Moving sand art

My mother's father was from the Ukraine. I grew up hearing, tasting and admiring all things Russian. He died when my mother was 13 (murdered, long strange story) so I never knew him. But she passed along some of this heritage through her passion for Russian artists (mostly dancers), blinis at The Russian Tea Room, and through the music. Oh. How I love the music. I wish that she were still here to have felt this performance with me. I hope one of you watching is as blown away by it as I am.

WanderCRAFT book

About three weeks ago, right before going to the beach for a week on that spontaneous trip to Isle of Palm, S.C. to be with fellow unschoolers, I was quickly checking out some of my favorite blogs, seeking joy in places other than my long packing and cooking to-do list. On that day, I visited Sara, at Wandercraft, a crafty, dog-loving, great photographer in Boston. She revealed a giveaway for a small travel scrapbook that she had made. The winner would need to scrap a few pages of this book and blog about it and was given a more than generous amount of time in which to do so. Well, you know where this is going. I won! I came home from the beach to find this beautiful book and several scrapping accessories waiting for me on my table. I was so excited. I put it in my art room (a room that has seen far more food and Bananagrams than art lately) and envisioned all of the possible trips that I could scrap about. And, as recovering from the beach, new lives and early deaths took over, I conveniently blocked out the request to have a few pages scrapped for Sara's etsy store by this week. eek!

As it turns out, rediscovering this deadline last weekend was just the push my procrastinating, deadline-loving creative side needed. Despite laundry, cooking, knitting for fast growing new babies and planning and cooking for the next trip (in the mountains - leaving on Sunday), I rediscovered my art supplies and any printed out pictures I had on hand from past trips.

Here are the scanned images of the front of the book and of the first two pages (Sara created teh map cover and back and I did all the inside work - I love her sewn together book):
On the front of the book, I highlighted a few of the longer routes that we have taken (to Australia and Japan) on the beautiful map-cardstock cover that Sara had created.

The book will be a collection of moments from various trips over the years. It will live on our coffee table as a place to go to remember, and to find inspiration for the next journey.

Thank you Sara for these precious moments back in the art room. I never would have gone there without you.

Gifts from Gillen

Gillen has been working a lot this week at the farm. Every night he enters the house with a new "surprise" for me. The first day, he brought this beautiful bouquet that he'd picked for me. Then he brought tiny wild plums and blackberries, and a handful of blueberries, from the back fields. Today he plans to brave the back-field briars to pick more blackberries - enough for me to make a cobbler. Mmmm.

As evidenced below, Jesse and I have spent the heat wave in the art room. He has been making more cards for his Treno game. I have been playing with paper, pens and glue. Fracas has been happy to have the company, in what has very much become her room.

Peaceful moments..

via creative urges.

This morning we read more of that book I wrote last June. It's been long enough that I had honestly forgotten most of it. It isn't bad. Once we've finished reading it I may just write a second draft. I owe it to the real bees that I neglected in my yard last summer to give them their voice in The O'Riley Bees.

The best part of reading out loud? I can't help but fall asleep. Neither can Fracas.It's the only way I allow myself to nap.

The kids seem to be following their creative urges so much more easily now that they can see all of the possibilities on the shelves:Gillen made window decals to keep the birds from flying into our new room's windows. Two birds have been stunned and today a Cardinal hit so hard that it died.

Jesse is working on a new set of cards to go with his Treno game.

Now, if I could just get excited about creating dinner.

Gratitude Journal

I'm a very lucky woman with so much to be grateful for but every once in a while I lose sight of this and get caught up in the small stuff. My chronic fatigue annoyances - the occasional dizzy days - are my main complaint. Sometimes I am able to remember reality. I think about those I know who are facing real challenges - like my beautiful inspiring friend Zoe, my long-time mothering mentor, who isn't much older than I am. A few days ago she just started chemo. to fight a recurrence of cancer. Now that's a challenge.

I did my first art project in the new art room today. Here are the wonderful deep new shelves:Here is what I made:It's a gratitude journal. Each page has room for seven entries and there are around fifty-two pages so that I can enter one thing a day. Or not. Some of the pages are folded (like the one on the left) and the entries can be made inside. I also included a few pouches that contain seven tags inside.

Through the window I got to watch the guys jumping, running and, right out the window, climbing. I love the view of "Blackie" the bear in the branches above.Jesse is in a t-shirt because it got into the 70's today! Yes, I have a lot to be grateful for. Did you know that Zoe means life? I'm sure grateful for Zoe.

Treno

Back in March, Jesse decided that he wanted to make his own card game. He asked me to cut out cards from card stock and once in a while asked me how to spell something. He would put the cards away for weeks at a time and then suddenly make them every day. Every once in a while he'd ask for new colors of card stock.

About a month ago, Jesse thought of selling these cards at the Live and Learn Conference untrepreneurial fair. This gave him a deadline and he started working more quickly. As of today, the game is officially complete.

His game is called Treno. He has created four different decks of 35 cards each. They are called: Rainbow, Sea Serpent, Light and Earth. I picked one card from each deck to post here.
He came up with very clear and interesting directions (it's less complicated than yu gi oh, so even I might be able to play). He is decorating containers for the decks.

