i never thought i'd make curtains

So, a WHILE back, I promised I'd write a post entitled "I Never Thought I'd Make Curtains", but you never saw it. And then a shorter while back, I promised to show you the children's artwork, but never did that either. Well, here are both those posts rolled into one.

I don't guess you can call a simple valance a curtain, but I made it, and I think it was the first "curtain" I ever made. The shade is a flour sack towel that Mom had given me. When she gave it, I knew it had to be used in my yellow and black kitchen somewhere, but I wasn't sure how. Then I remembered having seen a tutorial on adding fabric to shades. So that's what I did. It's a little wonky since it was my first try and, once it's on, it's on. But I like it--it's fun. Now if it just wouldn't fall down every time I try to pull it up... I'm gonna have to have David work on the hardware part for me. :)

You're probably thinking that the shelf just looks like a board laid across two cabinets. Well, guess what? You're right. It is just a board laying across two cabinets! That's a future project...

I really cannot remember where I got the scale. Maybe the Rescue Mission thrift store, maybe David got it from "that old lady" (another post another time), maybe it was Aunt Mae's (my great, great aunt who was the previous owner of this house). All I know is I had it way before I decided on a yellow and black kitchen and I love it. And as you can see, on either side of it is the artwork. Aubie's kind of looks a little Van Gogh-y. Matthan's is definitely very impressionist--as in, the impression of his foot is seen many times throughout the piece.

This curtain is sort of a valance too, I guess--it had to be short so that when I open the glass slats, I can still see the kids through the screen when they're playing outside. Yep, it's one of those weird 50's? doors. I just loved this print on the dress that I got in a stuff-a-bag for $10 at a thrift store. I had to take out some darts, but this curtain came pre-hemmed! I LOVE re-fashioning for that very reason. :) The top is the same fabric as the other valance, and the trim is some awesome Asian-themed ribbon that I got at Malone's fabric (one of the junkiest, most amazing places I've ever been) for a dollar a yard.

That almost concludes the tour of my kitchen. I can't wait till I can one day post the truly finished version. No more plastic tile, no more ugly floor. But until then, I'm trying to make it as "me" as possible.

the craft post...finally

Ok, so this isn't crafting really, but I wanted to show some more of Aubie's artwork. The first is one of her trees with some water and the sun. The second is Matthan with his tongue out and Aubie standing behind him sticking her tonge out as well. (Their mouths are both really open and that dot in the middle is the tongue.)



This was back in June for Renee's son Daniel's birthday. I got the shield, sword, and helmet ridiculously cheap, but each piece only had one jewel, so I added some. I made the knight shirt and then recycled a diaper box to put all of his armor in.
This is my first attempt at hand embroidery and it wasn't as hard as I thought. I made this bag to put Jill's quilt in that I made for her 6th birthday.
This is a close up of one of the ballerinas.
The quilt. In the middle square, the quilting is actually Jill's initials, but you wouldn't be able to see that from this picture. Also, all of this fabric is from my stash! I was so happy to be able to make something so cool (not bragging, just happy) from stuff I already had. It kind of inspired me to start doing that more often instead of buying for each project.


More of Aubie's artwork (why won't this let me stop underlining?). This is a picture of Arthur.

This is a picture of me, Aubie, Matthan, David, and Daniel (in that order). The long haired one is me. It is one of my favorite pictures of myself--I love my expression and how my hair is blowing in my face. One would be tempted to think that the person on the opposite side would be David and the other one Daniel, until you look at the expression. The one on the end definitely has Daniel's smile. : )

the park (#193)

David was off on Monday, so we decided to go to the park for lunch.

I love these pictures he took of the kids.


Aubie coming down the slide. (David)



Matthan and Daddy.




Aubie climbing the giant flower.



David got these shots of Matthan in the middle of a tantrum. I can't remember why--they're pretty frequent these days--but I think it was because he didn't want to leave.



Then, this has nothing to do with the park, but I wanted to show the sandwich that inspired the artwork beside it. Aubie loved her sandwich (the other star looking thing is supposed to be a butterfly) so much that she wanted to draw a picture of it. I love my imaginative girl!

P.S. Sorry for the poor quality of these pictures. Our computer messed up big time, so since we just got it back yesterday, I haven't had time to download photoshop or anything. Flickr is great, but I don't know about using it for blog posting.

