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Jaynette’s Virtual Craft Show
Hi Guys. I have some business to take care of. I don’t think you’ll mind. It’s for a very good cause. You see those cute kids up there in their sporty running gear? It’s for them and their mom who I am very fond of. I know the cute boy is not smiling but that is probably because his feet are cold and wet from running in the rain. Or maybe he’s pissed because his mom chopped his feet off when she took the photo. Either way, I assure you he is not the surly type. He is very sweet. You can even see him playing around with Bug in this movie.
Anyway, these kids are Bug’s other cousins. The ones that don’t get blogged about very much because they live all the way up in Oregon where it rains all the time. Their mom, Jaynette (pronounced Janet), is very crafty. She made all the bags for my alphabet cards. She’s also made us some very cute hats and fingerless gloves over the years. Lately she’s become very involved in crafting and etsy. She even had booths reserved for two craft fairs.
Then her kids went and decided to be very good at sports. You can check her blog for details…something about making the team and attending sporting events all the way in Virginia. Personally, I’m not surprised at all. Athleticism runs in the Ponnay family. Toby can sit around all day in front of his computer and never work out and still wind me running up a hill after I’ve worked out every day for a year. It’s in their bones or something. They are very light but strong. Toby’s brother, George, almost made it to the Olympics back in the day for pommel horse I think.
Because those cute kids are so good at sports and Jaynette is a very good mom, she put her craft fair (that she had been looking forward to for months!) on hold and took her kids to their track meets. She was pretty bummed about it. In order to cheer her up, I agreed to help her with a virtual craft fair on the internet instead. How about that? Want to play along?
You don’t have to buy anything. No pressure. Just poke around her site. Leave a comment and let her know that her kids are so very worth it. Look at her flickr pictures (bears in hats and little keychain wallet thingys woo hoo!). If you see anything you’d like shoot her an email and she’ll put it in her shop. She does custom orders too, even for picky people like me. Christmas is right around the corner and homemade is the new bright and shiny!
And also we modeled for you:
Cool stripey fingerless gloves! (though I don’t think she has these exact version available right now)
Also in this photo: snowballs by Bethany! (We might as well plug her shop too! She’s even selling the pattern!)
And of course Baby Bug’s FAVORITE hat. She has several but this is the only one she’ll wear. We love it. You can have one too!
Thanks everybody! I appreciate you taking a gander. I’ll be back tomorrow with more of the usual…I need your help designing a calendar!
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Meet Tweet.
Greetings from the sick desk. Funny how last week I couldn’t wait to write about all the fun we had with the alpha+mom projects but now that I’m slogged over the head with the snots, all I really want to write is, “Hi. See you next week. Pass the Kleenex.”
But I wouldn’t do that. I’ll just drink my big cup of coffee and plow on through. Coffee is my answer to everything and yes, I know I would probably feel better if I stopped drinking it. But that’s not going to happen. At least not this week with the time change screwing with my head. If I ever stop drinking coffee you’ll know I’m either very sick or pregnant.
So! Onwards!
Last week we made a paper maché turkey. It was a blast. So sloppy and messy yet fulfilling. I took a sculpture class at our local community college a few years before Bug was born and I always forget how much I love working in 3D. You think you have it perfect and then you turn your sculpture a few degrees to the right or left and lo and behold there’s an arm where a belly button should be!
It’s challenging but freeing at the same time. I think it works parts of your brain that wouldn’t normally be used. Sort of like that drawing-upside-down trick. If you can turn off the voices in your head that tell you a house should have a triangle roof and the sky should be blue, then your artwork comes out ten times better than you expect. Bla bla bla.
This post is not about left brain vs. right brain, it’s about Bug’s turkey! Her turkey was green OF COURSE!!!! We named him Tweet. Cute, no?
I had to sort of “fix” her floppy strips of soggy newspaper when she wasn’t looking but she definitely got into it. In fact later in the day she kept referring to our “balloon newspaper” project over and over. I think it made a big impression on her. Kids really don’t care about the end result. It’s all about the process. And believe me, this process is about as hands-on dirty as you can get. I’m glad we didn’t have any permanent pigment thrown into the mix or it might have been a little too much mess even for me.
The thing I didn’t realize is that when flour and water and salt combine and then dry they really do create glue. Glue that sticks to your patio and carpet until you get down on your hands and scrub it off with a fork and eight gallons of elbow grease! Shizer! I still have bits of white crud stuck in my carpet and I had company on Friday that I had to clean up for! It was bad.
So, that is my warning to you: If you want to do paper maché, stay on top of the drips and drops and don’t let them harden and become tomorrow’s worst enemy. Maybe it’s not that bad. I just don’t like cleaning as much as I like making messes so I wish I had been more mindful as I was going along. I’m so used to just hosing paint off our patio with no effort that I didn’t really expect the hard labor scrubbing that came later.
One other thing: Paint. We were on a deadline when we did this project so I didn’t really have enough days to let things completely dry and harden. Then on top of the birds not being completely 100% dry, I used cheap kid paint to paint them. I think the water content in the kid paint is higher than my regular acrylics and that didn’t work well for me. It actually weakened the paper structure and when I punctured my turkey with the wire for feet, the balloon inside contracted and sucked the turkey in with it. It was a panic moment.
Thankfully, I was able to cut a large enough hole to fit my hand in and mold the turkey body back to it’s original un-dented form. But it was a close one. I think if I was working on something smaller, it would have been doomed. My second bit of advice, let it dry completely and use the good paint.
Since we let Bug’s piñata sit for an extra day, it was fine. No crazy sunken-head birdy for her, good thing! We painted him up, glued on some googlie eyes, a paper beak and some feathers and he was done.
I let her color on him with a Sharpie (I love living on the edge!) and she promptly punctured a hole in the poor bird with her pen. Then later when I was off doing dishes or something and the birds were sitting on the coffee table on display, she pulled off all Tweet’s feathers and stuffed them in that same hole.
What can you do, right? Kids will be kids. All I can say is that it was a fun project and it used up several hours that would have otherwise been wasted watching tv.
