art tray: a tutorial

OK, so when I say tutorial here, I'm using the term lightly because this was pretty simple. But what the hey, it was fun little project and it turned out well so I'm going to share.
Evelyn occupies more space on this blog than Briton. Part of that is just the fact that she is home with me most of the time and he is at school, so a lot of what I do during the day is with her. She also likes to have her picture taken and wants things made for her and so many of my projects tend to be for her. Briton, well, Briton is 8 1/2. He is starting to have opinions on things like haircuts and clothes and he isn't a big fan of getting his picture taken a lot of the time these days. He and I do a lot of things together, they just aren't as projecty (because project wise, he leaves me in the dust. The kid makes things like crazy. Currently he is working on a ball launcher for his fort).

But while Briton might not appear as much in the blog, art wise, he is all over the place in this house. We have his paintings, collages and sculptures everywhere. And it's here that Evie kind of gets the shaft. We have some of her drawings up on the vent (we have an exposed air duct in the kitchen for displaying art) but not a lot beyond that. I'm sure that once she starts Kindergarten she'll be bringing home projects by the bucket load just like her brother, but in the mean time I decided to use some of her "art" on a tray I wanted to rehab.

I'm a big tea girl and a few years ago Will bought me a pretty little tray from the Delft factory while on a business trip for toting my tea things out to the living room and the yard and the bedroom. Which was great. Except, don't tell him this, but the thing is not wide enough for my saucers. I know, I know, who uses saucers anymore? Well I do. I just do. So the tray is a little frustrating as a tray. However, it's perfect as a place for my oils and vinegars to sit on the counter. And that's where it has been pretty much since we moved in (and got counters, that is) But this leaves me without a tray. I've looked for one but nothing has really jumped out at me.
So a few weeks ago I was doing my weekly Michaels run and came across this perfectly sized tray in the clearance bin. Ugly, yes, but the perfect size. And for a buck, I couldn't pass it up. Last fall I Modge Podged a tray with a collage of the kids art to give to my parents at Christmas (my tea drinking habits are genetic) and then put it away somewhere until winter and promptly forgot where I hid it. No, really, it's still lost (sorry mom and dad, when I find it, it'll be in the mail) I was sure I'd find it during the great closet clean out but no luck. It's a mystery. But I started off with the idea of repeating this project for myself. However, when I looked through the collected art from the past few months I realized that almost everything was Briton's and it was all bold and fun and truthfully, framable - not really something I wanted to Modge Podge into a collage.

But while the closet clean out did not yield the lost tray, it did reveal a stash of paper that I set aside for wrapping gifts. We often cover our coffee table with paper and set out crayons and just let people scribble away on it. It's one of Evie'e favorite things and so most of the time it's all her, but some of the rolls have mom and dad and Briton and playdate friend's drawings as well.When it's pretty well covered I un-tape, roll it up and put it away for gift wrap. Or art trays. Because it's perfect.

This piece is that thinnish art paper that comes by the roll. I usually use freezer paper for the coffee table because it's sturdier but I must have been out for a while because I have several sheets of Evie scribbled art paper. It's also almost all crayon and after my experience with the mixed mediums from Briton's art on the first tray, I would say go crayon. It doesn't smear when you put the Modge Podge on and the colors stay true.

Alright, have you made it this far? Man, I'm having a wordy kind of day! Well good for you if you have, here's the drill.

Art Tray

You'll need:

1 hard plastic tray
Art big enough to more than cover the tray (again, thin paper and crayon is best)
Modge Podge Hard Coat
Clear poly-urethane
Craft knife
Cutting mat
Foam paintbrush
Sand paper (fine grit)
Scissors


First, lightly sand the entire top side and edges of the tray, this will help the Modge Podge to stick. Clean the dust off well (the easiest way is to rinse it under the faucet and then let it dry) and apply a thin coat of Modge Podge all over the top of the tray. smooth the art on, cutting slits at the corners to help ease over the curved or angled parts. Smooth, smooth, smooth while it dries. And let it dry all the way before proceeding.

Now, flip the tray over onto the cutting mat and trim off all of the excess with the craft knife. Flip over and check that all the edges are smooth, trimming further as needed.
Coat the tray in another three thin coats of Modge Podge, letting each layer dry before adding the next and taking the Modge Podge all the way around the top rim of the tray with each coat.

