The line must be drawn here…

20 Dec 2010 2 Comments

by katsmama in arts and crafts, holidays, learning Tags: , ,


This year, I haven’t made or given teacher gifts, I didn’t handknit anything for my secret Santa recipient, I haven’t made batch after batch of cookies. And I am okay with that, I think. 

In previous years, not only have I given presents to all the kids’ teachers, and aids, and speech therapists, I made the presents from scratch- one year I knit 7 mini stockings, and put Starbucks cards in them. It was good because I totally was able to internalize the structure of sock knitting, with all these mini socks. But I also remember staying up late the night before the last day of school, weaving in ends of yarn.   This year, I decided to cut the teacher presents, for lack of time and energy. 

A noro striped scarf I made for Secret Santa last year- if the recipient has worn it, I haven't seen it...

In previous years, I have made scarves or felted bags for the person I’ve drawn for secret santa at school, and this year I couldn’t bring myself to it.  Part of it was that my local yarn store has closed and I don’t have anything stashed away that would have worked. But I noticed that when I made the decision to skip knitting something for my colleague, a weight lifted off my shoulders.

Similarly, when I decided to skip the cookies, I felt so relieved. We’ve made tons and tons, and given some away, but eaten a lot myself, too. Not having to make several different recipes of cookies, and put together tins or plates for people was a relief.  There is the chance that I will be able to zip my ski pants, too, so there’s another benefit. Don’t get me wrong- we aren’t entirely Scroogey-  we have decorated, and hosted a party, and we have gifts, (some homemade) but having a slightly simpler Christmas has helped us with some peace on Earth.

Gingerbread houses- another project we didn't do this year.

Or at least peace in our own house. I don’t think my kids will look back, and say, “Hey, remember when we made gingerbread houses, and mom yelled at us for putting too much food coloring in the icing?”  This year, I am trying to draw the line at yelling.

Hollow Book Safes

11 Dec 2010 1 Comment

by katsmama in arts and crafts, holidays Tags: , ,


 Just moments ago, I got an idea to make book safes for my nieces and nephews- little books to hide important things in…then I realized I don’t have time to make them before Christmas, but maybe next year. I did come across this extremely complete tutorial for hollowing out a book, though.http://rive.rs/projects/hollow-a-book/  Now that I think about it, giving everyone book safes at the same time is a bad idea, then little brothers and sisters know which book holds your secrets…I have great visions of lining vintage books with velvet, though…maybe I just need one for myself.

Angel costumes we have heard on high

10 Dec 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in arts and crafts, holidays Tags: , ,


My sister-in-law called me a week or so ago, wanting advice. “You’re so crafty,” she said, “and you have such great ideas, I wonder if you can come over and help me with ideas for these angel costumes for the kids’ Christmas play. It’s just that none of them match, and they’re too long…you’re just so creative…” I agreed to come over, and thought of what I’d say, things like, you know, “gold belts would look great… or why not try halos? or how about cutting holes in white sheets?”

It turned out that when I got there, she had about a dozen non-matching costumes for kindergarteners, all of them long enough for the kids to trip on as they walked up to the stage. We looked at what she had, and I said, “In a perfect world, what would you want?”

I traced this template from the best existing costume, then laid it out on rectangles folded in quarters. Zip zap with the rotary cutter...

All of the costumes looked like they had been put together at different times, by different people. Some with genuine sewing skills, and one of them was, no kidding, a sheet with holes cut in it. My SIL said that in a perfect world she would want the costumes all to match, and not be as long, and this one (she pointed to one of the several lying on the floor) had nice wingy sleeves. By the way, she also had a bolt of white muslin. Well.

We figured out that we could trace a pattern with the one with the sleeves she liked, and had enough muslin to cut out 8 at 18 inches long, which was just right on my nephew, who is one of the Angels in question. I took the bolt home, washed the fabric and ironed it, which is always the worst part. In fact, since my SIL agreed to iron all the bits and pieces as they came off the sewing machine, sewing them wasn’t so bad. I checked the internet to see if anyone in the blogosphere had any tips about angel costumes, but seriously, they were along the lines of: gold belts, halos, cut holes in sheets…

SIL brought the kids over to my house the next day and we set up an assembly line, cutting out the necks and sleeves from a symmetrical pattern, like a valentine heart. (The kids weren’t in the assembly line, by the way, they pretty much ran around, swordfighting with sticks, and breaking up the ice in the goldfish pond with a shovel.)  Then I stitched the sleeves and armpits, then the necks. We were going to try to get away without doing the necks, but then one angel ripped it when trying it on, so I zigzagged around each neck hole.

Artsy? or just underexposed? you decide...

All the angels were adorable at the Christmas play, although I didn’t get any pictures- we were late, as usual, to the performance, and they took off the costumes pretty quickly after the show was over.  It took an afternoon of work, but we’ll see the costumes for years as my nephews and nieces work their ways up from angels to census takers to shepherds year by year.

