more tiny : babies, knits, and encampments

Spring must be Baby Season, what with all of the friends and family anticipating new arrivals, or recently having welcomed them. Boy, girl, girl, twin boys, and even a few "as yet unidentified." With the chaos that is the end of the school year, I needed a good reason to get my hands moving in some sort of soothing rhythm, a way to calm the interior while the exterior runs circles. Nothing does that so well as baby knits -- small, fast, and incredibly soft.

In the spirit of all that tiny, one of my girls has been spending a lot of time out back. I didn't even realize what she was up to until I stumbled across her Encampment.

Teepees and canoes, fire pits and ponds. She even managed to shift the dirt in one planter enough to provide for the ever-crucial stable. Reminds me of all the summer hours I spent making small encampments in the backyard of my parent's home (although I seem to remember actually lighting the fire pits -- shhh, don't tell her that. We're on High Fire Alert around here). Sometimes "the good old days" don't seem that far off after all.

wednesday's ode

To beautiful surroundings.

 

silly walks

planting time

We've signed up for a working share at a local CSA, prepped the soil at a friend's house (who will be out of the country for the summer) to plant enough tomatoes for gallons of sauce, and we're getting the beds out back ready for a second try.

And daily baths for a great many of us are making their way back onto the schedule. Clearly spring has arrived.

keeping eeyore warm

Lately the daily temperatures are hovering in the 70's, so it seems odd that this would be the time my five year-old's bedtime companion, Eeyore, is having trouble staying warm. But trouble he is having. My obvious solution was to grab one of the many (many many many) doll blankets lying around and wrap him on up.

"Oh no," she countered. "He needs a blanket of his own."

Being home about half of the week (odd kindergarten schedule and such) is sometimes hard on this girl -- no one to play with but the baby and a busy mom. Most of the time she is searching for a good dose of action. The blanket came as a double request: "Eeyore needs a blanket mom, and I need to do some hand sewing."

She picked orange fabric for the back and bright flowers for the front -- "Eeyore really likes flowers, you know" -- finishing off with blue thread for the E. We sewed the blanket together with the machine (lap-sit style, the girl running the show), and then sat down for the hand stitching.

Considering that the girl is only six, and has done just a few hand stitches before, I thought she did a remarkably good job. A good job with a little help from her (mommy)friend, and a hearty round of dark chocolate.

Eeyore certainly seems happy with the end product. And I'm assured he is nice and warm now.

a little bit of green

Spring is starting to pop up in around here. Temperatures in the 50's, 60's, and 70's for weeks on end have induced the grass and trees to begin thinking green.

One of my girls has also started thinking green, both literally and figuratively. She came up from the laundry room the other night with a giddy glint in her eyes and started asking about the bag of rice.

"Does all of the rice have to be gone before someone could use that bag?" she asked.

"Nope," I replied. "The rice is in a plastic bag inside the canvas bag."

"Ahhhh," she said, and disappeared back down. The next time I saw her she had the now-rice-free bag in one hand, and a large piece of green fabric and some batting in the other.

"Any chance you could help me make a new backpack?"

Well, I'll be darned. A backpack. Out of a rice bag. For a seriously fashion-conscious girl. Who would have guessed?

We lined the bag with green fabric, and added an orange pocket with a stick-on-velcro closure. The zipper came pre-installed in the bag -- I just had to be careful not to mess it up. We put a double layer of batting inside the straps to keep them soft with all those books pulling down, and over-stitched them onto the backpack at least half-dozen times, just to be safe.

And would you believe that all of her school folders fit inside the thing? Just barely, but they fit. This bag was meant to be a backpack.

The first day she wore it I asked if anyone had noticed she had a rice bag on her back. "Oh, everyone loved it," she said, tossing her hair out of her face and heading off for a snack.

Everyone loved it. My faith in generation-x-box has been restored. At least a wee little bit.

the human element of art

We mustered up enough courage to take our children to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this weekend. There were moments when it felt like a foolhardy endeavor of the highest order:

I glance over and notice the 5-year-old standing where some shaky film footage is being projected onto a white wall. Then I realize she is poised with her pencil millimeters from the wall. I dash over and (I think) barely avoid disaster as I pull the pencil from her hand and move her back a few feet. Fast forward two minutes. The 3-year-old is now standing at exactly the same spot with an eraser in her hand.

Apparently I wasn't quite quick enough - she was trying to mitigate her sister's overzealous involvement with the exhibit.

Then there was the rest of the visit, filled with the enthusiasm of the 3-year-old moving from room to room proclaiming what she saw in the art, which was so very open to interpretation. Or with her older sister intently sketching the paintings on the wall (which was why she had that dratted pencil in the first place).

The children drank in their surroundings. Their excitement was contagious. Dare I confess that I am not particularly fond of modern art? I am one of those unenlightened people who looks at a painting of squares and paint splotches and says, "my five-year-old could do that." But that day my children helped me feel the paintings.

Confined to one room for a bit while my baby nursed, I was particularly taken with a painting by Mark Rothko. My children and others moved in and out of the space in front of it. The combination of painting and the people interacting with it created a constantly changing work of art.

After they could no longer stand to be mere observers of art, we headed over to Golden Gate Park. In addition to your typical playground structures, there was a climbing wall in the shape of an ocean wave and sculptures of various beach wildlife. Again, art unfolded before my eyes.

 

24 kindergarteners and some circles

 With my oldest entering kindergarten this past year, I've been reintroduced to the world of school fundraisers. I told my husband, as the flyers came home for fundraiser after fundraiser, that I would prefer to simply donate a share of the amount of money the school needed rather than feel obligated to buy overpriced chocolates, buy popcorn and soda for a class gift basket and then bid on it, go to the school "carnival" and yield to my daughter's pleadings for paying for cotton candy and a cake walk, or pay my daughter for running around in a circle half a dozen times. I'm feeling rather Scrooge-ish as I type this. Perhaps I don't yet understand the community that is built from fundraising in this way.

But when my daughter's teacher asked me to head up the class art project for the upcoming school art auction, my interest was piqued. I scoured the internet for ideas on what 24 kindergarteners could put together that would command lucrative bids from other members of our community. Kandinsky's Squares with Concentric Circles kept popping up. It seemed plausible and my daughter's teacher liked the idea, so I ran with it.

Squares with Concentric Circles. Wassily Kandinsky.

Past endeavors I had read about had the children use pastels or paint on cardstock squares, then assemble them into a cohesive picture on paper. I really wanted the kids to be able to work with canvas, though, so I prepped a few yards of canvas with gesso and cut it down into dozens of 7" x 7" squares.

The day of the painting session, I introduced the artist to the children. I read some of his inspiring quotes regarding how he felt his art captured emotion. I gave a quick refresher on color mixing (we only gave the children red, yellow and blue to work with). I put on some inspiring music. Then the painting began.

I came home with 24 beautifully unique squares. Over the next few weeks I went through the process of turning them into a cohesive work of art. I trimmed down the squares to 6" x 6" and arranged them on a 2' x 3' canvas. I attached them with a layer of gesso. A few coats of varnish helped complete their unification.

 

My 3-year-old helped to document the process. Along with about 50 unnecessary closeups of my (and the baby's) behind. (Orange juice and Trader Joe's soup cartons were among the many household items carted out to help press down the canvas as it dried.)

I attached a card to the back of the canvas explaining a bit about the finished piece. But it didn't do justice to the excitement I had felt from the kids as they painted.

 How wonderful to be part of their creative process. And what a beautiful creation it was!