Once you have all the coats on and dry, lightly sand the edges to smooth any Modge Podge/paper bumps. Wipe any dust away and spray or paint two coats of polyurethane onto the tray, top and bottom, allowing drying time in between. This will protect it from heat and moisture.
And that's about it. Pretty simple, yes? But I love how it turned out. It almost looks like a modern art print. Almost. And it fits my saucers perfectly :)

So, what do you do with kid art? Anything out of the ordinary (because I have lots and I need some more ideas!)

clean closets

I have a sort of split personality when it comes to cleaning. On the one hand, I really like my house to be clean. Or tidy I should say. I don't have germ thing and living in old houses all of my life has meant that having things CLEAN isn't really going to happen. I mean, when your aged wooden floors have gaps between each board, well, dirt is going to happen. But tidy I like. I find it distracting when the house is messy and so I tend to do little sweeps through the house to straighten up before I sit down to work.
Now this isn't to say that my house is always pristine, it's almost never pristine. But usually it's presentable, except on Friday mornings when I'm rushing to meet a deadline. Then, well, it's a crap shoot. It could be clean from the day before, it could be a pit. I dream of super organized spaces with everything stored in matching boxes and neatly stacked into crisp, well lit spaces. I love to look at the rooms on Chez Larsson, but alas, I don't think I'll ever get there. Partly because of the other side of my cleaning personality.

That would be the hoarder.

OK, I'm not a real hoarder, just looking at pictures of hoarders homes gives me the willies. But I do have a habit of stuffing things in closets and the basement when I don't want to be bothered with the "what do I do with that's". So these regular closet cleanouts are necessary for my two halves to work together well.

This closet is my nemesis. It's really the only space in the house other than the basement (which is on the list at the end of the month. Dread dread dread...) that doesn't have a specific daily purpose. No one is getting their clothes out each morning or putting away sheets and blankets. It's just storage. And it's not really clearly any one kind of storage. Originally, when the office was the playroom, it was the guest room equipment storage. Pillows, air bed blankets and shelf space and hooks for luggage made it easy to turn the playroom into a guest room. And we still keep that stuff in there, but now we have overflow books and special toys that are really outgrown but which no one seems particularly interested in moving on from, and playdoh cutters, wreaths, extra crafts supplies. It's a jumble. Since general storage is kind of in shot supply here, it's become the catch all. Which means it can get really, really messy.

When I tackle a closet I try to take EVERYTHING out and start again. That way I'm not married to what one shelf holds anymore. Both this closet and the linen closet got totally rearranged while our clothing closets pretty much went back in the same way that it was before, only cleaner and with less stuff.

I would really love to keep these spaces clean. Sometimes I think making more regular, small clean outs would work, but I'm afraid that if I pack anything else into our cleaning routine it just wont get done at all, and those spaces will become horrible again.

How do you handle these "hot spots" in your home? Do you tackle them on a regular basis and keep them clean or are they once a year, dreaded tasks?

interrupted plans

This weekend we were supposed to go spend two days hanging out under a mountain with some dear friends. Unfortunately, round about the time we were loading up the car, the stomach bug hit. Not out family this time, but one of the others. And as much as I was looking forward to a weekend away from computers and cell phones and DIY projects, it just wouldn't have been the same with out them. After a flurry of texts and calls we scrapped the plans for another day.
While this was absolutely the right decisions, it left a big gaping hole in our weekend, one that we probably should have filled with finally getting the bathroom sink installed, but after too many weeks off not enough time as a family we needed an escape. We all needed an escape. Especially the dog who seemed to sense that she had just lost out on two days of run as much as you can time. So off we went to for a walk in the woods.
When Will and I lived in Oregon, the ocean and the forest were both a short car ride away. In fact, if you drove about 45 minute in just about any direction you almost can't help but run into forest or mountains or lakes or ocean. Here in Virginia, there are plenty of trees, there is an ocean (although it's a bit too far for a quick afternoon trip, and also, the water is warm. And that's just weird) and there are these things that they call mountains. They aren't really mountains, not to a Northwest girl. You remember that scene in Crocodile Dundee "That's not a knife! This is a knife." Well, ask anyone from the west coast about the Blue Ridge Mountains and you'll get a similar response. Still, they are highish, and they are pretty. But we haven't really found our go to spots for escaping into the woods. So last summer when some friends suggested a hike at Sugar Hollow, we were happy to find a very Oregon-like wilderness so driveably close. So after the disappointment of this weekend, we piled in the car and headed out for a hike.

