the garage.  Instead, I'm at the computer, staring out at this gray, gorgeous, drizzly morning and not getting much of anything done.  Rosh Hashannah is a week and a half away.  There are challahs to bake, menus to plan, guests to invite, and freezers to purge.  (How on earth can my freezer be so FULL when I've only been home for a month?)  I've finally bested the camp/moving laundry pile, and am back to my standard 2 loads a day.  The kids' rooms are all basically situated (we painted Esti's last week!) and the bookshelves have journeyed upwards from the basement.  My room is partially furnished and utterly closetless, so I'm trying to make some sense of things up there; mostly by spray painting things.  Yesterday my lamp got it---I set up shop in the garage to fight off the gray drizzlies and painted it a shiny silver---and things felt much more organized, somehow,  for the effort.  The kitchen would be lovely if only people would stop cooking and eating in it.  I made quinoa for the first time since camp this week---with beef stock and craisins---and it was amazing. 

Still here.

Cool porch, no?  And the kids are terrifying the dog-walkers and joggers alike as they careen down the ramp on their bikes...

The new house is a marvel of freshly-finished floors and just-painted (or just-about-to-be-painted) rooms.  The basement makes the Labyrinth look like child's play and the garage is chock-a-block with the vast majority of our possessions,  but the overall impression is favorable.  The laundry chutes work, the studio is coming along, and the bathrooms are intact, though terrifying.  (Seriously---who paints over the shower tile?  Wait!  It must be the same people who---I kid you not---wallpapered the entire kitchen with Contac paper.)

The kids' rooms are set up, for the most part, but Jess and I are shacked up in the basement until he can harness some manpower to help move our beds upstairs.  The paint colors we chose (long-distance) are fine, for the most part, although the creamy yellow in the living and dining rooms is a little more washed out than I'd hoped for, and the Honeydew that the little girls decided on at the last minute has kind of a neon subtext that borders on being less than soothing.  The kitchen---aqua walls, red accents, and black and white checkered floors---is a glorious sight to behold, although I'm in a snit about the flooring.  Pattern, fab!  Texture, FAIL.  Grainy.  Who makes grainy kitchen flooring?  Suffice it to say that the floor-maintenance department is unimpressed.  Pics forthcoming.

I'm mid-dresser-rehab, in the midst of the madness, and am making a slapdash job of it.  The girls are entranced, though, and can't wait to have the finished product in their psychedelic digs.  Just add princess crowns, and they're happy, thank goodness...

Akiva's 12th birthday came in a frenzy of chocolate-cake-making.  Given the fat that we'd been in the new house for a whopping three days and I'd yet to locate the majority of the Finer Things---like Shani's shoes, the damned baking powder, and all of our hangers---I felt justified in patting myself on the back for
a) unearthing the KitchenAid and
b) producing--- and serving!--- anything even remotely palatable.

Card art by Esti---she blows my mind.

The munchkins sally forth to school this week, and we're all looking forward with varying degrees of enthusiasm.   I'm hoping to have my act a bit more together in time to tackle the carpool-lunches-homework show with my usual aplomb, but have already accepted the fact that we may have to fake it for the first couple-few weeks.  No use being all Pollyanna-ish at my own expense...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

I drove.  I unpacked.  I made a lot of stuff.  I found a new addiction.  My ego got stroked.  My heart got banged up.  I made new friends.  I missed old friends.  Things I thought would succeed were rip-roaring failures, and things I never considered projects hit the big time.  I blogged too little.  I slept too much.  I created a haven.   I repeated myself more than I thought possible. I was given opportunities to do things that scared me---and I did some of them.  I did very little laundry.  I ate too much.  I survived a long and painful bout of EITTTS.  I bought myself a tiny vacuum cleaner.  I did a big, important repair and did it well.  I swept and swept and swept.  I discovered that OCD---not mine, silly!---can be a wonderful thing. I spent a little time alone---and good things came of it. I sniffed way too much spray paint, resin, and burning Sculpey.

Awesome.

