...a thousand words, a snapshot linky

I'm doing my first photography link up ever. It's my sister's link party. I think it's a fabulous idea. You can read about it here. You can join her every Sunday. She will provide the title of your photo for the following week and your job is to find the perfect shot. Fun! So, here goes...





"Welcome to the Jungle"

I don't know if I can think of a wilder, more untamed place then the hallways of the high school where I work at passing time. You know, in between classes. In fact, there is one hallway specifically where particularly large crowds of teens tend to gather on a regular basis. I call the groups "people clots". You know, instead of blood clots. Same idea really, but instead of blocking major arteries these guys block the flow of traffic. It's crazy during noon supervision, trying to navigate this gauntlet. It's a big, fat party in the hallway. (I say this somewhat fondly as I love the energy that's always present working at the highschool level. There is always something going on.)





Stop over and have a look!

It's done

So, here are the deets on my mixed media piece. It is 24" x 30". It's on a canvas panel. I used the following materials to complete it:

tissue paper

mod podge

acrylic

cotton fabric

tulle

ribbon

handmade paper

hot glue

ink

printer transfers

gel medium

ummmm, and I think that might be it.

Here is the finished product. I added a bit of prose I wrote that I feel really captures who my daughter is at heart. And, for the record, I like it now. I might even hang it in her room.

My Little Dancer

She is a rough and tumble kid, an expert runner, jumper, climber, skipper, tumbler, and faller...at any given moment she has quite a collection of bruises, bumps, and scrapes...battle scars from her adventures. But she will pull her hot pink tutu from her pile of frilly fru fru and turn her three year old face to me and suddenly she is a dancer. She tells me she needs to find her "slips" so she can dance. I help her put them on and she leaps and twirls. She is the most beautiful dancer I've ever seen...

Mixed media update

I've been working on my mixed media project and it's coming along. I added some transfers to the canvas, all pictures of Pumpkin over the past three years. You start with a computer print, on a regular piece of printer paper, you apply an even coat of gel medium (I use Blick) to the print side of the paper. You lay the print on your canvas, where you want the transfer to be, and press firmly, starting in the center and working your way out all the way around. (You're trying to remove any wrinkles and/or air bubbles.) Let the transfer sit for a while. After a time you should be able to peel up a corner to see if the ink is adhered to the canvas. If most of the ink stays on the canvas then you can begin peeling the top layer of paper off. This is what I was left with, and while I enjoy the process, I wasn't sure if I liked the product in this case.

Not really very cohesive, and I wasn't at all sure where to go from here. But this is what I did next:

See the vine there? The color is a bit off in the above photo. Next I added detail and shadows to the vine. And cut out a whole bunch of leaves from some handmade paper. I painted detail on the leaves and then glued them to the vine.

That's all I have for tonight. It's not finished yet. But again, I'm not sure where to go from here. I think it's good for my students to be able to see my artistic process though, and that even someone who's been producing artwork for years gets stuck. We all have some successes and some failures...I was just hoping this would be a success. We shall see!

Something I've been working on...

Here's a mixed media piece I've been working on. My Advanced Art students are working on stained glass and mixed media pieces right now and I decided to work on my own with them. I'm not done yet but I'll continue to post my progress. So far it's an illustrative representation of my daughter. She's definitely a little firecracker and not at all girly until she puts her tutu on. The canvas is large. I can't remember the dimensions right now but will post more info on it as I progress further.

Here you can see the texture I added with white tissue paper and mod podge, which I love. The mod podge I mean. It's like one of my best friends. For sure. You can also see the illustration of Pumpkin beginning to take shape.

Here I'm starting to add some color. And in the next I've added her leggings which are a bit of fabric and guess what else?...Yep, mod podge. You can see that I'm also trying to emphasize the fact that she is a bit of a firecracker.

Here, more color, and a tutu. And here, hair bows and slippers.

I'll post more when I have more. Good night!

Bedtime fun

I just wanted to share this with the rest of the world. This is how Pumpkin gets into bed at night. I have NO CLUE why Superman decided it would be fun to let her do this but now it has become part of the bedtime routine. You know, go potty, wash hands, brush teeth, get in jammies, step on daddy's face to get into bed...the usual. I'm wondering how long this will continue??? How long it CAN continue??? I can't wait to see her twenty pounds heavier and stepping on his face to snuggle in.

Ack! I really am still here...

So, yes, it has been an entire month since my last post. Again. That's terrible. But there will come a day, I just know it, in the not so distant future when I will actually learn to better balance my life. Without going into any detail, things have been ca-razy around these parts. Last week I think the only time Superman and I saw Pumpkin was to tuck her into bed at night. (That's even sadder than not posting on my blog.) But things are bound to get less crazy because I seriously don't think they can get any crazier. I AM NOT going to even attempt to catch anyone up, family or otherwise, on anything we've been doing the past several months. I AM NOT going to post Christmas pictures here, as it is now the end of February and obviously, even though I just went through our Christmas photos the other day, the rest of the world has moved on! I will, however, show you just a few photos of something we did with Pumpkin during our Christmas break. We are lucky to be able to share a Christmas break together with our daughter. We are also kind of lucky to have a nice sized hill in our backyard. We went sledding and our little Peanut quickly decided it was not for her.

She had no interest in it whatsoever. So Daddy went inside where it was warm. And Pumpkin and I made this:

We played and played and then we went inside where it was warm too. In the morning, seriously, I'm not even kidding, it was gone. The snow had melted away and she stood by our back patio window and said in her sad, little voice, "Momma, where it go? There's no snow! It awlllllll gone."

_

The really funny thing about this is that it is now February 27. Two more sleeps until March 1, and we have a huge overabundance of the fluffy white stuff. I am so done with this. Listen up Wisconsin, you didn't want the snow in December so now it's too late! Too bad! You can't have it now! So give it up!

Hello world? I'm still here...

Well hello. It's been a while. I'm still here. Alive and kicking. I've also been crafting and creating, even though I haven't been posting about anything. Sometimes I get caught up in the day to day hustle and by the time I collapse into bed at night to type in my journal I'm just too tired to do anything other than that. But here is something I completed recently.

I have a huge pile of t-shirts that Superman gave me. I stacked them neatly in my stash thinking that I would do something cool with them like make a quilt or a wall hanging for his classroom or something similar. That is until he told me that he really didn't want them and that there was no sentimental value he associated with the pile of old t's. (You know, they're the ones you buy for homecoming week, class competitions, prom, etc.) I CAN'T throw them out. Not now that I have a serger and it's so easy to sew knits. I pulled one of them out not too long ago and looked at it. It was a dark heathered gray knit with a green print on the front. I loved the gray, not the green print. So I cut it up the sides which left me with two largish pieces of knit fabric. I placed them one on top of the other and cut out a whole bunch of long trapezoid shapes. Like this:

(You'll have to pardon the poor quality pics...I took them with my phone.)

After I had them all cut out and pressed I serged them all together with the print side in so all that nice, unadulterated, heathered gray was visible and the green print was hidden. Pretty easy.

This left me with almost a full circle. I cut a wide piece of elastic to fit Pumpkin's waist and serged that to my almost full circle.

Then I serged the circle closed and hemmed Pumpkin's cute little circle skirt. It looks pretty good! I like it quite a bit!

And it meets all the requirements for Pumpkin. If it's going to be a skirt or dress it HAS to be comfortable above all else! She is not one for fru fru and frills of any kind really. Unless she's in the mood for dress up or it's a tu tu. All the fru fru and frills in her closet are really for me. Not her. Some day I'm sure she'll understand.