Florida

Well, it's been another 2 week stretch between posts again. I wanted to post Florida pictures the day after we got back, but as you can see, that didn't happen.


Aubie and her baby--this picture taken right after she asked me for the 50th time, "Where the beach? Are we here yet?"

Singing a song while waiting for our food at the Olive Garden Monday night. We decided to have Olive Garden night on Monday since it was raining something awful and there was nothing else for tired travellers to do (except go to the gym in the condo--which is exactly what Dad, Daniel, David, and Elena did before getting ready to go eat).

The somewhat cloudy view from our condo on Tuesday. It got sunnier as the week progressed, but I didn't get pictures of that.

Aubie and Elena getting their first taste of Dip-N-Dots!

Aubie standing outside the coolest looking Goodwill I have ever seen (located in Destin)! The prices are only cool on Mondays, because all clothing is half price. Sadly, this was Wednesday.

A close up of the artwork.



We girls at the beach in Destin at sunset.

As if I needed any more reason not to like shrimp! Blechhh!

Aubie rode the luggage cart to the car when we were leaving.
I'll have more beach pictures after I get them developed. I didn't want to ruin our camera by taking pictures while we were lounging in the sand (been there, done that--bye, little camera, I miss you!), so I used a disposable. Since I didn't use it up, it may be a couple weeks before those get posted. It seems that I only post every couple of weeks here lately anyway... Just kidding. I'm going to try to work on that. : )

artwork and olives and a few other things...

This post was actually started on the day that it says, but it's December 3rd and just now finishing it : (


I don't think she's singing to him here, though that is what it looks like. I like to imagine that she is though. It makes for such a sweet picture.

This picture is so weird. Leah thinks he looks adorable in it, but I think he doesn't look like himself at all. He's cute, but it doesn't look like Matthan.

Aubie loves olives. Her Daddy and her Granny both hate them. I'm happy she took after our side of the family--olives are my favorite!

I love the color scheme in this picture. It is so Fall-y. But kind of Christmas-y in a way too. Its almost like the transition from Thanksgiving to Christmas.



This is the best person that Aubie has ever drawn and the first complete one, I think. That little circle at the bottom started out being a person, but it looked like a lemon. So Aubie showed me the lemon. Then she said, "It's a lemon peepee." Of course, I laughed. And then said, "We don't need to draw bodily functions, though, Aubie." Obviously not understanding the word function, she shouted, "IT not a punkin!"



Another funny conversation in the same night:
David asked Aubie, "What about Wady Bogo*?"
Aubie: "Hers not a friend. Her fired. My Grandma say, ' You fire dat friend NOW!' "
David: "Who fired her?"
Aubie" "Da Firemen."
*Wady Bogo (rhymes with Lady GoGo) was one of Aubie's first made up names for an imaginary friend. It was at least a year ago that she said, "Wady Bogo. Dat's my new friend."



Hey, if you haven't seen the video below this post, check it out. It is so sweet.

dead rabbits

For those of you wondering what the actual story is on pregancy killing rabbits, here is a link:The Rabbit Died
The only dead rabbit pictures I could find were disgusting, so yes, this is original artwork ; ) The inspiration behind this piece is the very good news that I have just gotten. Thus the happy colors despite the dark subject matter. What I want people to get when looking at this is a sort of happy, melancholy feeling. A knowing that the rabbit gave up his life for another's happiness.

Aubie's artwork

Matthan by Aubie.

Aubie's art has gotten really impressive lately. She just started drawing people a few months ago, but within 10 or so people pictures, she moved from the head-with-arms-and-legs-attached stage to drawing a body and hands and feet with fingers and toes. She is such an artist in the perfectionist sense. She will start out drawing a person, let's say me. But because she doesn't have the skills to draw something how it looks or doesn't draw as well as Aunt Leah, she will change it and say, "oh, that's not you, Mommy. that's just an old lady, ugly man, bear ..." or whatever it looks like. Then some of her pictures, like the onion in the Curious George picture, start out as doodling and then she calls it what it looks like. I'm not sure if that's the case with the parrot or not. I don't think it is--I've seen parrots that look like that which she could have copied--but I'm not positive.

The parrot.


Curious George and the onion.