Sigh, in a perfect world, I would have had more time, to hand-bind the necks with silver ribbon, a simple detail that would be invisible from the audience, but I would know…

Organizing the Piano

05 Dec 2010 2 Comments

by katsmama in arts and crafts, holidays, learning Tags: , , , , ,


In order to put out Christmas decorations, we have to clean. The girl wants to be in charge of the Christmas village, which consists of two newspaper offices and a spooky castle. As we start clearing off the piano, I am realizing that one of the reasons it hasn’t been cleaned before is because of some unfinished business. There is a big basket of sheet music that dates back to when the girl took piano lessons. I mean, it dates back to when the girl quit piano lessons.
So much clutter is psychological- I had wanted piano lessons as a kid, but never got them. The girl started out liking lessons, then hated practicing, hated lessons, hated me. There was a lot of yelling. We hosted her final recital, she did a beautiful job, then she quit, and I had (still have) a lot of mixed emotions. The basket of sheet music contains her Suzuki book 1, the Suzuki book 2 that I bought, hoping she would change her mind, notebooks that I took notes in about what she needed to practice, flash cards, envelopes with prizes she could win if she practiced 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours…
I am tempted to put the whole pile in a box to be dealt with at some later date. No. Must deal with now. Wish me luck.

OK. It is later, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I went through the basket while the girl dusted the piano. I got rid of some bad memories, and was able to pull some Christmas music to the front of the basket. We pulled out a vintage linen tablecloth to represent snow, and she set up the buildings, plus the spooky castle on the hill. Then she actually added to it, making some houses, and an ice skating pond. In a perfect world, she would then sit down, pull out some Christmas music, and start playing piano. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. I guess I can dream.

No, there was no tornado...this is just how the living room looked before. It is much better now. At least the top of the piano is organized now...

Even Sharks Don’t Celebrate Shark Week

23 Oct 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in arts and crafts, favorite things, holidays, Uncategorized Tags: , , ,


So, like three years ago, I got a great idea for a halloween costume- a surfer being eaten by a shark, head first. I had seen a shark hat on the internet, but it was ridiculously expensive, and I thought, I could make that. Then, the boy wanted to be a praying mantis that year, and wanted me to be a venus flytrap…so I put it off. Then last year, I thought of it again, and googled instuctions, or patterns, whether knit or sewn, and preferably, free, of course. Nothing.

 Now, I am a pretty good knitter, good enough to follow patterns, and good enough to figure things out on the back of an envelope. So, I bought some Cascade 220 at the local yarn store, now sadly out of business (moment of silence, please) and examined an extrememely realistic plastic shark out of the boy’s toybox. I started knitting. Like, almost a year ago. What slowed me down was uncertainty about the fins. I wanted to felt the hat, shrinking it on purpose in the washing machine, and I know that I can expect about a 25% decrease in length, but less than that in width, so knowing that, how long do I make the dorsal fins? And the pectoral fins are smaller, but by how much? And the tail, it’s crooked, but is it crooked enough to rip out and try again, or is that the kind of thing felting will hide?

Before felting the shark is floppy and flaccid.

The thing with felting is, there is no going back, so the hat sat in a tote bag for almost a year, not because of a failure of knitting, but a failure of nerve…of will… Anyway, with Halloween coming up again, I figured it was time to do or die, so I took a few photos and threw it in the washing machine. I checked it once in the middle, decided it could go a little longer, then left it in slightly too long. I got distracted. It is really cute, but it isn’t as long as I’d like. Some might say my head is too big. They might be right…

Felted stuff shrinks a mysterious amount- it is hard to predict how it will fit.

Knitting patterns, I have discovered, are hard to write, so if I get organized between now and the rapture, I’ll write it up- this has really great possibilities, of course, thing about the variations of “being eaten by something” costumes. I long for a little blond girl I can dress up as the Princess Bride being eaten by a screaming eel…what about a worm, or a goldfish? Squeeee! Someone needs to have a baby so I can make a goldfish hat!!!!

Oh, wait, someone did have a baby. Excuse me. I have to go buy goldfish colored yarn.

Eyeballs, gills and gums (do sharks even have gums?) then I added lacy picot stitched teeth. I might redo the teeth, except it's kind of a pain.

Knitting socks and lessons learned

05 Oct 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in arts and crafts, learning Tags: ,


The yarn harlot  www.yarnharlot.ca/blog has written about a self imposed sock club( for those who don’t know, a sock knitting club is where you sign up and buy a pattern per month and the yarn to complete it.) Anyway, the yarn harlot had a closet full of sock yarn, and a stack of books with patterns bookmarked, so she created her own sock club, putting copies of patterns she wanted to try into Ziploc bags and choosing sock yarn to go with them. Every month she pulls out a bag and blogs about the results.  I was inspired to do kind of the same thing, although without the Ziploc bags.

Oooh la la, look at those socks.