And spent the whole drive trying to explain to Evelyn that we were not going out to get sugar challah.
Out walk was quiet and beautiful and just what we needed. And when we got home we have squishy baked french toast for dinner that had been destined for breakfast the next day and then a funny thing happened. We did have that quiet weekend after all. Will worked some on the computer but other than that we stayed off phones and email and the kids played for hours and hours upstairs and I read for hours and hours downstairs. (By the way, it's amazing the difference that having glasses that are actually the right prescription makes. Two books in two days. It usually takes me two months to read that much. Thank goodness for glasses!) For the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday we were just quiet. We worked a little (all closets cleaned and sorted! Car loaded up with goodwill fodder!) we played a little, or in the case of the kids, a lot. We drank a lot of tea and ate scrummy things that aren't particularly good for you and just hunkered down. No playdates or meetings or social events or things to get done. Just quiet. And perfect.

It was bliss.

What was your weekend like?

in the garden

Well, I couldn't resist. After spending another hour or so yesterday in persuit of clean closet nirvana, the day became just too sunny to stay indoors and so Evie and I headed out to work in the garden. Heaven.
Last year we plowed up four looooong rows running along side out house and while this worked fine, I decided that I really prefer shorter beds, it makes weeding not seem wuite as daunting somehow to have lots of little beds instead of a few huge ones. Will also hated trying to mow between the rows to we wanted the grass out between beds, so a lot of digging is in order. Add to that the fact that we've decided to fence in the veg garden to make it look more formal and the rearranging needed to actually have a square garden and in some ways we are starting all over again.

The good news is that I love to dig when the weather is still a little cold. I'm not sure if it's my Northwest upbringing or the English blood in my veins but I really enjoy being out in the garden when you're only warm enough if your digging and wool sweaters and wellies are a must.
I remember spending hours out in the garden with my dad, getting things ready for summer, when we lived in Idaho and so gardening in just barely above freezing must be imprinted on the gardeners portion of my brain. I hate digging in the heat which makes summer weeding around here kind of a no-go, but I'm trying not to think about the hot days to come and am just focusing on this perfect gardening weather.

Evelyn, apparently, doesn't agree that it's perfect garneding weather and decided to dress for snow. Or maybe it was a fashion thing.
Yesterday I managed to get the garden staked out and the first two beds re-dug while Evie collected worms and today I'm hoping to do a few more. My sugar snap seedlings are actually ready to go in and I'm on the hunt for some of these tomato towers which I've used before to give the plants a head start. And now that I'm going to have small beds that can each be devoted to one crop, I'm starting to look at things like adding extra manure to the bed where to potatoes will be and trying to figure out what specifically the corn will like (lots of compost if the popcorn that went wild in the yarn waste corner last year is anything to go by!)

This won't be one of those elegant vegetable gardens, I imagine it will look pretty utilitartian once it's going, although I have plans to grow morning glories and gourds on the fences and have sunflower seedlings started to grow along the front side (where they won't block the rest of the garden from the sun). If I'm lucky it might look like a smaller version of this. But if I could I'd make my garden look like this, isn't that gorgeous? Someday... although, really, I think a full to bursting vegeatable garden is pretty gorgeous regardless of the ornamentation, but maybe that's just me.

How are your gardens coming along? Does the cold but sunny weather get you ramped up or keep you inside?

t-shirt yarn: a tutorial

With all this closet clearing (one and a half down, three and a half to go) I'm starting to amass a pretty substantial Goodwill pile. Mostly of t-shirts that have stretched and shoes that no longer fit growing feet, the usual. But I feel like every time I go through and do one of these big clear outs and haul all of our cast offs away, a week or so later I'm digging though our closets looking for an old shirt to use for this or that. But of course at that point there's nothing left to use as a painting shirt or as some make shift stuffing or a sweater to felt. So this time, as I go, I'm trying to pull out things that I might want down the road for a project or two. I've salvaged a wool skirt, a few of Will's dress shirts and some colorful t-shirts to tuck away (probably in the closet, sigh).
The T's are already being put to good use. Briton is constantly asking me for yarn or rope for projects. And while I would happily give him some yarn for an actual knitting/weaving/sewing experiment, more often than not he's really looking for something to tie things to trees or secure Playmobil men to the train track during an adventure gone wrong. So the good yarn is off limits but t-shirt yarn is perfect.