You know that feeling you get when you discover you're in the process of driving onto a one-way street, and you have just enough time to back up before a truck crushes the life out of you?  Isn't that an amazing feeling?  And that feeling when you back up, and discover that the source of the tooth-jarring thunk! is only a telephone pole, and not another car?  I LOVE that feeling!  And the feeling when you get out of the car to find that the tooth-jarring thunk! left nary a scratch nor a dent in your erstwhile vehicle?  Yeah, I love that feeling, too. 

And that, ladies and jellybeans, about sums up my morning.

Epic fail

Subway art.  It's everywhere, and I've been hankering for a little bit of subway in our new house. (Hah!  You didn't even know we'd moved again, didja?  I figured I'd bored you enough with my previous tales of packing and unpacking ---sorry for the WKRP reference; I'm a child of the '70s---and this time my sainted husband did the hard part while the kiddos and I were at camp.  Thanks, Jess!)
  Right, so I read the tutorial, I drooled over the pins on Pinterest, and I purchased my spray paint and vinyl sticker-letters.  I trakced down some old shelves to upcycle, and I listed all of the places we've lived since Jess and I got married back in 1994.  Four rentals, four of our own homes, from Miami to Rochester, to Des Moines, and now to Milwaukee.  I primed, I measured, I stuck-on, I sprayed, and I peeled.  And I realized I'd forgotten to include a residence.  And that one of the addresses I'd listed was---well, not someplace we'd lived.  There were fuzzy spots where the stickers hadn't adhered entirely.  (Did I mention that I was doing this whole shindig after hours, whilst the wee folk slumbered?  That's my excuse du jour, and I'm stickin' to it.)  I attempted to repair my strokes of idiocy, and blundered once more---the spray paints I'd chosen were flat, and the acrylic "repair-paints" glossy.  So I scrapped it, and started from scratch.

Those of you who know me well realize that I must have really wanted this subway art.  Because I am not a "try, try, again" kind of girl; I'm more of a "what-ever---let's go have some chocolate," kind of girl.  This time, though, I re-primed, re-measured, re-cut,  re-stuck, and re-painted.  (There was a little re-swearing in there, too, but as I said, the wee ones slumbered.)  My diligence was rewarded.

You think I'm going to make this into some kind of cheesy story about how you can always achieve what you put your mind to, don't you?  Or, perhaps, a cautionary tale about the evils of mixing concentrated spray paint fumes with Excedrin and late nights?  Nah, it's just me again, too cheap to shell out cash for something I really, really wanted.  And it's going on the mantel before I unpack my first suitcase.  So there.

The "Creative Process"

Hah.  I love it when people ask me about my "process."  So I figured I'd give you a look at what goes down, creativity-wise, inside my little wooden head. 

I woke up at 4:35 this morning.  It was light outside, and the kids were all asleep.  With a whispered "carpe diem," I vaulted out of bed---managing not to wake the trio of co-sleepers who'd joined me in the night---and into the shower.  Once I'd woken up sufficiently to regret being conscious, I settled down at the computer to catch up on my Pinterest-ing.  (I can't emphasize how much I'm not kidding, here.)  After a few minutes of browsing, I'd found three ideas to try out in the art room.  The first of them is the one we'll be looking at today.

I love that I get to play around with materials that are out of my usual six-pack when I'm at camp.  This Sculpey pendant was a new, excruciatingly simple application that I'd just never considered when working with polymer clay, and I was eager to give it a go.

First, I conditioned the clay and rolled it flat.  Then I took a little excursion in search of a small,veiny leaf.  On closer inspection of the first small, veiny leaf I encountered, I discovered it was attached to a poison ivy plant.  I excursed elsewhere. (Yes, I know that "excursed" is not a word.  Neither is "veiny," if you want to be particular about it.)