This a mermaid, water, and fish.

original artwork

I've had these brown squares for a while--I think Leah got them while she was teaching art or something, and passed them along. And I've always wanted to do something cool with them. Well, one day a few months ago, I decided to let the kids use just my kitchen colors (yellow and black) to paint something for the shelf (that is not yet completed, but kind of hanging anyway).

Aubie was neat, and stuck to the color scheme by mixing colors as little as possible.

Matthan on the other hand...



But now I have two very yellow-and-black and very original paintings for my kitchen. AND... you will have to see how they are arranged (currently) in another post, since I can't get my pictures to upload right now. So just enjoy these shots of this dainty girl and this messy boy and then imagine what fun I had cleaning my kitchen after they were finished. :)

our state fair

What does a disheartened pregnant woman do when she finds out that it could be another week or so before delivery? Well, this one decided she and her family should go to the opening day of the Georgia State Fair. I didn't realize it when we went, but it was dollar day, so it only cost us $2 to get in (I had a coupon for BOGOFree admission, but that still would have been $5) which was nice! It was about 92 degrees on Tuesday, but with the nice breeze, it wasn't completely unbearable. We did a lot of walking, which probably did nothing to onset labor, but at least I got some exercise.

Aubie and David got a good spot to see Robinson's Racing pigs.
And they're off!


Here's Aubie's sad little pig (the guy picked Aubie to cheer it on--each race he picked someone from the audience for each pig) who decided that it didn't want to race. Especially not a biathlon (running and swimming this time). The poor dear seemed a bit scared of the water. He kind of made this sighing motion when they finally got him to get in the water--like, "Oh, dear, I knew it'd come to this eventually!"

This is me holding an invisible deck of cards. Yeah, they're really there, you just can't see them.

Here's the other volunteer picking an invisible card out of my hand. I'm not really sure if I missed the point or what, but when the magician let me pick the one flipped-over card out of the visible deck, it was the 2 of clubs--the same card that the man had picked out of the invisible deck. It was supposed to be a sort of mind reading trick, I think. (Does everyone just automatically think of the 2 of clubs when he or she thinks of an invisible card?)
This is Aubie holding my ring under a handkerchief. Of course, my ring disappeared after he did a few little finger waves over it. Aubie looked a bit taken aback that it disappeared, but was amazed at the "magic" just the same.
OK, the trick is, my ring is now gone, and he keeps giving Aubie quarters to put into the ring machine. He asks me if I want to trade my ring for the cheapo things inside the little plastic bubble containers and of course I say no (even though this is just a temporary ring from Walmart until my fingers aren't swollen anymore).
Well, on the third quarter Aubie puts into the machine, guess what comes out? My ring! I really cannot figure out how he did this, but then I can never figure out any magic tricks. Sometimes I just prefer to say, "Its magic!" Then other times, I just get amazed at how much quicker other people's fingers move than mine do. Either way, it was a great trick. And lest you think that he switched them as he was handing me the bubble container to get my ring out, he had said earlier that Aubie might be too young to help with this one. A slightly older child could have looked at the ring coming out of the machine and said, "Mommy, that's not your ring". (Also, he got her to check each time before giving her a quarter to make sure there was nothing in the door.)
For being such good volunteers, I got my ring back, and Aubie won a cute red cordouroy teddy bear. Lest you think we were just the prettiest, cutest things in the audience and that's why we kept getting picked, there were only like 10 of us watching, so our odds were pretty good.
Aubie did not like this ride at all, poor dear. It would have been fine if it had just spun around, but it went up high and spun a pretty fast circle for a three year old. This is once the ride was over and she is looking mistrustingly at the poor carnie after he spun the car around for me to take a better picture. It was only one ticket, and we told her she could only ride one ride so it made me sad that this ride was it. (Tickets are a dollar a piece if you don't buy a bunch of them.)

After our sad ride experience, this was just what we needed to get spirits back up. Just a dollar to Paint the Pony, and all proceeds go to help abused children. Aubie really enjoyed using her creative talents to "beautify" this kind creature.

I helped her with the "A", but the rest is all her own artwork.
I could digress into a social commentary on the state of the state fair these days, but this post has taken me a day and a half already (I am actually posting the day after the date at the top), so I will save that for another time. I tell you one thing, I WILL be entering a craft or two next year--with the slim pickins that were there, almost every entry had a ribbon of some sort. I hope have a blue ribbon of my own next year.