I hope he sells a few at the conference. They are pretty darn cool - not that I'm objective or anything.

I'd like to thank the red head in Wisconsin

Angie, a funny, red-headed, organic farming, unschooling mama put me down as a recipient of this cool award. She is one of my favorite bloggers and I feel honored.

I followed her link to the Mexican site that talks about the award's origin and found this one bit of explanation in English:

"What is the meaning of the expression: Arte y Pico...it translates into a wonderful phrase in Mexico, “lo maximo.” ...It will never find its counterpart in English, but if it HAD to, it would be something like, Wow. The Best Art. Over the top."

I have no idea how I could ever have been included in her list - I give credit to Nicolas' vegetables - but I'll let it inspire me to greater artistry and creativity.

Now the hard part, where I pass it on to only five other blogs. Of the twenty or so blogs that I read regularly I would have to point to the following five as being "lo maximo" - over the top artistically. They are, for the most part, blogs that have so many readers that I don't even know if they will notice that I gave them this award, but I wanted to share them with any of you who may not have read them:

Bits and Pieces - Cathy Zielske's blog. She is a graphic artist who inspires me with her artistic ideas and, more importantly, she is one of the funniest women alive.

Julie Person's blog. Another red headed unschooling mama who likes to garden. She is also an amazing photographer, painter, felt artist and blogger. I once was looking through the archives of her blog for a certain musician I knew I'd discovered on her playlist and I ended up laughing and crying my way through most of her posts. Her blog is amazing.

Mary Gold's zenmomma blog. I love what she can do with food, with taters (most recently), with combinations of words and pictures. I followed the band Train (well, at all my local venues) for a year, so I relate to her obsession with the band James.

Elsie Flanagan - very young, sassy, and extremely talented. I sometimes feel old while visiting but often feel inspired.

Little Purple Cow Photography, my friend Stephanie's new photography blog. She is an artist, with photographs and with words. So is my sister - Bhu Sullivan - who is linked in my side bar list.

Four cool, crafting chicks, and other animals.

Here are three of the four chicks (the fourth being me) who had an impromptu gathering at Mindy's home this weekend, to have time to do art with no interruptions. Shanna is a painter. Mindy is a belly dancer and visual artist. Claudia is a scrapbooker, what Allie Edwards would call a life-artist. I was planning on writing. We did spend time doing art, some of it collaborative, and I have a better idea of what I am going to write when I start my own private nanowrimo next week. But mostly, it was about the eating, the home-made margaritas, the laughing, the uninterrupted thoughts, and the talking. It's good to get a women-only fix every so often. I felt recharged to run home and hug my boys and give thanks to Nicolas.
Laughter is good.
Of course, whenever an animal is part of the cast, it tends to steal the show. Here is Christy, the neighbor's cow who needed milking twice a day (the neighbor being on vacation). Mindy and Claudia took on this large chore. I commemorated their hard work with Christy portraits.

The volunteers doing their synchronized milk dance.
The neighbor's rooster was the angriest, meanest damn rooster that any of us had ever met. He attacked Mindy earlier that week. She still has the bruises.Mindy, shovel in hand, checking under the milking barn for A.R.'s covert war trench.
Today, back home, many beautiful winged visitors came a'callin' through out the day.



The only local farm pictures of this past week come from Gillen and Jesse's backyard farm, where they have been proudly harvesting their first radishes.


Hope you all, well, you who may still be reading here after my long blog break, had a wonderful weekend. May everyone have had a good weekend, those who read here and those who don't. May Diana have had a fabulous fortieth birthday (again I am late with a card). May I learn how to make mix-CDs that can be played on non-mp3 players. May itunes let us record songs that we have just bought from them, or may they never get my money again. May I have something to say when I sit down to write next week. May exercise (having been on on hiatus here for a few years) happily re-enter my life tomorrow, since it lost it's chance to return today. May I now go get the sleep I missed for much of May. And may this mosquito die a quick and painless death when I finally stop typing and kill it.

The Inman Park Festival

After spending a few hours at the Morningside Farmers Market this morning, we went to the annual Inman Park Festival, held in the neighborhood where, 15 years ago, Nicolas and I slung hash (as my Grandmother Simone would derisively call our work as waiters), and fell in love. We looked today for the first house I lived in there and it had burned to the ground. But there was no time to be nostalgic. There was a gourmet lunch to be had at Shaun's, an amazing Inman Park restaurant where Nicolas sells his vegetables, and we had an indescribable (though I'll try) parade to watch.

This is an equal opportunity festival - as exhibited by the range of characters we saw on our way to Shaun's. There was a fundamentalist calmly, but unrelentingly, extolling us to read our bibles:And a witch made her way towards our path, where she silently fell in synch. with two red-headed Weasley types in matching sweaters.