Having found a less volatile but equally veiny leaf to work with,  I returned to my clay and rolled the leaf imprint on to its surface.  I popped it in the oven and waited---not so patiently---while it cured.  When it emerged, I waited some more (for it to cool) and then daubed the imprint with black acrylic paint.  More waiting---this time till the paint was dry---and I was ready to sand off the excess.  I rinsed the pendant and dried it, then covered it with a coat of liquid polymer clay and baked it again.  Here's the done deal:

I was pretty chuffed with the result, so I headed back out for another leaf right away. I wanted to play around with some of the variables---color, curing time, and ditching the translucent glaze---to see what would happen.  What happened?  I chose black for my background.  And then I had a hankering for silver as the contrast.  So I hunted around for some silver leaf (no pun!) that I know is somewhere back there until I got good and tired of searching.  And then, in true ADD fashion, I got distracted.  By a can of shiny gold spray paint. Which yielded this:

By this time, I needed to set up for my first activity, so I set the Shiny Thing aside to dry and did my job.  I checked on it a few (dozen) times, though, because I'm a little obsessive about certain things.  (Most of them are shiny, come to think of it.)  I was distraught to note that the paint wasn't drying.  (Back when I got distacted by the shiny spray paint, I remember thinking very quietly that perhaps it might not be so bright to use spray paint on polymer clay, but then I realized that I didn't have any magpie-friendly acrylics and banished the thought.  Turns out, the banishing act wasn't what you'd call "radically clever."  Who knew?)  So the paint never dried, which didn't so much stop me from attempting to sand the gummy pendant.  Some days are a total waste of sandpaper.  And razor blades.  In case you're still unclear on this, it's not a good idea to use spray paint on polymer clay.  (Unless, for some reason, you're shooting for gummy-mucky-profoundly-indistinguishable objets d'art, in which case it's really the only way to go.)

It's okay, though...the old train of thought has yet to be derailed.  I'm going to give it another shot once the days' activities are done, and then I need to find a way to make it foolproof.  Which means that there will be at least 5 more trials, so I can break the process (the creating process, not the creative one) down into bite sized chunks for the kiddos. 

So there it is: from Pinterest to product in a few short hours.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it redefines "epic fail."  When I'm lucky, I can share it---either in the classroom, or in the shop.  And then there are times when the whole shebang is so vastly different from what we've just discussed that you'd be hard pressed to call it a process.  Clear as mud, isn't it?

If you're going to The Windy City...

...be sure not to leave your camera on the kitchen counter.  Especially if you were planning to blog about your trip.  Because, really, who wants to hear about your trip to The Museum of Science and Industry and your fabulous lunch at Malibu Pizza if they can't see pictures of your kids terrifying museum employees and waitresses alike?  Your readers will want to see visual evidence of The Tuna Melt That Could Feed a Nation, and the damage you did to it in just one sitting.  They'll want to eyeball the whole brood as they bounce, pinball-esque, from exhibit to exhibit, and of that same cast of characters conked out in the car on the trip home.  Sorry, folks.  I dropped the ball.

Luckily, I do have photo documentation of  how I whiled away the ride to and from Chi-town.  

I made enough headpins for 30 sets of Dictionary Sacrifice Earrings.  

(And four camera-shy origami boxes.)

 

I made scads of infinity links.  Which means there's probably another button necklace (or six) in my immediate future.  

And I made oodles of heart bookmarks.  

Note to self:  Just because you like the way steel wire shines up in the tumbler doesn't mean you should put 20-some-odd wire curlicues in there together.  Because you'll end up with something like this:

Which will give you something to do on the way to the doctor's office (I love being a passenger---I accomplish so much when I'm not driving!) while you take ALL SIX KIDS to the pediatrician for their camp physicals. 

Which is how I spent my afternoon, thank you very much.  

All six of them.  The doctor thanked me when we left.  

For leaving, I think.  He was mildly traumatized.

Yeah, me too.

He Rocked the 'Hawk. (Briefly. Very briefly.)

Somebody's hair got crazy long before his harried mother finally dragged him into the bathroom for a date with The Buzzer.  At his sister's behest (oh, how I overuse that word!) he was the proud possessor of a temporary mohawk.

I made my first ring.  I like it.  More repurposed buttons and steel wire.

There is solder in my future.  Just you wait...

A child who shall remain nameless did in my favorite thrift store lamp.

Don't be surprised if you see some amber "faux-sea-glass" pendants popping up in the shop in the next few weeks.  My rock tumbler is running...