The first time I made t-shirt yarn I'll admit, I was really just looking for something to have rolled up in a bowl on my dining room table. Something colorful and out of the ordinary. So I bought some blue t-shirts and turn them into yarn balls. But once I'd made the first skein of the stuff, I realized that for kid yarn, it's perfect. It's actually perfect for a lot of things. I sported some as a stringy scarf for a while and made a necklace out of some more and I have great plans to one day crochet a rug, rag rug style, out of all those blues for the kitchen floor. But as art project fodder, it really shines.

This is a super simple procedure and only takes about 5 minutes to make, max. Plus the stretching part is pretty fun and I always have a willing helper when I get to that stage. T-shirts without side seams are really best if you are making something that needs smoothness, but for play yarn, any old t-shirt will do.

T-shirt Yarn

You'll need:

T-shirt - any adult size
Fabric Scissors
Ruler
Pencil
1. First cut the shirt off at the armpits to create a rectangular loop. Set the top half of the shirt aside, you won't need it here but it makes great dusters. Cut the bottom hem off of the loop as well.
2. Turn the rectangle so that one of the folded edges is up, we'll call this the top edge from now on. Fold the bottom edge up so that it lies one inch down from the top edge.
3. Fold the new bottom edge up to the same place. You should now have thick pile of jersey with a band at the top where it's just the original two layers.
4. Use your ruler to mark the folded area into 1-inch wide strips and trim any excess off the sides.
5. Cut along each strip through the thick layers of the t-shirt but not the thin band at the top.
6. Open up the fabric so that you can lay the uncut area flat (or flattish, some of the strips may be in the way, just adjust as you go)
7. Cut at a diagonal from the end of the first strip to the beginning of the second strip. Continue to do this all along the shirt. You'll end up with a weird loop at the beginning and will need to cut straight through at that one. This will give you one long, thin piece of jersey. You're almost done now.
8. Starting at one end, stretch the fabric tightly, this will cause it to roll up and create a yarn like shape. Work along the strip, pulling as you go, until you've reached the end. Then just roll it up like regular yarn and you're good to go!

Yay recycling!

Now I just need to figure out what to do with those old dress shirts, surely there's something fun that can be remade from them. Any ideas?

spring chores

Clean closets
Change out winter clothes

These are the first two chores on the list in my planner this week. I know, it seems a little early, but really, it warms up quickly here, we've found, and once it's pleasant out I have a hard time committing to spending several days inside dealing with too warm clothes and too full closets.
It's not my favorite chore of the year but it's probably one of the more rewarding. If I could keep our closets clean all the time it wouldn't be such a big job, but all four of us tend to use closets to stow away things that we don't want to deal with, so twice a year or so I go through everything and "purge" and then I try (unsuccessfully, but still, I try) to keep them tidy and straightened. Usually this works for about two months and then we start stuffing again. Bad habit, but there it is.
Practically this chore means that our house will be a pithole of despair for the next week while the closets (and under the beds too, while I'm at it) get emptied and all the contents get put into piles: GoodWill, Storage, Trash/Recycling, Craigslist and Back in the closet. Then the stored clothes are pulled out and sorted before everything gets put away. It sounds like a big undertaking and it is, but it's not horrible. I usually put a story on my ipod or watch movies on my computer while I work, which makes it almost pleasant. Almost. (This time I'm listening to "My Life on an Allotment" which I suspect will hurry me up because it already has me chomping to get this done and get out into the garden).

The best part of doing this clean out is that it makes room for new things and so one of the things further down on the list this week is to tally up what clothes and shoes need replacing for each person. We're not talking huge shopping sprees here, but even replacing a pair of shoes here and a few shirts there is fun, always nice to have some new togs. :)

Do you do these big clean outs or are you more regimented through the year? I do pretty much a constant rotation of purging but even with that I need these larger, pull out the whole closet events to keep things really organized. Do you hate the chore or kinda like it? How do you handle the switch out of seasonal clothes?

need

For the third week in a row I've ended up actually going to the grocery store. If you know me at all you know that I'm obsessed with our local grocery delivery company Retail Relay and I almost never ever go to the grocery store apart from a quick trip to the small market downtown. I love Retail Relay but I'm on a fruit kick and the fruit I'm craving isn't really available, or at least not at my budget, through them, so to the grocery store I've gone. Yesterday Evie and I were trotting around the store using the self scanner (both my kids love these, it actually makes grocery shopping with them fun which may be why I've been willing to go lately) I kept having to haul up my cloth bags as they fell over, scrunched down and otherwise cause me grief. What I needed was one of these.

Seriously, brilliant.
I need them.

NEED THEM.

Wonder if I could make them actually.... Any thoughts?