Looking at the special festival menu at Shaun's:
We get so excited when the farm is mentioned on a menu! It's in the appetizers - the arugula on flatbread with shaved cheese (it says ricotta but it is usually parmesan) So good:



Full of good food and drink, we ran to find our usual spot to watch the parade (except for years when soccer games have taken precedence -I'm unashamedly happy to be on soccer hiatus) in front of our friend Terry's house. Terry has a security bull horn with which he announces upcoming parade sights. These floats, marching bands and acts beg for some explanation. Though there were some regular old talented high school marching bands, a Chinese dragon, a local Brownie troop and floats about local schools pushing for peace, or going green - these were the only usual parade sights.

The "Marching Abominable" band led the parade. I kept looking at some of these people and imagining what they normally look like, say on their way to work. Don't you love observing a regular guy on the bus and wondering if this(or maybe lounge singing, Civil War reenactment, horror movie directing, or stripping) could be his other life?


At one point, a horn player in front of me, looking anxious about her instrument's weight, slowly let her arm fall, and then, let her body fall, following her horn, face down, to the ground:
Actually, all of the "Abominables" fell into a deep sleep, for several minutes, before they were revived by a few musicians with wands. It was something!

Yes, Jesse, there is, after all, a tooth fairy:



Here is that sweet brownie troop, to bring you back to earth. I was that red-headed Brownie pictured here towards the right, many moons ago in Boston. I remember being at Brownies the day we pulled out the troops from Vietnam. Will these girls be at Brownies on the day we leave Iraq? Lets hope they aren't already Girl-scouts (I walked over the "girl-scout bridge" in some ceremony but never did follow up).






A few peace floats later, we had the Mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin.





And then it was back to colorful, creative, crazy Inman Park Festival business as usual. If you have time, you really should click on these below and take a closer look:
As I said, equal opportunity prevailed. The kids got frisbees from a Presbyterian church, "go-green" disks, candy from the politicians (lots of those), and the pieces of wooden boards that the Karate school split with their hands in front of them.

Thankfully, they didn't notice the condoms that were thrown to we grown folks from the Planned Parenthood car (or they might have thought they were gum or a lollypop and tried eating them ;).

There was so much more - roller derby girls, Trees Atlanta, who conserve and plant trees), sequined, high-heeled show girls, and the young "in-training abominable marching band", Harry Potter fans... But it is time to sleep now, as tomorrow is another day of play away from our simple surroundings - this time at a Slow Food Event at a farm.

Kids' Art

Since returning from Australia, we have continued our pre-Christmas tendency to take over the dining room table, once in a while cleaning it up and putting the table cloth back on for dinner; but mostly, covering it with every craft material we own to make valentines and other art. Nicolas has decided that it is time to get a table where our arts and crafts can live. No worries! We are happy to oblige. So this will be the last shot of us doing art where we eat:This is Gillen's entry for a GA bird drawing competition:
The first in a series of murals that Jesse decided to create this past week. Hot Chocolate and good music were a few of his inspirations. I can't help feeling that "Across the Universe", what he saw of it, played a part as well.
Yesterday, Jesse followed through on his plan to go on a "magic quest." We couldn't find the magnifying glass that he had requested but I did give him a small container that we have that holds and magnifies bugs. He eagerly set off, with the woods as his planned destination. Gillen and I watched as he spent about twenty minutes wandering around our back yard. He came back with his magnifying cup filled with water from the frog pond, nothing in it visible to the naked eye. Looking through the lens, there were tiny bits of life moving about.

"Magic," proclaimed Jesse. "I don't have to go further than the yard to see magic!"

He added moss to the list , "since most people think it is straight and the fact is that it is furled like a Fern".

He says that he can't forgive us about our Santa lie. But at the same time he is glad that he's been inspired to look for magic more closely.

The events of the past few days reminded me of this quote.

"Kids are God. Pay Attention"
-Viggo Mortensen

Paper Possibilities

We finished hanging our paper chains today and then had all of these extra strips of luscious, cut patterned paper all over the table. I quickly came up with more paper crafts. The guys weren't as excited as I was at the prospect of working with paper again, but as soon as I started they found themselves drawn to the table for hours, while they were taking a break from the trampoline and game cube. This paper is that persuasive. Here's a sample (though my picture doesn't do it justice.) I gave up on getting a great picture of the paper chains. You'll just have to visit and see them in person.

We had learned on Friday, at the High Museum, how to make paper beads. You tightly wind thin, triangular pieces of paper around a dowel and then glue the ends down. The coolest part is that you can take this one step further and make them look like glass beads by rolling them on an embossing ink pad, coating them in embossing powder and then heating them with a heat gun (all of which I happily happen to have)to create a "glass" coating. Gillen loved this project and made two sets of beads. Here, he is rolling a bead on the dowel.

We listened to more of "Little Town on the Prairie" and I made some Christmas cards. I was in bliss.

Later, my paper passion still ignited, I continued - with an old Christmas origami kit that I remembered my dad giving the kids many years ago and that I was able to find. I created many cranes (tried a reindeer but it turned out to be too advanced for me, yet) while we watched "March of the Penguins". The cranes kind of look like the penguins. They need to be flying from fishing wire, or at least higher up, on a mantle.

I still haven't cleaned the table. So tomorrow holds yet more paper possibility. Though, we do have my father in law and his wife coming the next day so maybe I need to switch gears.