For the month of June, I chose a wavy lace pattern called Old Shale, from the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=twisted+sister+sock+workbook and some great kettle-dyed hot pink sock yarn from Knit Picks www.knitpicks.com   

            June was vacation month- I got out of school, spent a couple of days cleaning and packing, and then got on a plane to Boston.  I started the first pink sock on the way to the airport, worked on it at DIA after we checked in. I checked my toolkit with my luggage, so I didn’t have a measuring tape.  I used a 4×6 index card that I had copied the pattern on to measure my progress, and when I had a 4 inch cuff, I started the heel.  This detail is important.  I turned the heel as we flew over the great lakes, and cruised down the instep.  How far is it from Denver to Boston? Slightly less than 1 sock.

            I knit more as we wandered around Massachusetts. We found the hotel, got pizza, went to the science museum, rode the T, walked the freedom trail. My production slowed considerably, until we drove to Mount Washington and I finished the toe.

            I started sock number two. We assume that socks will be twins. Commercial socks are usually identical, handmades are sometimes fraternal.  I worked on the ankle of of pink sock number 2 as we drove down the coast to Providence- we started at Salisbury, which is near Cape Anne, and drove down and through Gloucester, Salem, Boston. At rush hour it began raining, and we struggled with reading road signs through trees in the rain. Quincy, Braintree- ooh, John Adams was from there!  Bad signage made the drive stressy- DH drove, the kids slept, and I kept knitting. Knitting is good for stress.  I kept thinking “one more repeat, and I’ll measure.”  I fished the index card out of the bag…4 or 6?  Which edge had I measured with? I somehow remembered 6, but when I compared it to sock number 1, it was 4. So my second sock was about an inch and a half longer than my first. Drat.

Choices:

  1. a pair of unmatched socks.
  2. make a third sock to match the second, then hope there was enough yarn for a fourth to match the second.
  3. rip out one and a half inches of lace.

 

Great color, too bad they aren't the same length.

I chose option C- I took a photo first, there in the twilit car, in the rain, in Rhode Island. Then I figured out where to rip back to and unraveled- 2 hours of knitting gone in 30 seconds. Then I carefully picked up the stitches, counted them twice and made the heel and kept going. It’s a great pair of socks. And maybe I learned something from making it.

I’m an English teacher, and a writer, so a big part of me wants this to be a metaphor. Wouldn’t it be great to get a do-over in life- rip out and pick up…it’s painful to admit a mistake, but freeing to fix it. Another part of me says, “it’s just a sock.” So it is just as likely I didn’t learn anything.

I don’t know karate, but I’m a black belt in furoshiki

17 Sep 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in arts and crafts, environmentalism, holidays Tags: , ,


In the old days in Japan, people used to walk to the public baths- in fact, they still might, if this Shonen Knife song is any indication. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJz3ACnCKJY  People would tie up their stuff in a bundle to take with them. Furo means bath, and shiki means bundle, and because in Japan there is an art to making everyday things beautiful, furoshiki has become an art. There are different folds, different wraps were created, beyond what I think of as a hobo bundle.http://furoshiki.com/techniques/

oooh, pretty tags, too

People gave gifts wrapped in fabrics, with different ties best suited to different sizes and shapes of packages.
After WWII, when paper became cheaper than it had been in Japan, and it was fashionable to lose the old style of doing things, and adhere to new, furoshiki declined as an art. People wrapped in paper.

As a green American (actually, I’m a white American, but I like to think of myself as environmentally aware) I hate wrapping things in paper. Also, I’m really bad at it. I used to work at a Hallmark store, and hated being on “complimentary gift-wrap” duty. Picky people would stand over me thinking to themselves, “I could have done this better myself” and they likely could have done it better- I was hopeless. Even now, I claim my kids have wrapped the packages at Christmas, because it looks like it was done by a 5 year old.
Last Christmas, there were 15 people opening presents at my family’s celebration. There were 2 garbage bags full of wrapping paper thrown away when we finished. And we even saved out the shiny gift bags and the paperboard boxes. I hate wrapping, and I hate throwing it away. So, I like furoshiki. For some really beautiful pics and a chance to practice your Japanese…http://www.kakefuda.co.jp/

All this year, I have been shopping thrift stores for silk scarves- ARC in my town sells them for a dollar, and sometimes has them half off. The tricky part is finding scarves for boy presents, but bandanas or animal prints are surprisingly common. I guess I’m surprised because I don’t wear zebra print scarves, but they are all over the thrift stores.
My other idea has been to sew gift bags. I have made my daughter a big pink drawstring bag and a couple of smaller bags out of a pink skirt I got at ARC. $2 and I will use them for every gift occasion until they wear out.(picture) Before my son’s birthday, I’ll make him a couple of bags as well.
My goal is to have no paper wrapping at Christmas for my immediate family. Anyone join me in a no-paper holiday?

Next Newer Entries